Godfather of Night

What if you belonged nowhere and to no one? What if you learned as a teenager that the father who had mistreated you for years wasn’t your father at all–and that you were actually born to the mistress of a Greek gangster? And what if the only way to connect with your real father was to become his fiercest rival?

Kevin Cunningham grew up in Tarpon Springs, Florida, just another kid from the wrong side of the tracks. But from his first days, Kevin gravitated toward power, and in Tarpon Springs that meant local crime boss Lukie Pappas. As a boy, Kevin hung out at the Pappas Restaurant, and he saw how the townspeople approached Lukie. How they respected him. How they came to him for help. How they called him nounos–Greek for “godfather.” From the shadows, Kevin admired it all.

When he turned seventeen, Kevin’s world flipped upside down. His dying father confessed that Kevin was the son of another man–and not just any man. He was the son of Lukie Pappas. Suddenly, Kevin’s destiny was clear. His lineage became his fate. His rightful place was beside the Greek godfather who ruled his hometown.

But Lukie coldly rejected him, as both a son and a colleague. Fueled by rage and pride, Kevin claimed the Pappas name as his own and embarked on his own criminal enterprise. From two-bit swindling he rose quickly to high-stakes drug trafficking. Money laundering, gunrunning, and racketeering polished his underworld résumé, even as they placed him squarely in the crosshairs of every federal agency with three initials and a most-wanted list. And when he got caught, Kevin’s time behind bars only honed his criminal instinct, hardened his resolve, and cemented his reputation as a larger-than-life outlaw who sometimes went down but could never be taken out.

Still in his early twenties but as powerful as any crime boss, Kevin surrounded himself with an elite group, a posse that called itself the Band of Five. Flush with fast cars, boats, planes, and women, they wanted for nothing, but their antics invited violent attempts to bring Kevin to his senses–or at least to his knees.

More than a gripping tale, Godfather of Night unveils the Greek American crime syndicate and its close alignment to power and takes readers to a dark place where family secrets collide with high-level crime and corruption. Kevin Pappas’s story is a true-crime epic for a new generation of wiseguys–full of the harrowing war stories and hard-won wisdom of a man who lived by his own rules, broke everyone else’s, and dared the world to try to stop him.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Title of ebook: Godfather of Night
ISBN: 9780345515186
parent-ISBN: 9780345512239
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Pages: 256
Published: 08-2009
Released online for download: 08-11-2009
Author of eBook: Pappas, Kevin

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Godfather of Night

A Greek Mafia Father, a Drug Runner Son, and an Unexpected Shot at Redemption
Chapter One

I grew up in Tarpon Springs, Florida, during the 1970s. Twenty miles from Tampa, the town looks like a quaint tourist spot from the outside, but in reality it’s controlled, from the docks to the courthouses, by Greek immigrants and their descendants. My name was Kevin Cunningham—an outsider in the heart of Greektown.

If you walked out of my house, turned right, and went down two city blocks over the cobblestone streets, you came to the church. Every Sunday morning starting at about seven you heard this chant that started “Na na na na . . .” coming over the loudspeakers, the sound bouncing off the waterways so the whole town heard it. It was the old priest singing the church hymns. It’s like when you go to Egypt or Morocco and they have the Islamic call to prayer. But this was the Greek version.

The next block over from my house was the Smyrlis Bakery, and the smell of bread would come through our open wind ... read full excerpt from: Godfather of Night ebook

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