Vegas P.I.: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective

A former Las Vegas private detective recounts his adventures with a legendary bounty hunter, his experiences with the mob, and his involvement in the Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination investigation. 35,000 first printing.

Drab self-rendering of the colorful life of supersleuth Headley, champion of underdogs, who died last year of Lou Gehrig's disease. That Headley and coauthor Hoffman could write an exciting book was proven by their Contract Killer (January 1993), about hit man Donald Frankos, as well as by Loud and Clear (1990), about the aftermath of the murder of Arizona reporter Don Bolles, and (to a lesser degree) by The Court-Martial of Clayton Lonetree (1989), about Headley's gumshoeing on behalf of a Native American convicted of spying--and that's part of the problem here, where these three cases are sketchily rehashed even though they were chronicled in greater and fresher detail in the earlier books. And while Headley's other high-profile cases--including doing legal legwork for the American Indian Movement after its occupation of Wounded Knee, and identifying Donald DeFreeze, kidnapper of Patty Hearst, as an FBI informant-gone-bad--are potentially dramatic, his tellings of them wilt on the page, leached of energy by his conversational, detail-poor prose (assistant and former wife Terri Lee is ``really great''). It's only events of paramount emotional impact that sparkle here: Headley's killing, as a young Vegas cop, of a suspect--a death that prompted the author to quit the force and turn p.i.; the Wounded Knee investigation, which radicalized Headley and cemented his lifelong contempt for the FBI (in one astonishing scene, he makes a citizen's arrest of two bullying agents); and his poignant, dignified struggle with his fatal disease, chronicled mostly through letters to Hoffman. A dull narration that only occasionally flickers to life--but one that, thankfully, doesn't quite obscure Headley's real legacy: his many rightings of injustices along his courageous, committed way. (First printing of 35,000) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For 30 years, Headley, who died in 1992, worked as a private investigator in Las Vegas. This account of his career, written with Hoffman, his coauthor on Contract Killer, is shocking and exciting. The earlier book involved the killing of Jimmy Hoffa, so little attention is given that case here. But Headley does present startling revelations about his other investigations. He presents well-documented evidence that Donald DeFreeze, head of the Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnappers of Patty Hearst in 1974, was a police informant and an agent provocateur. Headley also worked on the investigation of the 1976 murder of reporter Don Bolles in Phoenix, and concludes that certain of Arizona's public figures conspired in a cover-up of the case (the convicted killers, Max Dunlap, a contractor, and James Robinson, a plumber, are to be retried).
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.