cover image The Squad: The Us Governments Secret Alliance with Organized Crime

The Squad: The Us Governments Secret Alliance with Organized Crime

Michael Milan. S.P.I. Books, $19.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-933503-36-6

Full of contentious, blockbuster revelations, this is the autobiography of a man who purportedly was part of a hit team--``J. Edgar Hoover's private Squad''--that between 1947 and 1971 dealt with people with whom the law either couldn't or wouldn't. The pseudonymous Milan was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and early on became a Mafia collector and enforcer. He writes that he was recruited by Hoover, as were others from the mob, the OSS and the military, and worked on cases involving a former Japanese officer who played a major role in the Bataan death march, an ex-Nazi who escaped to the U.S. after the war and a taxi driver who was implicated in JFK's assassination. Typical of the prose is Milan's description of his execution of the Dallas cabbie: ``The sonovabitch didn't even twitch like most people do when you shoot'emsic in the head.'' Photos not seen by PW . (Nov.)