The Pierre Hotel Affair
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New York City, 1972.Bobby Comfort and Sammy “the Arab” Nalo were highly skilled jewel thieves who specialized in robbing luxury Manhattan hotels. With the blessing of the Lucchese Crime Family, their next plot targeted the posh Pierre Hotel—host to kings and queens, presidents and aldermen, and the wealthiest of the wealthy. Attired in tuxedoes and driven in a limousine, this band of thieves arrived at the Pierre, seized the security guards and, in systematically choreographed moves, swiftly took the night staff—and several unfortunate guests who happened to be roaming about the lobby—as hostages.The deposit boxes inside the vault chamber were plundered and the gentlemanly thieves departed in their limousine with a haul of $28 million. But then matters began to deteriorate. The authorities immediately suspected Comfort and Nalo of masterminding The Pierre ambush and arrested them, but the veteran criminals kept their mouths shut. The Lucchese Family funneled a $500,000 bribe to the presiding judge to quash the charges—and to this day The Pierre Hotel caper remains unsolved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simone's less than compelling account of a daring 1972 robbery of Manhattan's Pierre Hotel reads like fiction, and in the absence of any explanation of his sources and methods for recreating events from more than 40 years ago, he inevitably invites skepticism about the truth of his story. In particular, Simone (The Lufthansa Heist) presents lines of dialogue including from background characters whose words would not have had lingering relevance even at the time as if they are accurately represented word for word. More significantly, he does nothing to support his hard-to-believe representation that legendary Manhattan DA Frank Hogan not only assigned the high-profile prosecution to a relative novice but eventually agreed to a sweetheart plea bargain for those who were arrested, a deal that encompassed the theft of millions of dollars in jewels and granted "unconditional immunity for any known or unknown crimes they may have committed, abetted, conspired, or implicated in." Coauthor Sacco, the only surviving participant in the robbery, weighs in only intermittently, in asides that add little to the narrative.
