Longwinded, heavily researched biography of a really bad man who
may or may not have been a mass murderer.Born to a wanton mother in
a Polish village in 1868, Joe Lis (usually aka Joe Silver) died
unmourned around 1918. During his brutish lifetime, the peripatetic
Jewish gangster was a bigamist and police agent, a burglar,
pickpocket, pimp and whoremaster on wholesale basis. Van Onselen
(Humanities/Univ. of Pretoria; The Seed is Mine, 1996, etc.)
details Silver's mercurial history in stupefying detail. Sexually
confused and "neurosyphilitic," he was a classic psychopath who did
time in jails from Poland to London, New York City to Pittsburgh,
South Africa, West Africa, Paris, South America and back to Europe
- the Atlantic World, as the author calls it. Minutiae are given
about police corruption, population shifts, the weather in Cape
Town and the Yiddish theatre in Buenos Aires. Social history and
extraneous fact threaten to engulf the story of Joe Silver until,
following a few hints, the final fifth of this earnest text gets to
the lurid point. After working on the case for a generation, Van
Onselen asserts that Silver was Jack the Ripper, Victorian London's
most notorious serial killer, previously identified as a famous
artist, a member of the royal family and a host of others. The
author bases his assertion on descriptions, names, access,
personality, coincidence and other circumstantial evidence. "I
never did find," the author concedes, "the one piece of
incontrovertible evidence that could convince everyone."A vast
canvas painted in florid detail, but the climactic indictment
certainly is not documented enough to persuade a jury or even an
especially skeptical reader. (Kirkus Reviews)
At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white
slavers' established a hugely successful global market for
commercial sex. Criminal syndicates from Buenos Aires to London and
from Cape Town to New York were able to organise the seduction or
rape of women in under-developed parts of Europe and their 'export'
as prostitutes to meet an insatiable demand for sexual services.
For three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph
Silver - brothel-owner, pimp and trafficker in women on four
continents - was central to this hidden world of betrayal,
intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner,
jewel-thief, rapist, safe-cracker and sodomist, Silver's notoriety
was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen
countries in the western world. What those in charge of
law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves, however, was how their
officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate
syndicates built on 'vice', only to have him outwit them as he
moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes. A
disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist driven
by dark biblical and medieval obsessions, Silver's mental universe
remained largely hidden from his family, other gangsters and police
handlers. In this first reconstruction of the life of a dangerous
psychopath, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one
man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world to identify the
most infamous serial killer of all time - for Joseph Silver's
darkest secret of all lay in London, in Whitechapel, in the autumn
of 1888.
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