Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski

Five-Finger Discount is a combined family and personal memoir by a reporter from Jersey City, focusing on the criminal activities of her forebears and extended family tree, as well as how she became a reporter and, more or less, came to write this book at the end of the last century.

Helene Stapinski mostly works in chronological order here, starting with her grandparents and great-grandparents - though anchoring most of her chapters in her personal experiences, starting when she was very young and her grandfather threated to kill her entire immediate family - and eventually getting to her own career in the last fifty pages or so of the book.

She's got a reporter's eye and a reporter's pen, pulling out lots of specific details and focusing on the most interesting/strange/surprising elements of each story, both the ones she lived personally and the ones she pulled out of newspaper morgues and family legends.

I read it because I'm from Jersey myself - though not the same end of it, and definitely not the same kind of family. My people are much WASPier, and from various bits of Upstate New York. We're from older waves of immigrants, mostly English and German - Stapinski had the kind of family with a clear Polish side and Italian side.

Apparently there is a recent documentary based on this book, which I haven't seen and didn't know existed until I started typing here. But it's the kind of thing that could turn into a movie, all sepia-toned mugshots and swirling newspaper headlines and voiceovers from everyone still alive.

Now, Stapinski came from a big family, and I don't think it was all that crooked. One lightly murderous grandpa - who was stopped before he could actually kill any family members, though there are legends about other less-lucky people - a father who regularly brought home things that "fell off the back of a truck," a cousin who ran the numbers for decades, a great-aunt who was politically connected but seems to have been as honest as any Jersey City politician ever was, and so on. It's a parade of interesting stories, but, against the background of dozens of other people who didn't go to Harvard Law and then get disbarred for misusing client funds, or killed by police during a standoff after a robbery, it's probably only a slightly more crooked family than most. Maybe not even that much. Just out in public more, maybe.

So this is an entertaining run through about a hundred years of local scandals - probably not local to you, and not super-local to me, but you know what I mean. Stapinski reasonably connects her family to a lot of other activity - Jersey City was famously corrupt for fifty-plus years of the last century - and tells a bunch of good stories along the way. Her personal life is probably the least compelling bit, but that's what makes it personal, and wraps it all up in the end.