Summary
On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley N. Alpert was kidnapped off the streets of Manhattan by a car full of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card. He ended up blindfolded in a Brooklyn apartment as his captors changed their plans, alternately threatening him and his family, seeking legal advice, expounding on the "gangsta" life, and offering him the services of their prostitute girlfriends as a birthday present. All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, and memorized every detail he could in the event that he ever managed to get out of there alive.
Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller-but every word is true.
Author Notes
Stanley N. Alpert served for thirteen years with the U.S. Department of Justice as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where he was chief of environmental litigation. There, Alpert investigated, prosecuted, or supervised many complex civil and criminal cases, some resulting in multimillion-dollar awards.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this tartly written memoir recalling his 1998 kidnapping, Alpert, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, describes his abduction and release, and the subsequent trial of the kidnappers, with an impressive amount of detail and only the occasional note of self-congratulation for how he handled the ordeal. On the night before his 38th birthday, Alpert was forced at gunpoint into a car near his Greenwich Village apartment, blindfolded, made to relinquish his ATM and PIN, and driven to Brooklyn, where he was kept in an apartment full of oddly personable, gun-wielding youths and teenage prostitutes. In between violent threats, the criminals solicited legal advice concerning past crimes and offered him pot and sexual favors in honor of his birthday. After 25 hours, they handed their hostage $20 cab money and left him in Prospect Park. Though the second part of the account, detailing the mechanics of the arrests and sentencing of the perpetrators, along with Alpert's return to normalcy, is relatively dry and slow, Alpert delivers an honest, vivid chronicle of the suspenseful event itself in the memoir's first half. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A federal attorney gets kidnapped off a Manhattan street. Stanley Alpert was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who braved the mean streets of New York and went on to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney mostly prosecuting environmental cases. On a cold night in January 1998, the day before his 38th birthday, he was kidnapped near his Manhattan apartment by a trio of armed hoods who targeted him because he looked like he had money. The book is Alpert's sober recollection of what followed, neatly cleaved into halves labeled "Mouse" and "Cat." His kidnappers were three youths: a pair of gun-toting thugs who went by Ren and Sen, and their leader, a self-impressed type named Lucky. Blindfolded, Alpert was driven out of Manhattan and deposited at an apartment that he believed to be in Brooklyn. As the obviously amateurish kidnappers debated how to get money out of "Stan" (they were interested in emptying his bank account), he amassed details about the location and biographical information about the men and their teen prostitutes. Alpert kept his cool, impressively sustaining a mix of authority and deference until he was finally let go on the edge of Prospect Park with a $20 bill for his troubles. The "Cat" half of the book, in which Alpert is reunited with his worried friends as a brigade of feds and cops mobilize with lightning speed to catch the crooks (using information he provided), is less thrilling than the first. If Alpert presents the facts dryly, what's appealing is that he does not oversell his bravado. He knows in the end that, as skillfully as he manipulated his captors (they were eventually caught and prosecuted), he was lucky to survive; most kidnappings end with a corpse. This is practically a textbook outlining how to behave in a similar situation. Stark and honest. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The view from inside the trunk of a car is delivered in this harrowing, first-person account of kidnapping, robbery, and revenge. Alpert, who now heads his own law firm, worked for 13 years as an assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. On January 21, 1988, the eve of Alpert's thirty-eighth birthday, he was snatched from a Greenwich Village sidewalk by a carful of thugs, blindfolded and held at gunpoint, and taken to a Brooklyn apartment where his captors tried to figure out how to profit from their big catch. This story is told in two parts, effectively giving a satisfying narrative arc to Alpert's complex ordeal: the first part is Mouse, recounting Alpert's victimization; the second part is Cat, in which Alpert pursues his former captors. A street-smart prosecutor, Alpert delivers an unflinching look at the humiliating, terrifying role of the victim, lacing his plight with commentary on contemporary crime and the creaking judicial system. The second part reads as compellingly as the first and with every bit as much suspense. An effective, one-two punch of a memoir. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2006 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In the 1970s, muggings in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Alpert, a federal prosecutor, grew up were so frequent that they followed a shorthand script ("Yo, lend me a dime"). The racial tensions of that era form the backdrop for Alpert's account of his ordeal as the victim of a kidnapping that took place in 1998, on the night before his 38th birthday. Grabbed at gunpoint in Greenwich Village by three toughs who demanded his A.T.M. password and took $800 from his account, Alpert was then held overnight at the apartment of an associate of the kidnappers in preparation for a half-baked scheme to compel him to withdraw $50,000 from his bank the next day. The night was by turns harrowing and farcical; his captors' friends came by to eat McDonald's takeout, smoke pot and have sex in the presence of the blindfolded, terror-stricken prisoner. Alpert remained acutely alert during his captivity, psychologically manipulating his kidnappers and noting every feature of his surroundings to help investigators should he survive. The rest of his tale, a more conventional police procedural, is something of an anticlimax, though well served by his litigator's sense for dramatic pacing and the telling detail. And throughout, Alpert wins over the reader the same way he did the kidnappers, with the force of his canny, self-assured, bighearted personality.
Library Journal Review
Federal prosecutor Stanley got a "birthday party" he'll never forget when he was kidnapped by thugs who were after his ATM and credit cards, blindfolded, and held for over 24 hours on the eve of his 38th birthday. Though familiar enough with street crime from his days as a Brooklyn boy, Alpert was an environmental litigator, not a criminal prosecutor, and was unprepared for this random and terrifying encounter. Still, his quick mind and courtroom experience stood him in good stead: he spent much of his time memorizing details of his surroundings and absorbing hints dropped by his captors, clues that would help the police immeasurably in their search for the kidnappers. For all its inherent drama, the book is slowed down considerably by Alpert's repeated injections of other biographical information. More judicious editing might have given this harrowing story more punch. Recommended for public libraries.-Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.