Synopsis
For eleven years, John Pascucci tracked down the most evil people on earth. He was better at it than anyone else in the U.S. government - in part because he made himself think like the people he was tracking. During the Reagan administration's "get tough" era of law enforcement, he became one of the most decorated men in the Marshals. President Reagan wanted results - period. And Pascucci delivered.
John Pascucci was the best American Nazi hunter who ever lived. After others had failed, he nailed "The Child Killer" of the Ukraine, Bohdan Koziy, who'd earned his nickname by torturing and killing children in front of their parents. Then Pascucci bagged the "uncatchable" Konrad Kalejs, who'd murdered thirteen thousand Jews. Finally, Pascucci tracked down the inhuman Dr. Josef Mengele - and settled the fate of the "Angel of Death."
Pascucci applied a streamlined strategy to evil men: "Track 'em, whack 'em, sack 'em." Since he was after dangerous fugitives who'd already been convicted, Pascucci didn't need to worry about suspects' rights or rules of evidence. He just needed to bring back his man, dead or alive.
Pascucci, America's cyber-detective, worked with just two weapons: one good modem-equipped computer, and one good gun. They were all it took for him to catch virtually anyone.
Reviews
During his 11 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, Pascucci was responsible for tracking down two wanted war criminals: Ukrainian Bohdan Koziy, called the Child Killer, whom he found in Costa Rica, and Latvian Konrads Kalejs, who probably caused more than 10,000 deaths, whom he arrested in Florida. Another of his pursuits resulted in an additional 25-year sentence for escaped California spy Christopher Boyce, whom he tracked all over the American West: "[He] was a wimpy-ass, scrawny punk." Writing with Stauth (The Golden Boys), Pascucci also traces the development of the USMS in the 1980s, claiming that the Justice Department in the later Reagan ("President Rambo") years winked at all manner of civil rights violations. Pascucci's government career ended in 1989, when he was found guilty of threatening the ex-boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend and spent time in prison. With much macho posturing, he recalls what to him were his glory days, "the life-or-death action" that will likely strike readers as overbearing. He is now a consultant to private investigation firms.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A trash-talking exUS marshal presents his vision of what he calls ``the real world.'' Pascucci, an old-school proponent of law and order and a Reagan devotee, was a US marshal from 1978 to 1989. He tracked down a Nazi in Costa Rica, found The Falcon and the Snowman spy Christopher Boyce, and helped recover Dr. Josef Mengele's skeleton from its swampy grave. Coauthor Stauth (The Franchise, 1990, etc.) here uses his ability to let subjects speak in their own voice to devastating effect: Pascucci is crude, unreflective, and egotistical. The book begins with a look inside the tracking of Bodhan Koizy, nicknamed ``The Child Killer,'' a Nazi who had spent much of the period after WW II living in New York and Florida, and who quickly disappeared for parts unknown when the government finally took an interest in him. (Beginning in the early 1980s the underutilized marshals were given the job of tracking down international fugitives.) Pascucci takes readily to the Koizy assignment (his preference, he says, would be to ``track him, whack him, and sack him''). The fugitive is duly discovered in Costa Rica and turned over to local authorities, who seem not to care, and Pascucci zooms back to the US without revealing anything about his methodology, though he does discuss his passion for Coke Classic. Pascucci tracks other creeps, including Boyce, terrorist types, and a CIA turncoat, and when he isn't speeding somewhere in his Corvette, he's complaining about the modern legal system and pining for the warrantless days of Reagan. The story ends after Pascucci is fired for harassing the ex-boyfriend of his sometime mistress, and however welcome his remorse and ashamed hindsight are, they're too little, too late. While the occasional passage of soul-searching provides some insight into the mind of a tracker, this rant is sadly weighed down by cheerless bravado. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Allowed to ignore the rules that most cops must abide by since his quarry had already been convicted, Pascucci has helped track down some of the worst criminals of his generation. Here, he tells of some of his more famous hunts.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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