Product Description

On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped off the streets of Manhattan. This is the story of what happened next. . . .

Alpert was taken by a carful of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card, but when they learned his bank balance the plan changed. They took him, blindfolded with his own scarf, to a Brooklyn apartment, with the idea of going to a bank the next day and withdrawing most of his money. But the later it got, the more the plan changed again . . . and again . . . as his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and, once they learned it was his birthday, offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present." All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, tried to figure out where their mood swings would take them next, and memorized every detail he could in the event that he ever managed to get out of there alive.

In the meantime, his friends and law enforcement colleagues, worried that they hadn't heard from him, launched a major police and FBI investigation. It, too, would take many twists and turns before it was done-and some of them would be very strange indeed.

Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, told not only from Alpert's memory and notes but from police reports, interviews with NYPD detectives, FBI agents, and witnesses, videotaped confessions, and court records, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller-but every word is true.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #500916 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
The Birthday Party [is] one of the most exhilarating, improbable New York stories ever told. -- New York Times, January 24, 2007

Alpert wins over the reader the same way he did the kidnappers, with the force of his canny, self-assured, bighearted personality. -- New York Times Book Review, April 22, 2007

Favorite Books of 2007 Nonfiction:

Alpert was kidnapped in 1998 in Manhattan after his 38th birthday party; his memoir of the experience is "like watching a slow-motion train wreck -- difficult to look at but impossible to turn away from." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 9, 2007

On Jan. 21, 1998, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanley Alpert is about to celebrate his 38th birthday. Coming home to his Greenwich Village apartment after a disappointing blind date, he becomes the target of a hapless gang of stupidly vicious punks who kidnap him, hoping to use his ATM card to gain access to his bank account.

"The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival" is not a funny book, although some of what happens in the course of the harrowing next 26 hours is funny. It may be hard to remember that in 1998 cell phones were far from ubiquitous and the horrors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks hadn't happened.

Despite the passage of time, however, I have no doubt that Alpert's recollection of those events and conversations, including the lame jokes, are entirely accurate. Life-changing experiences are often seared into memory, complete with details of sound, smell and taste that defy ordinary recall. And even though he eventually escapes from his captors and sees his assailants brought to justice, it is clear that Alpert continues to grapple with the disturbing effects of that violation.

Contrast is everything: We see Alpert's $70 Florsheims as opposed to the thugs' $130 Air Jordans. The punks drive a black Lexus. The lawyer doesn't own a car. Alpert and his captors are products of New York's mean streets. Alpert grew up as a nice Jewish kid in Brooklyn just as the safe, working-class neighborhood was changing to a gang- and drug-infested one. His parents divorced. His family was poor, and he grew up dealing with routine muggings. Ultimately, this impoverished childhood served as the catalyst to a desire to succeed and sent him in search of an education. His attackers see their backgrounds, ironically not all that different from Alpert's, as excuses for turning to lives of crime and drugs and as a justification for their stealing what Alpert has legitimately earned. "Hey, you have an education. You can always earn it back," one said.

In the face of his captors' terrifying threats, Alpert forces himself to remain calm. When the thugs threaten to harm his elderly father, the blindfolded hostage engages in a life-and-death game of mental chess to protect his family without inflaming his captors. Throughout the ordeal, he is faced with the very real understanding that his assailants have nothing to lose and that these may be his last few precious hours on this earth.

Anyone who has ever watched "Cops" knows that most crooks aren't geniuses. These bad guys here are no exception. Their schemes are violent, overblown and essentially stupid, but what's truly chilling is how young these perpetrators are, how devoid of any moral compass and how ignorant they are of how the world works. Their behavior is ultimately so bizarre (including offering their captive sex with one of their group's female members) and so puzzling (they let him go for no clear reason) that investigators don't believe Alpert's story.

