The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival

On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, a chilly January night in 1998, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanley Alpert was feeling pretty lucky. On the way home in a New York City subway, he heard a pretty woman talking about work for the United Jewish Appeal, and when the guy accompanying her got off the subway, Alpert struck up a conversation. He mentioned his own UJA connection, and before they separated, he had arranged to invite her for tea some subsequent night. He was feeling good as he walked home in the Village, and may have been so preoccupied with his good fortune that he did not use the training he had developed in his Brooklyn upbringing to "crane my head every which way, prepared to run for my life at the sign of danger." He was five blocks from his home when he felt a tug on his right elbow from behind; from nowhere had come a short, stocky black male, who insisted that Alpert not say a word and just get in a nearby car. An automatic machine gun emphasized the need to obey. And obey he did, for the subsequent harrowing 26 hours. Alpert tells the story of his kidnapping and its outcomes in _The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival_ (Putnam), a scary, intense, and often surprisingly comic recollection. Alpert lived to tell the tale, and to see justice done, at least partially because he kept his wits about him and probably more just as a matter of sheer luck. His experience with criminals and with reading the New York papers had supplied him with the conventional wisdom that "you should never get in the car with the robbers, because if you do you'll never be heard from again." The gun he had seen, however, made any attempt to resist seem very foolish, and once in the car he was informed that it would be used on him "if you do anything stupid". From the beginning, Alpert took whatever limited steps he could to play his role in a smart fashion. When he revealed the extent of his finances (no sense lying since they had the cards and could run a check), his captors were impressed: "What do you _do_ for a living, Stanley?" and this got the answer, "Well... uh... you really kinda picked up the wrong guy. I'm an Assistant U.S. Attorney." They are interested that he is a lawyer, but more amazed that he has such money and no car. And no wife or girlfriend or kids at age thirty-eight. "Stanley, man, you mean you are thirty-eight years old and you don't have a car and you're not married and no kids... What the hell have you been doing?" Alpert had thought about this subject already, plenty, and replied, "You should talk to my parents. They're wondering, too." Again, he wanted to humanize himself, and to show some self-effacing humor, and it worked: "They actually chuckled, mid-kidnapping." Another part of his self protection was allowing his "prosecutor's instincts" to take over. He was blindfolded, but he consciously reinforced memories that he knew would help if a prosecution ever took place, memories like names, steps in st

A great read. If you live in New York City or in Fargo you will want to read this book. It would make for a funny movie.

Worlds collide here. The Federal prosecutor in control of the facts, deft at putting on his witnesses, craftily dismantling defense witnesses on cross-examination with yes and no questions and cooly summing up and explaining to the jury as to how the government has met its burden of proving guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not in this book. In The Birthday Party, A Memoir of Survival, published by Putnam, Stanley N. Alpert, an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in charge of civil environmental enforcement, has his world turned topsy turvy one cold January night in 1998, the day before he was to turn thirty eight years of age. Mr. Alpert is abducted by three young African-American men while he is walking home at night to his Greenwich Village apartment, being shoved into the backseat of a brand new Black Lexus. Mr. Alpert's real life abduction is not related to his work as a Federal prosecutor as his friends and colleagues were later to speculate, but is unrelated to anything but the complete randomness of him being alone on a dark street and him being an easy pick. Indeed, if Mr. Alpert had not purchased chocolate chip cookies for himself and a potential date that he had met on the subway that night after coming home from yet another failed blind date he would not have been in the precise spot at the wrong time when he felt a tug on his elbow and was swept away into a world he could never know of. The plan was simple. The three gangsters, Lucky, the brains, and Ren, and Sen, the henchmen, their real nicknames, hatched the plot where they would force the victim to give up his ATM card with PIN and then withdraw monies from the victim's account. When Lucky found out that Mr. Alpert had more than $100,000 in his savings account they believed that this was going to be their big score. Because Mr. Alpert's ATM card limited withdrawals to only $1,000 per day, after withdrawing the monies that night they kept their prey and held Mr. Alpert as hostage in a Brooklyn slum apartment hoping to force Mr. Alpert to withdraw all of his savings the next day. Mr. Alpert was blindfolded with his scarf shortly after being kidnapped into the Lexus and remained blindfolded until his release 25 hours later. Mr. Alpert has now been converted from the prosecutor in charge to the victim with only one thing on his mind: survival. Mr. Alpert, a scholarly Jewish man, the son of a cantor, whose mother only wanted him to marry a nice Jewish girl, befriends them giving them legal advice and telling them about his own mischievous days growing up in Brooklyn, which are not really comparable to these gun-toting hoodlums. This is no friendly dance, however. The gangsters hold a machine gun to Mr. Alpert at all times, with Mr. Alpert constantly being reminded of who is in control by hearing the terrifying "click click" of the trigger of the gun as Lucky's henchmen play with their guns as little boys would play with water pis

This is a great book! yes, the story itself pulls at your emotions and yes there are Lessons. But we are here to buy books --or at least find out which ones to demand that the libary get--and I'd like to stick on point: this is a great book. it tells its story with energy and even if you know the ending (dead men write no books) I for one was pulled in every second, wanting to know How it happened and Why it Happened. Stanley Alpert delivers.

The writer was kidnapped by men with automatic weapons, forcing him into the backseat of a shiny new black Lexus. Money was stolen from the kidnap victim's bank account, and he was held at gunpoint, blindfolded for 26 hours. The writer survived a hellish living nightmare due to his own resourceful answers to kidnappers's questions. Reading his weighing of these answers is one of the MANY great parts of this book. Others are the vividness with which he portrays all the harrowing and terrifying and yes, comical moments of this crime. This is an unbelievable story (law enforcement did not even believe the story for a day or 2!) told unbelievably well.