In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States and, before being sentenced to seventy years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

In American Gangster, Mark Jacobson’s captivating account of the life of Frank Lucas joins other tales of New York City from the past thirty years. The collection features a number of Jacobson’s most famous essays, as well as previously unpublished works and more recent articles. Together, they create a vibrant, many-layered portrait of the most fascinating city in the world, by one of the most acclaimed journalists of our time.

We are living in a time of unprecedented distrust in America…

Faith in the government is at an all-time low, and political groups on both sides of the aisle are able to tout preposterous conspiracy theories as gospel, without much opposition. “Fake news” is the order of the day. This book is about a man to whom all of it points, the greatest conspiracist of this generation and a man you may not have heard of.

A former U.S. naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one bestseller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated—because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth—by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy to decrease the population of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals; and the Illuminati are secretly involved with the U.S. government to manage relationships with extraterrestrials. Cooper died in a shootout with Apache County police in 2001, one month after September 11, in the year in which he had predicted catastrophe.

In Pale Horse Rider, journalist Mark Jacobson not only tells the story of Cooper’s fascinating life but also provides the social and political context for American paranoia. Indeed, with the present NSA situation and countless other shadowy government dealings often in the news, aren’t we right to suspect that things may not be as they seem?

The journey that takes Mark Jacobson around the world began when a friend bought a lamp at a rummage sale and was told that it was made from the skins of Jews. While he didn’t believe the story, he sent it to Mark, saying, “You’re a journalist, you figure out what it is.”
After three years of research in America, Poland, Germany, and Israel, and with the assistance of forensic experts, DNA analysis, and consultations with Yad Yashem and the historical director at Buchenwald, Jacobson has investigated not only the truth of the thing itself but of the idea of it. He also analyzes our understanding of history; of myths, facts, and evidence; and of the concept of evil.
Despite extensive historical reporting of items made of human skin in eyewitness accounts from Nazi concentration camps, this is the first known discovery and investigation of such an artifact.