Alphaville

As a cop, Codella worked the toughest beat in New York City, a part of lower Manhattan called Alphabet City. He had grown up close by in Brooklyn, where cops and Mafia heads lived on the same block, and knew the streets like a native. He soon found that speaking the language of prostitutes and dope-dealers gave him an advantage in fighting against the drug wars taking place in a crime-infested city. Narrator Keith Szarabajka provides Codella's story with streetwise New York accents and Puerto Rican-accented English. In delivering the story's noir style, he excels at depicting the gang members, drug dealers, and other low-lifes the author specialized in putting out of business. Without Szarabajka's narration, one imagines that the trip into the danger and occasional comedy of such a terrible place would be far less entertaining. Codella doesn't paints himself as an angel--nor does he talk like one--but he seems like he wears a badge you'd want in your neighborhood. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine


The preface states that while some court transcripts and affidavits were used as source material, most of this book represents the recollections of the author, Manhattan Detective Sergeant Mike Codella, who tells of his battle to rid New York's Lower East Side of some very bad characters. With accurate accents and superb timing, Keith Szarabajka narrates this disturbing, bloody account of the way things were in the early '80s in "Alphabet City," an area filled with boarded-up, burned-out tenements, which was a haven for heroin dealers and addicts and the fiefdom of "Davie Blue Eyes," a murderous drug kingpin. Some characters are composites, and some of the names have been changed, but all sound uncomfortably real, thanks to Szarabajka's spot-on performance. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

March 28, 2011
Codella and Bennett provide a rich and compelling criminal history interlaced with the stories of Codella's years as a police officer, rising through the ranks in the 1980s and 1990s. Mixing information about organized crime, technology, and urban histories, the narrative shifts among different experiences of Codella's time as a housing officer and a plainclothes officer and the different historical forces that influence his hunt for the mobster Davey Blue Eyes. Keith Szarabajka's performance is admirable: he balances the straight first-person narrative with rich vocal characterization while easily shifting into the more straightforward historical aspects of the book such as the history of heroin or city planning. He takes some effective liberties with the dialogue, ratcheting up the intensity and sometimes even the strength of an accent, which provides added authenticity and drama. A St. Martin's/Dunne hardcover.