Gates’s Hell
GATES’S HELL Vanity Fair, August 1991 The shocking police beating of Rodney King has heightened tensions between L.A’s beleaguered cops and its embittered communities. As FREDRIC DANNEN discovers in a revealing interview, Police Chief Daryl Gates is as incendiary and conflicted as the crisis engulfing him. The son of an alcoholic and the father of […]
The Nine Lives of ‘Fat Cat’
THE NINE LIVES OF ‘FAT CAT’ Vanity Fair, April 1991 One of New York’s most ruthless drug warlords, Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols even called the shots from behind bars—ordering hits on a childhood buddy and the mother of his son. But a murder he didn’t commit finally destroyed his empire. Then the Cat turned canary. FREDRIC DANNEN […]
The Born-Again Don
THE BORN-AGAIN DON Vanity Fair, February 1991 How did Michael Franzese—a capo in the Colombo crime family and one of the richest “made” men since Capone—leave the Mob and take up with the Feds, then live happily ever after in Hollywood? They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. FREDRIC DANNEN reports _______________________ HIS PARENTS […]
Sins of the City
SINS OF THE CITY Vanity Fair, September 1990 Alexander DiLorenzo III, the reclusive ex-hippie who owns forty-two acres of Manhattan, is the unlikely slumlord of the Happy Land death trap. _______________________ BY FREDRIC DANNEN ON THE NIGHT of March 25, 1990, Lydia Feliciano, a woman who checked coats and occasionally bartended at the Happy Land social club […]