I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12975923

An odd combination of memoir, journalism, and fictionalized biography. The author was six when his father was murdered in a stairwell in his office building. His memory of his father, therefore, was not very strong growing up. But he was haunted by this murder. Why? What kind of man was he? Were the stories about him true?

So he set out to do a lot of research and try to put it together so it made some sense.

His father, Ed Lazar, was an accountant who became involved in a series of real estate scams. While not the head of the operations, he was a brilliant accountant and could not have been entirely unaware of what was going on. The author paints his father in perhaps the kindest light that he reasonably could, attributing to him doubts and misgivings that may not actually have occured to him. He bases this characterization on what he learned from Ed Lazar's many friends and acquaintances, most of whom simply did not see him as willingly entering the criminal world.

Beyond the personal story we are given the bones of the real estate scams, the mechanisms by which governments and everyday folks and, especially, overseas servicemen, were fooled. I did not follow every detail but I got the gist of it.

This was the early seventies, and companies were eagerly gobbling up contracts and selling them to other companies. They were not looking as closely as they should have at the paper.

The method of telling the story was a little disjointed to me, and I never really connected with the portrayal of Ed Lazar.
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ed lazar killing in Phoenix; ( )