The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Acknowledgments

  This book could never have happened without the involvement of a lot of people, some of whom are great friends, some of whom I spoke with for only a minute, and some of whom I’ve never met and only read. Mark Olitsky showed me around Cleveland, Ohio, his hometown. Christina Crowder showed me around Romania and told me so much about living there. Andrew Fedynsky and everyone else at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland could not have been more generous with their time in helping me find what I needed. Same goes for the good people at the Western Reserve Historical Society and the Cleveland Public Library. Claude Cahn, John DeMetrick, Alexander Fedoriouk, Katharine Karpenstein, Jim Miner, and Brian Murphy let me talk their ear off, and told me so much that I needed to know. The people at the New York City Federal Bureau of Investigation organized crime office gave me precious minutes of their valuable time in explaining to a confused writer how certain aspects of organized crime work. Paul Ziats’s memoir of growing up in Tremont and Marc E. Lackritz’s paper on the Hough riots are the only reasons I could even think about trying to re-create them. Likewise, Wil Haygood’s painstaking research and riveting description of the fatal fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle in Sweet Thunder is the only reason I could think about trying to re-create that, though I don’t think I did it nearly as much justice as he did.

  I owe a lot to Cameron McClure, my agent, who stuck with me through all of this. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Amber Qureshi at Seven Stories, for believing in the book so much and also giving it the rigorous edit that it needed. Finally, my real extended family, for the record, is nothing like the fictional family in these pages; in writing about a deeply dysfunctional family like the one in this book, all I had to do was imagine the opposite of how my own family would act, and react. I’ll always be grateful to them for showing me just how strong the bond can be.

  Books and Articles

  Aslund, Anders. 2009. How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy. Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics.

  Badal, James Jessen. 2001. In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

  Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control Policy. 2001. What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs. Washington, DC: Office of National Drug Control Policy.

  Fisman, Raymond, and Edward Miguel. 2008. Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Glenny, Misha. 2008. McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. New York: Knopf.

  Harwood, Herbert H., Jr. 2003. Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland’s Van Sweringen Brothers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

  Haygood, Wil. 2009. Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  Kara, Siddarth. 2008. Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Kapuscinski, Ryszard. 2002. The Shadow of the Sun. New York: Vintage.

  Kennedy, Maureen, and Paul Leonard. 2001. “Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices.” Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Washington, DC.

  Kiev University. 1964. Ukrainian-English Inter-Lingual Relations: Ukrainian Language in the USA and Canada. Kiev: Kiev University. (in Ukrainian)

  Kuropas, Myron B. 1996. Ukrainian-American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs.

  Kuzio, Taras, and Andrew Wilson. 1994. Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press.

  Lackritz, Marc E. 1968. “The Hough Riots of 1966.” Senior thesis, Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

  Mencken, H. L. 1941. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  Miller, Carol Poh, and Robert Wheeler. 1997. Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796–1996. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

  Porello, Rick. 1995. The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia: Corn, Sugar and Blood. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books.

  Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2000. “The Global Traffic in Human Organs.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 2: 191–224. Available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fm776vf (accessed April 20, 2010).

  Quammen, David. 2003. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Svendsen, Margaret T., and Charles E. Hendry. 1936. Between Spires and Stacks. Cleveland, OH: Welfare Federation of Cleveland.

  Ukrainian National Association. 1936. Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association in Commemoration of the Fortieth Anniversary of Its Existence. Jersey City, NJ: Svoboda Press.

  Van Tassel, David D., ed. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Available at http://ech.cwru.edu/.

  Wiese, Andrew. 2004. Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago.

  Ziats, Paul. n.d. Tremont: Cleveland’s Southside. Self-published memoir.

  Newspaper and Online Articles

  Browne, Anthony. “Drugs Push Scarred Land to the Brink.” The Observer (UK). December 2, 2001. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/dec/02/anthonybrowne.theobserver (accessed July 24, 2010).

  Candea, Stefan. “Abandoning a Broken Model of Journalism.” Nieman Reports, Spring 2011. Available at http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102575/Abandoning-a-Broken-Model-of-Journalism.aspx (accessed September 19, 2011).

  Keller, Martina, and Markus Grill. “42.90 Euros Per Arm: Inside a Creepy Global Body Parts Business.” Spiegel Online International, August 28, 2009. Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,645375,00.html (accessed April 20, 2010).

  Marino, Jacqueline. 1999. “Hidden History: Did the Old Arcade Once Harbor a Speakeasy?” Cleveland Scene, October 7, 1999. Available at http://m.clevescene.com (accessed December 13, 2010).

  O’Connor, Clint. “Welcome to Cleveland 1976 A.D.: Bombing Capital of America.” The Plain Dealer, March 6, 2011. Available at http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2011/03/welcome_to_cleveland_1976_ad_b.html (accessed January 2, 2012).

  Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The International Organ Trafficking Market.” Interviewed by Neal Conan on Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, July 30, 2009. Available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111379908 (accessed September 21, 2011).

  The Ukrainian Weekly, various issues. Available at http://www.ukrweekly.com/ (accessed July 24, 2010).

  Zetter, Kim. “Scientist Turns Microscope on Herself.” Wired. February 28, 2008. Available at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/02/scientist-turns/.

  About the Author

  Novelist, musician, and editor Brian Francis Slattery is the author of three previous novels. Spaceman Blues (2007) was nominated for the Lambda Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. Liberation (2008) was named by Amazon’s editors the best science-fiction book of 2008. Lost Everything (2012) won the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award. As an editor, he specializes in economic development and human rights, working for a variety of public-policy think tanks and traveling widely. He was previously a senior editor of the Journal of International Affairs and an editor and co-founder of the New Haven Review. His short fiction is published in Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, the Revelator, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and young son in New Haven, Connecticut.

 

 

 
ale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share