Blood and Volume: Inside New York's Israeli Mafia

by Dave Copeland

Blood & Volume reads like fiction but is absolutely all true. With the help of a few associates, Ron Gonen ran a multi-million dollar drug distribution and contract murder syndicate in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Closest in comparison is Henry Hill's story which was made into the movie, Goodfellas. Gonan was manipulative and charismatic, traveling between Tel Aviv and New York, doing deals until it all unraveled. After his arrest, he exchanged information for the witness protection program.

Genres: Crime

237 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2007

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Dave Copeland managed to pull this off in spite of many challenges. Ron Gonen’s knowledge of and intimacy with the NYC Israeli Mafia was enough to help bring them down, but it wasn’t the type of “made man” perspective that the typical OC reader craves, and one wishes that it had been one of the other gangsters who had come forward to tell their story. Gonen’s crimes occasionally crossed into the adventurous, but he was basically a coke dealer, and cocaine culture makes for some pretty dreary reading. It was painful to slog through passages describing the filthier aspects of addiction and to suffer through Gonen’s insufferable wife, Honey Tesman. But Copeland uses his skills to get us through it. When the narrative shifts from Gonen’s biography to the Israeli Mafia, the book really starts to pay off. Copeland’s third person narrative is light on dialogue and at first I was disappointed that we weren’t hearing the story straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, but as I read on I began to understand why Copland took this approach and it ended up working out quite well for this story. This is an interesting and unexpected piece of the American organized crime puzzle, and fans of the OC genre will definitely want to read it. These guys were as ruthless as they come and the speed with which they became major players in the big leagues of international organized crime is remarkable. With his debut, Dave Copeland proved himself as a serious and capable writer and researcher, and I’m curious to see what else he has written.