The Irish Game by Matthew Hart - mini review

The Irish Game
by Matthew Hart

Publisher:  Plume by Penguin Group

Format: paperback   

Copyright: 2004

Pages: 220

Genre: Non-fiction, crime
Source: purchased  
Summary the back cover:

Famous paintings. A notorious thief. Cunning cops. And a troubled Irish history. 

In the annals of fine-art theft, no case has matched – for sheer criminal panache – the heist at Russborough House in 1986. The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a brazen Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder – including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two works by Rubens, and a Vermeer – remained at large for years until the challenge of disposing of such eminent works forced Cahill to reach outside the mob and into the international area. When he did, his pursuers were waiting. 

The sting that broke Cahill uncovered a maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way that police view art theft. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the nose of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twists and turns of this celebrated case. 

And, unfortunately, leaves his readers in the tangles. This non-fiction retelling of the robberies (yes, plural) at Russborough House, book starts out strong, but leave the reader increasingly at sea - lost in an extraordinarily messy chronology and in an increasingly less than lucid explanation of machinations of both the police and the criminals.

The use of art as surety in the criminal underworld is a central theme in the book, but is explained so poorly that it leaves the reader under the impression that the criminals involved are related to the Three Stooges - fumbling about with art while at the same time creating complex international networks for supply of drugs and/or weapons. You get the idea that these connections are important but the way they are described they don't make any sense. And even the most inept thief must be aware that a multimillion dollar painting that is damaged or destroyed due to poor handling is no longer worth millions - so as a long term strategy treating art as some sort of football to be passed around the word just would not work - at least not as described. The author fails to really make the connections to explain why these art thefts are really new and significant.

Here is an article from the FBI Bulletin that makes more sense http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/march-2012/protecting-cultural-heritage-from-art-theft   (hum - this looks interesting too but I haven't had time to read it all https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol45p601.pdf).

I really struggled to finish this book. The more you read, the more it resembles a stack of notes for a book that never really got fleshed out. You need a score card to keep track of the majors players - especially with the inclusion of all the aliases used by the police. There is not enough information to really make any of the latter part of the book make sense - instead it is just a string of details that don't hang together to make a coherent portrait (sorry, that probably counts as a pun). There just isn't any rhyme or reason, and the lack of overarching framework leave you utterly bewildered as to why anyone was doing anything - or even who was doing what. And I think the book completely excluded the drama in Turkey.

The chronology is also increasingly tortured - zipping around in time from the 1986 robbery, to more recent ones, back again, forward again to when the Vermeer is hung in the National Gallery then in the next chapter telling you that the paintings were hung back where they had been originally in Russborough. Plus, Russborough House was the target of more smash and grab robberies in the 2000's - which get tossed in by the author to make some sort of point.

Anyhow - yea gods - there are much better books about art theft out there.  Unless art crime is really your obsession, I think this one is a pass - most of the information here is presented more clearly and in more detail in other books.

I guess this was a three claw read.

A peak into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Professor and the Madman

Late again - it has been that kind of a week. I am re-reading and reading for the first time, some classic children's novels for the Midnight Garden's Classic YA Readalong, so for Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader here is the beginning of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which is this months book ...

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. 

 I am going to go ahead and admit right here that I had to re-read that beginning bit several times over to convince myself that there wasn't a typo of some sort, 'cause you know, when I was in New York City, serene is quite possibly the last word on Earth that would have come to mind. Chaotic, huge, loud, fast, crowded ... serene just doesn't run with that crowd.

So Brooklyn now ...

Brooklyn in 1912 ...

A totally different world really.


And for non-fiction, here is the beginning of The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, source of some of the words for my Wondrous Words Wednesday post this week ... 


In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed. The marsh was a sinister place, a jumble of slums and sin that crouched, dark and ogrelike, on the bank of the Thames just across from Westminster; few respectable Londoners would ever admit to venturing there. It was a robustly violent part of town as well–the footpad lurked in Lambeth, there had once been an outbreak of garroting, and in every crowded ally were the roughest kinds of pickpocket. Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Oliver Twist would have all seemed quite at home in Victorian Lambeth: This was Dickensian London writ large.

---

For The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice page 56 of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is blank, so that won't work.  We will go with the start of Book Two on page 57 ...

It was in another Brooklyn summer but twelve years earlier, in nineteen hundred, that Johnny Nolan first met Katie Rommely. He was nineteen and she was seventeen. Katie worked in the Castle Braid Factory. So did Hildy O'Dair, her best friend.  


I have to skootch back to page 55 of The Professor and the Madman for continuity ...

"Forest fires raged," wrote another solider who was at the Wilderness, "ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of bloodstained clothing..." 

