Family secrets

So it turns out that just because I don't work at a Big Six publishing company, it doesn't mean I can't steal any good books from work.

When my old editor-in-chief left, he found an ARC while cleaning out his desk that someone had given us as a review copy back when it was first published. The book was Hit Me!: Fighting the Las Vegas Mob by the Numbers by Danielle Gomes and Jay Benincasa. The ARC is dated May 2013, making this review three years late, so I don't know if I'm supposed to still send the publisher two copies like they asked for. What's the usual practice for this sort of thing? Anyway, publishers, if you wanna send review copies of gambling-related books to Casino City, we'll be more timely in the future, because I'm here now.

Hit Me! follows the story of Dennis Gomes, a young accountant with an unshakable sense of justice who is tasked with heading up and reforming the Nevada Gaming Control Board's Audit Division in 1970's Las Vegas. Most of the casinos in Vegas at this time were owned by Mafia groups--usually multiple outfits, as joint ventures--who massively underreported revenues and used the skimmed funds to finance all sorts of other mob operations back in their home territories. A pretty huge proportion of Nevada's political and law enforcement apparatus was also involved, either actively in the mobs' pockets or just unwilling to cross them. This lack of institutional support--plus the occasional active betrayal from inside the house--makes Gomes's job very, very difficult at times.

While the word "audit" may conjure up for some readers a rather unsexy image of some desk workers poring over spreadsheets, rest assured that this is a full-on gangster story, with all the clandestine meetings, undercover surveillance and raiding rooms full of money at gunpoint that that implies. The cast of characters is also pretty loud, on the cop side as well as the mobster side. Fans of the movie Casino will be able to spot some familiar material in the second half of the book as Gomes starts going after the Stardust's Frank Rosenthal and Tony "the Ant" Spilotro. (The first half of the book I'm not sure about 'cause I didn't see Casino until this Friday, because I am the worst gangster movie fan ever.)

The biggest strength of this book is that it is very, very detailed--not in a lengthy way, but entire conversations are reconstructed verbatim, accompanied by vivid sights and sounds and smells until you feel you might as well be reading a trashy noir novel. Some of this is because the Audit Division kept extraordinarily detailed notes, and some is apparently because Gomes had an excellent memory, but I'm sure a bunch of it is just because some of this shit is so crazy you could never forget it. Gomes makes a relatable enough viewpoint character most of the time; mostly he comes off as very committed to driving the mob out of Vegas and very frustrated when he can't, which is pretty hard to take issue with. You get a glimpse of a little more of a weird dude right at the beginning and right at the end, but for the bulk of the book he's all Secret Agent Man all the time.

I don't know if this is something they may have included in the final printing, but my biggest complaint about this ARC was its lack of photographs. I want some pictures! Mugshots, crime scenes, awful '70s fashion, pics of the tacky old casinos that were there before the tacky current ones. I mean, this should be obvious. The ARC doesn't even identify whose photos are being used on the cover.

Overall, though, this is a high-adrenaline true crime tale, and I especially recommend reading it while drinking wine in the bathtub.

Editorial melodrama

While I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the gambling end of my current field, I've been pretty neglectful about keeping up on any sort of writing or editing-related reading. But it's been a full year since my last binge of editing books, so I did try to find the time to make sure I hadn't forgotten how punctuation works by zipping through Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Gordon is also the author of my old favorite grammar book The Transitive Vampire, of which I own a copy that my mother once rescued from a library weeding. I'm fairly certain I also have a copy of the old version of The Well-Tempered Sentence around somewhere, but I'm not sure if I've ever read it.

I did not really learn anything new from The New Well-Tempered Sentence, which is good, as it means I have not been radically wrong about anything too basic regarding punctuation and that I have not lost my mind about any of it either. (It is important to stop and check periodically, though, when you're in my line of work. JUST IN CASE.) The level of the material is not substantially more complex than what you would expect to be learning at a high school level. That is, of course, not really the point of any of Gordon's works. The point is that it is full of delightfully wacky example sentences—many of which are not really appropriate to what you would expect to be seeing in a pre-collegiate level class—and many old illustrations (from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Victorian line drawings) with humorous captions. My favorite bit comes in the list of uses for italics, where the different types of emphasis you can use italics to add are enumerated, and include "for unrequited platonic love" and "for special effect in social repartee."

Whether the melodramatic example sentences make it easier to remember the punctuation rules or not is something I cannot entirely weigh in on; I would have to ask someone who did not already remember the punctuation rules before reading the book and see if their retention had improved.