The Opperman Report'

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post

House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House.

It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence.

To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower.

Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.

One morning in July 1974, Anita Andrews, the owner and bartender at Fagiani's Cocktail Lounge in Napa, California was found dead in her bar-raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in a bloody frenzy. She'd last been seen alive the night before talking to a drifter who sat at the end of the bar, playing cards and flirting with her. But the stranger, along with Anita's Cadillac, had disappeared. Unable to locate a suspect, police investigators sadly watched the case grow cold over the years. Meanwhile a month after Anita's murder, young Michele Wallace, was driving down a road in the mountains near Crested Butte, Colorado, when she gave two stranded motorists, Chuck Matthews and a man named Roy, a ride. Dropping Matthews off at a bar in Gunnison, she agreed to take "Roy" to his truck. She was never seen alive again, nor could a massive search of the mountains locate her remains. The trail leading to her killer also ran into deadends. Fourteen years later, Charlotte Sauerwin, engaged to be married, met a smooth-talking man at a Laundromat in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. The next evening, her body was found in the woods; she'd been raped, tortured, and her throat slashed. The police suspected her fiance, Vince LeJeune, though he proclaimed his innocence to anyone who would listen. Meanwhile, the man from the Laundromat couldn't be located. The three murders would remain unsolved, eating at the hearts, minds and lives of the women's families, friends and communities. Then in the early 1990s, a rookie Gunnison County sheriff's investigator named Kathy Young began looking into the Wallace case and identified a suspect named Roy Melanson, a serial rapist from Texas. SMOOTH TALKER is the story of Melanson, his depredations, and the intrepid police work that went into bringing him to justice. I originally wrote about the Michele Wallace case in 2002 as part of my book NO STONE UNTURNED: The True Story of the World's Premier Forensic Investigators. The book detailed the history and best cases of NecroSearch International, a renowned group of scientists and law enforcement investigators who pool their knowledge and experience to locate the clandestine graves and remains of murder victims. Their first real success was locating the remains of Michele Wallace in 1994. However, at the time the book came out, no one knew about the true extent of Roy Melanson's horrific rampage or the connection between the Wallace case and the murders of Andrews and Sauerwin. It's all pieced together in SMOOTH TALKER: Trail of Death, in which the readers get two fascinating cold case murder investigations in a story filled with brutality, grief, forensic science at its finest, and exemplary police work.

Trevor Aaronson : The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Maufactured War on Terrorism
A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism exposes how the FBI has, under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of more than fifteen thousand informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau can then claim it is winning the war on terror. The paperback edition of The Terror Factory includes all new information on the FBI's counterterrorism efforts related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, as well as how the government has used (potentially illegally) FISA information in sting cases.
Trevor Aaronson is an investigative reporter for Al Jazeera America. He has won more than two dozen national and regional awards, including the Molly Prize, the international Data Journalism Award, and the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award.

Hello world! Gretchen Bonaduce came onto the scene in the mid-00s, starring in Breaking Bonaduce, a VH1 reality show with her former Partridge Family star husband Danny Bonaduce.

Soon after the show ended they divorced and Surviving Agent Orange focuses on the rest of the story: her eighteen year marriage to Danny and all that entailed—addiction, infidelity, and the chaos of celebrity, as well as their divorce and her life as a single mother. Musician, reality star, and mother of two, Gretchen's story takes a fun and funny look at a life in and around the spotlight.