Okay - poetic and horrifying. Um, that is a really lousy note to end a post on so we need a bonus piece here. This is Friday after all. And of course the next book on the pile is 1984 - well that will make everyone feel better. The next one won't help either - man, I have to rearrange this stack of books!

How about page 1 of Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon (the forth Meg Langslow mystery) by Donna Andrews ...

"Mutant Wizards," I said. "Could you hold, please?" 

I switched the phone to my left ear, holding it with my awkwardly bandaged left hand, and stabbed at a button to answer another line. 

"Eat Your Way Skinny," I said. "Could you hold, please?" 

As I reached to punch the first line's button and deal with the Wizards' caller, I heard a gurgling noise. I looked up to see that the automatic mail cart had arrived while I was juggling phones. A man lay on top, his head thrown back, one arm flung out while the other clutched the knife handle rising from his chest. He gurgled again. Red drops fell from his outstretched hand onto the carpet. 

"Very funny, Ted," I said, reaching out to press the button that would send the mail cart on its way again. "You can come back later to clean up the stage blood." 

I could hear him snickering as the cart beeped and lurched away, ...

 Have a great weekend ! 

Tower of London in a sea of red poppies

I am sure that lots of you have already heard about this, but I wanted to post anyhow. To mark the centenary of the First World War, an art instillation called 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' is going up on the lawn outside the Tower of London. The installation, created by artist Paul Cummins, set designer Tom Piper and a team of around 8,000 dedicated volunteers, will be comprised of thousands of red ceramic poppies - each one representing the life of a solider from Britain or the Commonwealth lost in WWI.

There are currently around 140,000 installed but the full instillation will consist of 888,246 poppies. The artist is trying to present a visualization of just how staggering the lost of life really was. The last poppy will be placed on November 11th - Armistice Day. 

Source - Telegraph

Each poppy is made in Paul Cummins' studio (one site said that there are 50 potters involved). The poppies are available at https://poppies.hrp.org.uk/buy-a-poppy/ for £25.00 +p&p. All net proceeds plus a guaranteed 10% from every poppy sold will be shared equally amongst six service charities. Poppies will only be available for purchase throughout the duration of the installation.

Lake Erie Water Quality - we are killing it again

Unless you have been in hiding, you probably already have heard about the brief drinking water ban (actually it extended to the point of a don't touch the water ban) in Toledo, Ohio. Up to approximately half-a-million people were told not to drink the water, don't shower in it, don't wash dishes in it, don't let your pets play in it -  in fact - just don't get near the water at all. And boiling it isn't going to make a difference. The first tests indicating that there was a problem came Friday night. Toledo issued warning just after midnight Saturday, leading the governor to declare a state of emergency. The state began delivering water to the Toledo area Saturday afternoon. The ban was lifted Monday morning (August 4th). They were pretty lucky - it would be hard to provide bottled water for that many people for any sustained period of time.

The really sad part of this news, is that it isn't really news at all. Scientists have been warning us about this problem for years. Algal blooms have gotten increasingly bad in Lake Erie over the past few years and with the effects of climate change things are only going to get worse. 

The above picture, from the New York Times, is of Lake Erie in 2011. That year the algal bloom  covered one sixth of the lake, expanded the dead zone (i.e. anoxic or oxygen free zone) on the lake bottom, reduced fish populations and fouled beaches.

NASA image of the 2011 bloom - this isn't at its worst either

Compare that to this image of Lake Erie taken a couple of days ago ...

Algae-infested water from Lake Erie on Monday washed up onshore at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, Ohio, near Toledo. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times

And this satellite image from August 3rd ...

Unfortunately the NOAA Lake Erie MODIS Satellite Image for 08-03-2014 18:41GMT s pretty cruddy but you can still clearly see the algae bloom. The rest of the days have tons of cloud cover.

This year, as I listened to the news play chirpy reports about how the Toledo population was pulling together and making jokes ("my child is so spoiled they only bathe in bottled water"), the thing that really attracted my attention was the unstated implication that these algae blooms are somehow the new normal. 


Really they are the result of nutrient rich run-off from agriculture and sewage treatment plant effluent. The phosphorus from these sources is food for a poisonous cyanobacteria called Microcystis aeruginosa, that produce the toxin microcystin. Microcystins are hepatotoxins (liver toxins), causing liver damage, diarrhea, and vomiting, as well as skin, eye and throat irritation. I have seen no reports of human deaths due to exposure, but pets and livestock have died after drinking contaminated water. 

Cyanobacterial blooms, or blue-green algae blooms, are already harmful because they cause oxygen depletion of the water, creating dead zones. The addition of Microcystis toxin just exacerbates the problem. And basically, they are our fault. Humans are providing the nitrates and phosphates that cause these blooms.

It turns out that in this instance, Toledo was a victim of bad luck. A bloom of toxic algae formed miles offshore directly over the city’s water-intake pipe in Lake Erie.

