Books - Douglas Century

Split Decision

Life Stories

Award-winning actor, rapper, and producer Ice-T unveils a compelling and astonishing memoir of his early life robbing jewelry stores until he found fame and fortune—while a handful of bad choices sent his former crime partner down an incredibly different path.

Ice-T rose to fame in the late 1980s, earning acclaim for his music before going on to capture television audiences as Odafin “Fin” Tutuola in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But it could have gone much differently. In this gripping and candid memoir, Ice-T and Spike, his former crime partner—collaborating with New York Times bestselling author Douglas Century—relate the shocking stories of their shared pasts, and how just a handful of decisions led to their incredibly different lives.

Both grew up in violent, gang-controlled Los Angeles neighborhoods and worked together to orchestrate a series of jewelry heists in LA and across the US. But while Ice-T was discovered rapping in a club and got his first record deal, Spike was caught for a jewel robbery and did three years in prison. As his music career began to take off, Ice made the decision to leave the criminal life; Spike continued to plan increasingly ingenious and risky jewel heists. And in 1992, after one of Spike’s robberies ended tragically, he was sentenced to thirty-five years to life. While he sat behind bars, he watched his former partner rise to fame in music, movies, and television.

Harrowing, timely, and thoughtful, two men with two very different lives reveal how their paths might have very well been reversed if they made different choices. All it took was a Split Decision.

The Last Boss of Brighton

Boris "Biba" Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America

Boris Nayfeld, a.k.a. “Biba,” is the last living boss of the old-school Russian mob in America, and he’s survived to tell it all. Filled with sex, drugs, and murder, Biba’s story is a mind-boggling journey that took him from petty street crime in the USSR to billion-dollar embezzlement in America.

Born in Soviet-era Belarus, abandoned by his parents in infancy, Biba’s brutal upbringing left him hungry for more–more power, control, and money. Taking advantage of the rampant corruption in the Soviet Union, Biba’s teenage hooliganism quickly turned into bolder “black cash” rackets, making him, by Soviet standards, a very rich young man. When authorities took notice and threatened him with “the supreme measure”– execution by firing squad–he managed to get out of the USSR just in time.

Within months of landing in America, his intimidating presence and street smarts quickly made him legendary in the Soviet émigré community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and launched him to the top of New York’s Russian Jewish mob, one of the world’s most inventive, powerful and violent criminal organizations. After decades as a globe-trotting boss, and three stints in U.S. federal prisons he remains unbroken and unrepentant, even as his entire life has unraveled around him.

Now seventy-four years old, Biba is a lion in winter. Douglas Century vividly brings the notorious gangster to life in these pages, telling not only his epic journey but also the history of the Russian mob in America.

Hunting El Chapo

Taking Down the World's Most Wanted Drug Lord

Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century’s sensational investigative high-tech thriller chronicles a riveting chapter in the twentieth-century drug wars: the exclusive inside story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that captured El Chapo—the world’s most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the law for more than a decade.

In 2006, fresh out of the D.E.A. Academy, Hogan heads west to Arizona where he immediately plunges into a series of gripping undercover adventures, all unknowingly placing him on the trail of Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a Forbes billionaire and Public Enemy No. 1 in the United States. Six years later, as head of the D.E.A.’s Sinaloa Cartel desk in Mexico City, Hogan finds his life and Chapo’s are ironically, on parallel paths: they’re both obsessed with the details.

In a recasting of the classic American Western on the global stage, Hunting El Chapo takes us on Hogan’s quest to achieve the seemingly impossible, from infiltrating El Chapo’s inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt with an elite brigade of trusted Mexican Marines—racing door-to-door through the cartel’s stronghold and ultimately bringing the elusive and murderous king-pin to justice.

This crime story following the relentless investigative work of Hogan and his team unfolds at breakneck speed, taking the reader behind the scenes of one of the most sophisticated and dangerous counter-narcotics operations in the history of the United States and Mexico.

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INDIGO

Street Kingdom

Five years inside the Franklin Avenue posse

Century’s debut book, Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse (Warner Books) was described by Publishers Weekly as “a heady mixture of reportage and memoir . . . at once mesmerizing, humorous and tragic.”

Novelist Richard Price wrote of Street Kingdom: “Putting his heart and mind (and sometimes his ass) on the line, Douglas Century has yielded that most elusive of journalistic treasures—something very close to the truth.”

Street Kingdom is currently in development by Conquering Lion Pictures as a feature film with Century and award-winning director Clement Virgo co-writing the screenplay.

Barney Ross

The Life of a Jewish Fighter

Century’s Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter, was published by NextBook Press and the Knopf Group in hardcover in 2006 and in trade paper in 2009.

The first biography of Barney Ross, the world’s lightweight and welterweight boxing champion in the mid-1930s and a decorated Marine Sergeant who earned a Silver Star at the Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II, the biography received widespread critical acclaim.

“This is an excellent story of a man and his times” wrote Bert Randolph Sugar in The New York Times Book Review. “And proof positive that time does not relinquish its hold over men or monuments. In a sport devoted to fashioning halos for its superstars, Ross wore a special nimbus, and this book properly fi ts him for that.”

