The Opperman Report'

In May 1973, Assata Olugbala Shakur was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which she was accused of killing New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and assaulting Trooper James Harper. This resulted in her indictment of first-degree murder of Foerster and seven other felonies related to the shootout. A member of the Black Panther Party, she became a prime target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Program. When she joined the Black Liberation Army and went into hiding, between 1973 and 1977, she was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for three bank robberies, the kidnapping and murder of two drug dealers, and the attempted murder of two New Jersey police officers.
In March 1977 Assata Shakur was convicted of murdering state trooper Werner Forrester and was imprisoned. Two years later she broke out of the maximum-security wing of Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey, pistol in hand, as she and three cohorts sped out of the prison grounds. In 1984 she was granted political asylum in Cuba where she has lived ever since. On May 2, 2013, the FBI added her to the Most Wanted Terrorist List, the first woman to be listed. Assata Shakur: A 20th Century Escaped Slave is the story of Assata Shakur, before she became a fugitive and since.

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SHOW ME DA MEMOOOOOO!!!!

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ack Pagano has always felt he is different. Smart and physically talented, the normal pursuits of youth―women and sports―have always come a little too easy to him and left him unfulfilled. At age seventeen, Jack is eager to leave high school and begin his college career.
But the schooling that lies ahead of him is of a far different variety than he could have ever imagined.
Albert Anastasia, the notorious leader of Murder, Inc., appears and claims Pagano as his son. But before Jack can make heads or tails of his new-found father, Anastasia is gunned down at the Park Sheraton Hotel.

Under the tutelage of his late father's associates, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, Jack enters a world where crime and politics, money and murder, and the American way of life are all but a hand's breadth apart and inextricably linked.
Jack O'Halloran: Family Legacy

Actor, Boxer, author ...
At the same time, another father is grooming his son to further his plans: Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of what will become American's ruling dynasty, has set his sights on the White House―and with the help of some old friends in Chicago, his son, also Jack, will rise to power.

Jack

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Jack O'Halloran : Family Legacy
Jack Pagano has always felt he is different. Smart and physically talented, the normal pursuits of youth―women and sports―have always come a little too easy to him and left him unfulfilled. At age seventeen, Jack is eager to leave high school and begin his college career.
But the schooling that lies ahead of him is of a far different variety than he could have ever imagined.
Albert Anastasia, the notorious leader of Murder, Inc., appears and claims Pagano as his son. But before Jack can make heads or tails of his new-found father, Anastasia is gunned down at the Park Sheraton Hotel.

Under the tutelage of his late father's associates, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, Jack enters a world where crime and politics, money and murder, and the American way of life are all but a hand's breadth apart and inextricably linked.

At the same time, another father is grooming his son to further his plans: Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of what will become American's ruling dynasty, has set his sights on the White House―and with the help of some old friends in Chicago, his son, also Jack, will rise to power.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Betty Medsger : The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI
The never-before-told full story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected, that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.

It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists—eight men and women—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, inspired by Daniel Berrigan’s rebellious Catholic peace movement, set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land.

The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule.

Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group of unknowing thieves, in their meticulous planning of the burglary, scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier (war supporter and friend to President Nixon) and Muhammad Ali (convicted for refusing to serve in the military), knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios.

Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and, with the utmost deliberation, released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers.

At the heart of the heist—and the book—the contents of the FBI files revealing J. Edgar Hoover’s “secret counterintelligence program” COINTELPRO, set up in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States in order “to enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” to make clear to all Americans that an FBI agent was “behind every mailbox,” a plan that would discredit, destabilize, and demoralize groups, many of them legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that Hoover found offensive—as well as black power groups, student activists, antidraft protestors, conscientious objectors.

The author, the first reporter to receive the FBI files, began to cover this story during the three years she worked for The Washington Post and continued her investigation long after she'd left the paper, figuring out who the burglars were, and convincing them, after decades of silence, to come forward and tell their extraordinary story.

The Burglary is an important and riveting book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.
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Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.