Scientists have been calling for action for years now. Perhaps this time people will listen, but I am not holding my breath.

I will close with these panels from Grist (at http://grist.org/climate-energy/this-comic-strip-explains-why-we-could-see-more-disasters-like-toledos-toxic-algae-bloom/) ...

You should read the whole thing.

 More to the story at Grist ... 

We are well on our way to losing Lake Erie again. 


Resources
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-says-its-water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html?rref=science/earth&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Environment&pgtype=article

Wondrous Words Wednesday 20

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Kathy at the Bermuda Onion where you "can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love. Feel free to get creative!

I am reading at night, but haven't gotten many reviews done latel - hopefully I can catch some up soon. I have jotted down a few words but neglected to cite the sources so first I have a couple of words that I don't even remember where I saw them ...


"Ready to absquatulate all the dragons and rescue you.”

absquatulate
abz-SKWAWCH-uh-layt

to decamp; to move on; to depart in a hurry
Origin: mid 19th century: blend, simulating a Latin form, of abscond, squattle 'depart', and perambulate.

... as a writer in the old Vanity Fair magazine in 1875 elaborated: “They dusted, vamosed the ranch, made tracks, cut dirt, hoed it out of there”.

--- *** ---

Okay - I know that I wrote this one down simply because I have always loved how it rolls off the tongue...

oubliette
/ˌo͞oblēˈet
A secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling.
Origin: late 18th century: from French, from oublier 'forget'.

I would imagine that lots of people know this word from the movie Labyrinth
 

So, looking for an image of a real oubliette, I have found that apparently the one at Leap Castle (pronounced “Lep”) in County Offaly, Ireland, has somehow become the most famous - via appearances in various ghost chasers television shows.

If you are interested in ghost stories, there appear to be a ton for Leap Castle. According to one website the oubliette was discovered in 1922 in the corner of a chapel - still full to the brim with skeletons.

Right - horrible reality, still an evocative sounding word. 

--- *** ---

Now to some words that I know where I read them, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester ...

In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.

louche
/lo͞oSH/
Disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way
Origin early 19th century: from French, literally 'squinting'.


Okayyy - failing to see how crime ridden slums are rakish or appealing.

Lower Fore Street, a narrow cobblestoned street in Lambeth, pictured in 1865. This industrial area became very densely populated over the Victorian period; its inhabitants rose from 28,000 in 1801 to nearly 300,000 by the time this photograph was taken.
Picture: 'Dickens's Victorian London' by Alex Werner and Tony Williams (source)

--- *** ---

So when a brief fusillade of three revolver shots rang out shortly after two o'clock on the moonlit Saturday morning of February 17, 1872, the sound was unimagined, unprecedented and shocking.

fusillade
/ˈfyo͞osəˌläd, -ˌlād /
noun: A series of shots fired or missiles thrown all at the same time or in quick succession
archaic verb: Attack (a place) or shoot down (someone) by a series of shots fired at the same time or in quick succession.
Origin early 19th century: from French, from fusiller 'to shoot', from fusil


I did basically know what the word meant, but it seemed repetitive as presented in the sentence so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing some subtlety here ... turns out that actually Winchester is rather flowery and repetitive, which can be fun or annoying depending on your mood.  

--- *** ---

This isn't a word per say but a thing in the book that made my mind go boink ...
the London Necropolis Railway 

London's population more than doubled in the first half of the 19th century, but the amount of space preserved for cemeteries did not keep pace. Grave were being 'reused' with the former residents dumped unceremoniously about the place and bodies were also being absconded with by 'resurrectionists.' Then came the 1848-49 cholera epidemic that killed almost 15,000 people. 

To deal with this problem, Sir Richard Broun proposed buying land in Brockwood for a huge new cemetery - dubbed “London's Necropolis” and using the railway from Waterloo to  Southampton to transport coffins and funeral parties there. London Necropolis Railway opened in November 1854 and service lasted until the night of 16–17 April 1941, when the London terminus was badly damaged in an air raid and rendered unusable. There are some amazing articles about it kicking around the web if you are interested.

Entrance to Necropolis Station, Waterloo, London, 1890

BTW - if you are confused about the connection, Waterloo station is in Lambeth and was famous for being ramshackle, confusing and, unlike other major stations, downright ugly.

Jerome K Jerome's even takes a jab at it in his 1889 comic novel, Three Men in a Boat. The protagonists were wandering around the station trying to find their train:

We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it. The porter who took our things thought it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.  

To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he had seen it at number three platform.  We went to number three platform, but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop.  But they were sure it wasn’t the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn’t they couldn’t say.

You get the idea. 

Well this was a rather morbid entry - bet you all liked it better when I rambled on about food. I will try to be reading something less dark next week.