Ice

A memoir of gangster life and redemption from South Central to Hollywood

In 2011, Century was the co-author, with iconic hip-hop artist and actor Ice-T, of Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood, published by Random House/One World.

The Associated Press called the book, “as cool as its namesake. . . a fascinating memoir, the pages of which are jam-packed with tales of a guy who actively did everything I rhymed about.”

The New York Times Book Review saw the book as the embodiment of “hip-hop’s Horatio Alger” myth: “Ice-T in short, is someone hip-hop might have invented if he hadn’t invented himself,” reviewer Baz Dreisinger wrote. “A goes-down-easy mélange of memoir, self-help, and amateur criminology. Ultimately, Ice showcases an eminently reasonable, positively likeable guy, the gangsta rapper even a parent could love.”

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Takedown

The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire

Rick Cowan was a young NYPD detective in 1992 when he dropped by a Brooklyn waterfront warehouse to investigate a recent fire bombing-only one in a string of interviews he considered routine. But what he found there was far from routine, for it would take him on a five-year odyssey and nearly cost him his life. In fact, he had stumbled upon the lead of a lifetime-the suspicion that he might unearth the hard evidence police and federal agencies alike had been chasing for decades: the proof of collusion among the mob families to extort billions from the nation’s most influential corporations that call New York their home.

Featuring eccentric, larger-than-life New York characters and an undercover cop on the brink of being discovered-and murdered-at every step, Takedown is a riveting real-life procedural and one of the most important investigative books of the season.

The book was a finalist for the 2003 Edgar Award in the category of Best Nonfiction Crime Book.

As read by actor Christopher Meloni, Takedown was also a finalist in the Audie Awards for the best audio book of 2003.

Brotherhood of Warriors

Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in one of the World’s Most Elite Counterterrorism Units

Century recently coauthred a popular military memoirs: Brotherhood of Warriors: Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in one of the World’s Most Elite Counterterrorism Units, a Los Angeles Times bestselling memoir of former Israeli Special Forces operative Aaron Cohen, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in April 2008.

If Not Now, When?

Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in one of the World’s Most Elite Counterterrorism Units

Century coauthored the memoir of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Jack Jacobs: If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice In America’s Time of Need, published by Penguin in October 2009, with a foreword by NBC Nightly News anchor and managing editor Brian Williams.

The Dark Art

A highly decorated veteran DEA agent recounts his incredible undercover career and reveals the shocking links between narcotics trafficking and terrorism

What exactly is undercover? From a law-enforcement perspective, undercover is the art of skillfully eliciting incriminating statements. From a personal and psychological standpoint, it’s the dark art of gaining trust—then manipulating that trust. In the simplest terms, it’s playing a chess game with the bad guy, getting him to make the moves you want him to make—but without him knowing you’re doing so.

Edward Follis mastered the chess game—The Dark Art—over the course of his distinguished twenty-seven years with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he bought eightballs of coke in a red Corvette, negotiated multimillion-dollar deals onboard private King Airs, and developed covert relationships with men who were not only international drug-traffickers but—in some cases—operatives for Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Shan United Army, or the Mexican federation of cartels.

Follis was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind the agency’s radical shift from a limited local focus to a global arena. In the early nineties, the DEA was primarily known for doing street-level busts evocative of Miami Vice. Today, it uses high-resolution-optics surveillance and classified cutting-edge technology to put the worst narco-terror kingpins on the business end of “stealth justice” delivered via Predator drone pilots.

Spanning five continents and filled with harrowing stories about the world’s most ruthless drug lords and terrorist networks, Follis’s memoir reads like a thriller. Yet every word is true, and every story is documented. Follis earned a Medal of Valor for his work, and coauthor Douglas Century is a pro at shaping and telling just this kind of story. The first and only insider’s account of the confluence between narco-trafficking and terrorist organizations, The Dark Art is a page-turning memoir that will electrify you from page one.

No Surrender

A Father, a Son, and an extraordinary act of heroism that continues to live on today

Part contemporary detective story, part World War II historical narrative, No Surrender is the inspiring true story of Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville-born enlistee who risked his life during the final days of World War II to save others from murderous Nazis, and the lasting effects his actions had on thousands of lives—then and now.

World War II has been covered so extensively that there’s little left to add to the broader narrative. What remains are many personal stories—well-written accounts of a soldier’s or sailor’s daily life, often retold by their sons, daughters or grandchildren—that give us a deeper understanding of the men who did the grunt work to defeat the Axis Powers. The best to come out recently is “No Surrender” by Chris Edmonds and Douglas Century.

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Under and Alone

The true story of the undercover agent who infiltrated America's most violent outlaw motorcycle gang

In 1998, William Queen was a veteran law enforcement agent with a lifelong love of motorcycles and a lack of patience with paperwork. When a “confidential informant” made contact with his boss at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, offering to take an agent inside the San Fernando chapter of the Mongols (the scourge of Southern California, and one of the most dangerous gangs in America), Queen jumped at the chance, not realizing that he was kicking-starting the most extensive undercover operation inside an outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement.