Overview

Was it the Mafia behind the biggest loanshark in New York City? Or a group of Long Island Rabbis? Melvin Cooper was a financier with an edge, making risky loans to New York businesspeople until he found himself running the biggest loansharking operation in the city. In 1984, he was arrested by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani along with seven Mafia capos and soldiers from four organized crime families. It was one of Giuliani's first high-profile RICO trials, and he filled the courtroom with notorious informants, lowlifes, rats, and some of New York's most sought-after crime figures including ""top earners"" like Jimmy Rotondo and Michael Franzese. Cooper was sentenced to 30 years in prison - from which he promptly escaped. The driving, three-decade story takes readers from the Brooklyn waterfront to Florida beaches to an Indiana penitentiary. Never before have Rabbis and the Mafia collided like this, as Mel Cooper and his partner - a dentist from Long Island - funded nightclubs and restaurants in freewheeling 1980s New York. Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI captures the mayhem that follows when ambition and flexible ethics meet. And, in a unique twist on crime stories, Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI is also about the business of crime: the daily bookkeeping, contracts, corruption, and cover-ups that echo to this day, and remind us why chaos and lies are not the best business tools.

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Reviews

""A stunning literary offering. Wiseguys, Rabbis and the FBI is a real tour de force of a true crime story."" - Paul Volponi, multi-award-winning author of Black and White and Rikers High ""Whoever says the system works hasn't been in the system. What the system does is give us the height of drama, insane predicaments that fuel true-crime podcasts and characters that would play into the most complex of Hollywood gangster films. This book has it all."" - Damien Echols, New York Times Best Selling Author, Life After Death ""A fascinating and fast-paced chase from East New York to Fort Lauderdale to a Midtown apartment overlooking the park, full of greed, precarious freedom, family dramas, wiretaps, and unexpected friendships. The authors nose dive into captivating scenes of Mel Cooper's capers and come up for air with lovely lines like this one describing 1980s New York as ""a city of gold teetering on an abyss."" - Rachel Federman, author ""In this page-turner, J.A Schwartzman opens the curtain on the mafia and the money business, giving readers a peek behind the scenes of high crime in 1980s New York City - with a very unexpected twist. If you're looking for a new voice in true crime storytelling, you will love this book."" - Thomas D. Zweifel, award-winning author of The Rabbi and the CEO and Gorilla in the Cockpit ""The true account of Mel Cooper's rise and fall has the stuff of dark, comedic fiction - nearly too fluky to believe were it not for Schwartzman's potent blend of tireless, investigative journalism and street-wise storytelling. As recounted by J.A. Schwartzman, Mel Cooper's brushes with the law, with the powerful and the infamous, paint a larger-than-life panorama of New York City crime and corruption. Cooper was a born risk-taker with an uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the right time. Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI inserts the reader into the thick of a scheme that takes down the most unlikely accomplices ever indicted."" - Jon B. Kushner, Writer/Director, Angelo & Ert, The Harbormaster

Author Information

J.A. Schwartzman is a copywriter and author, whose work has appeared in publications including Mademoiselle Magazine, Barbara Probst Solomon's ""The Reading Room"", the New York Press, and others. Her writing and editing has included non-fiction books, articles for trade and commercial publications, and a screenplay. Mel Cooper was born in Brooklyn, New York. His career has taken him through several industries including New York's commercial trash collection business, international telecom, and finance. He rose through the business world until he veered into making ""special loans,"" where he caught the attention of the FBI. After paying the price for his wrong turns, Mel retired to Brooklyn.

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