At first they think that he made up the whole thing. But the clues Alpert manages to provide - part of a cell phone number, the pattern of tiles in a brownstone lobby and the name of a local deli - eventually provide enough information so that the kidnappers are found and brought to justice. Their videotaped interrogations and unwittingly damning confessions, rendered verbatim, are simultaneously incredibly arrogant and incredibly sad. These are young people who know not they know not.

Reading "The Birthday Party" is like watching a slow-motion train wreck - difficult to look at but impossible to turn away from. Alpert depicts good guys and bad guys in vivid detail, bringing into focus the motivations and backgrounds of both the perpetrators and the cops, FBI agents and district attorneys.

Those telling details - alternately funny, appalling, fascinating and scary - are the product of some hard-won wisdom on Alpert's part. That's the real gift he received on the occasion of his remarkably memorable 38th birthday. "The Birthday Party" is a good read, but it is also an object lesson. We all need to pay attention to it. -- Newsday, February 4, 2007

Stark and honest. -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review, November 1, 2006

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: A Memoir of Survival. By Stanley N. Alpert. (Putnam, $24.95.) 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. -- New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 22, 2006

Customer Reviews

How to Save Your Own Life
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.

Poorly written
I ordered this book after reading a great review in the New York Times and hearing him interviewed on NPR. Both of those were vastly better than the book itself. For this I do not blame the author who is not a writer by trade. I blame the publisher and editors. They couldn't help him out and make it less like a high-school essay? Stream his interview, its a lot more entertaining!

Gripping Tale NOT well told
Began this book with great anticipation, having read an extraordinarliy glowing review in the New York Times. Was somewhat shocked at how inferior the writing was, and how frankly unpleasant the author's personality was as it came through the narrative.

First, to give credit where it is due, the events described in the book, especially prior to the author's release from captivity, are inherently interesting, and the author acted with great courage and resourcefulness in a terrifying situation. That having been said, there was little else to like about the book or the author.

Mr. Alpert apparently thought he was channeling Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane. I could barely believe that in this day and age, I was actually reading a criminal's confession being described as, "singing like a canary." Alpert also tried to emphasize his toughness by describing a hardscrabble childhood that certainly does not match what I know of the middle class neighborhoods in Brooklyn where both he and I grew up.

Alpert showed a decidedly juvenile side to his personality. Like a teenager, he seemed to think that constantly using profanity lent his words and thoughts some extra measure of authenticity; to me, it was just gratuitous vulgarity. Similarly, I found it offensive to hear this highly educated 38 year old attorney refer to his female contemporaries as "girls" and even "chicks."

The author also could use a serious ego check. Yes, he deserved to be congratulated for his courage and aplomb, but it would have been nice if he had allowed others to do it instead of constantly doing it himself, as, for example, in describing how the NYPD was able to find the criminals so quickly because of his "incredibly detailed" description of the building where he had been held. Over and over, he would describe his strategy, and then, when it worked, commend himself on how brilliant it had been. His inflated sense of self-importance even led him to question whether the lawyer for the oil company he was suing (he headed the environmental litigation department of his office) was being sincere in expressing happiness that he had escaped unharmed; apparently, Alpert thought his legal skills were so unique that the lawyer on the other side would have preferred that he be killed rather than having to face such formidable opposition. Like many assistant US attorneys (of whom I have encountered many in my career), Alpert seems to believe that only he walks on the side of the angels and knows anything about the law.

Alpert also got on my bad side with his New York bashing. During his ordeal, his friends were unable to get into his apartment to check on him because he had refused to leave a spare key with his super; his explanation was that stories of apartment break-ins by building personnel with keys "were as commmon as mosquito bites in summer." Having lived in NY my entire life (nearly 60 years), and having always left spare keys with supers, as have pretty much all of the people I know, the only stories I have heard were of supers preventing water damage to apartments below by getting into locked apartments whose occupants had left the bathtub running before leaving.

All in all, if I were the author's parent, I would say to him, "Stanley, I love you, and you are brilliant, but don't get kidnapped again and don't write any more books."