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There will never be another Billy Hill - Reggie Kray. Bill had a great brain. There's no two ways about it - Frankie Fraser. I made Billy Hill. Then he got over the top of me. I should have shot Billy Hill. I really should. I'd have got ten years for it but it would have made me happy and I'd be out now - laughing - Jack Spot. I have no doubt that during his career Hill had some very senior officers in his pocket - Leonard 'Nipper' Read, legendary Scotland Yard detective. Billy Hill was Britain's first celebrity gangster. Born in London's impoverished Seven Dials, by the early 1950's he had control of the city's gambling rackets and masterminded a heist that set the template for the Great Train Robbery. He ruled the roost in the bloody era when the underworld's choice of weapon was the open razor. His violent clashes with onetime ally turned enemy Jack Spot became the stuff of legend, as Hill and his henchmen left the streets of Soho running red. But Hill was astute enough to choose his moment to get out, abdicating in favour of his gun-toting young protégés, the Kray twins . . . In this fast-moving biography, Wensley Clarkson charts the life of the only post-war British villain to truly make crime pay.
Billy Hill writes about an extraordinary life of crime and punishment and his rise to the top of Britain's gangland. This book details Billy's sensational heists in the 1950s, for which no one was ever convicted. It's an entertaining read, giving the reader insight into what made Billy tick.
This is the memoir of Billy and Gyp Hill - Britain's most successful criminal couple - and Justin, their only child. Billy was the Boss of Britain's underworld. He introduced 'project' crime to Britain and got clean away with the 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery even though the authorities knew that he did it. In 1956, he was at the centre of a phone tapping scandal that led to a Privy Council enquiry. When Billy published his memoir, the papers said there had been nothing like it since the days of Al Capone.
In August 1955 two men fought on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, Soho. From the dreadful injuries they inflicted on each other it easily could have been a hanging matter, but ironically it became known as 'The Fight that Never Was'. It was, however, to have enormous repercussions in the battle for control of Soho and its clubs and for the bookmakers' pitches on the racecourses. It also led to the inexorable rise of the Kray twins. One of the men fighting was Jack Spot, the self-proclaimed defender of the Jewish community against Fascism. The other was the half Italian Albert Dimes, the right hand man of Spot's one-time friend and later nemesis Billy Hill, rightly described as the nearest Britain has ever had to a mastermind. Meticulously researched, including interviews with the survivors of the era, this is the story of the rise and fall of Spot from an East End background and Hill from a criminal family in Holborn, as well as that of their spiritual mentor Darby Sabini, the King of the Racecourses in the 1920s and 1930s and his successors Alf and Harry White.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The wildly opinionated, thoroughly entertaining, and arguably definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA—from the founder of The Ringer and host of The Bill Simmons Podcast “Enough provocative arguments to fuel barstool arguments far into the future.”—The Wall Street Journal In The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major NBA debate, from the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball. Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.
Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "You will not read a more important book about America this year."--The Economist "A riveting book."--The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Invitations to John Aspinall and John Burke's illegal gambling parties were the most sought after in 1950s London - only the wealthy and well-connected were allowed past their door. When the police finally arrested them, Aspinall and Burke challenged the law - and won. As a result gambling was legalised. Which interested crime boss Billy Hill and his lieutenant Bobby McKew, because suddenly clubs sprang up everywhere and Billy had a foolproof way of fixing the cards. He also had his eye on the ultimate prize, Aspinall's exclusive new club, The Clermont... Revealing for the first time how Aspinall and Hill plotted to steal a fortune, based on testimony from Burke and McKew, The Hustlers is a riotous journey back to 50s and 60s London. With a cast of characters that ranges from safecracker Eddie Chapman to the reckless Earl of Derby, from croupier Louis the Rat to unlucky Lord Lucan, it vividly recreates the exploits of the gamblers and gangsters whose lives collided in the clubs and pubs of Mayfair. 'a fascinating glimpse into a bygone world . . . when chemmy parties took London by storm and toffs were often found to be rubbing shoulders with gangsters' Daily Express
Billy Young was a boy of 15 when he joined the AIF in 1941. He was an orphan - hungry, broke, with nowhere to sleep - and the army offered him a feed, a blanket and five shillings a day in his pocket. The trouble was, the army sent him off to Malaya where he became a POW when Singapore fell to the Japanese. From Changi, 'Billy the Kid' went on to spend the rest of his teenage years in some of the most barbaric Japanese prisons- the notorious labour camp at Sandakan (from which he escaped), and solitary confinement in the horrific Outram Road prison. Billy survived by a combination of luck, larrikin humour and native cunning, learned as a market boy growing up in Sydney during the Depression. He has lasted into old age by virtue of his extraordinary spirit. In this powerful account of one of the youngest-ever prisoners of war, award-winning author Anthony Hill takes us into the hearts and minds of the POWs, who refused to ever wholly submit to their captors.
String band music is most commonly associated with the mountains of North Carolina and other rural areas of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, but it was just as abundant in Piedmont region of North Carolina, albeit with different influences and stylistic conventions. This work focuses exclusively on the history and culture of the area, the music's development and the changes within traditional communities of the Piedmont. It begins with a discussion of the settlement of the Piedmont in the mid-1700s and early references to secular folk music, including the attitudes the various ethnic and religious groups had on music and dance, the introduction of the fiddle and the banjo, and outside influences such as minstrel shows, Hawaiian music and classical banjo. It then goes on to cover African-Americans and string band music; the societal functions of square dances held at private homes and community centers; the ways in which musicians learned to play the music and bought their instruments; fiddler's conventions and their history as community fundraisers; the recording industry and Piedmont musicians who cut recordings, including Ernest Thompson and the North Carolina Cooper Boys; Bascom Lamar Lunsford and the Carolina Folk Festival; the influence of live radio stations, including WPTF in Raleigh, WGWR in Asheboro, WSJS in Winston-Salem, WBIG in Greensboro and WBT in Charlotte; the first generation of locally-bred country entertainers, including Charlie Monroe's Kentucky Partners, Gurney Thomas and Glenn Thompson; and bluegrass and musical change following World War II.