Tangled Up in Blood

A review of Rich Cohen’s new book, ‘The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation’

Everybody’s got their favorites, the people whose work they will immediately consume upon arrival, no questions asked. I’ve got two: Bob Dylan and Rich Cohen. It seemed auspicious, then, that when I opened Cohen’s latest book, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, A Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation, on sale June 4, I found myself staring at a Dylan lyric:

“Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

It only gets better from there.

But allow me to back up for a moment. My first exposure to Rich Cohen came when I was asked to review Sweet and Low: A Family Story for Harper’s Bazaar in 2005. A perfectly balanced combination of family biography (Cohen is the disinherited grandson of Ben Eisenstadt, the founder of Sweet’n Low; it’s a long story) and the history of the artificial sweetener industry, I called it a “passionate if unforgiving chronicle of the Brooklyn family’s enormous wealth and eccentricities, the corruption, incompetence and scandal,” at the time. I’ve read almost every book he’s written since.