Customer Reviews

Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1975 Edward Lazar was murdered in a Mafia hit in a parking garage in Phoenix. Ed Lazar was murdered to prevent his testimony before a grand jury investigating the rampant land fraud and political and institutional corruption existent in Arizona in the 70's. His son Zachary was 6 at the time, and EVENING'S EMPIRE is his history of his father's life.
I don't like to describe much of the plot in a review, but I will say that the book is a fascinating and quick read which features, besides Ed Lazar, a vast assemblage of con men, mobsters, and crooked cops and state officials.

As Lazar does not actually remember any of the incidents he writes about, what he has done is to exhaustively research his father's life by means of court records, interviews, newpaper clippings and more, and then on the framework of the facts - which are extensive - flesh out his father's life and death based on the reasonable conclusions he draws as a result of the factual material. So what the reader gets here is part true story, part novel.

And the result is terrific. Zachary Lazar - just an outstanding writer - has created a story that crackles with amorality, cynicsm, tension, and murder, even as, at the same time, the emotional importance of his father to the author is abundantly clear.
I loved EVENING'S EMPIRE and would recommend it any and everyone.

Non-Fiction is one of those great categories for a book. While minor liberties may be taken to fill in the blanks, ultimately a story will either succeed or sink based upon the way the facts are communicated. EVENING'S EMPIRE succeeds in a big and hauntingly satisfying way.
The author has taken a crucial event in his life (the mob hit death of his father) and through research and FBI records and the memories of family and friends explains how a seemingly ethical CPA, husband, and father managed to get involved with crooks, politicians, and mobsters in a huge real estate scandal. The resulting book is a deftly handled account of greed, ambition, and what can happen when it all goes terribly wrong.

Author Zachary Lazar writes about the life and death of his father Edward, a man who died when his son was five years old. The actual details of land fraud and swindling are really interesting, but to this reader, the author never fully explained his father's role in the titling, retitling, mortgaging and repossession of Arizona land. Was Edward Lazar an innocent shmuck who got swindled by men he thought were his friends and business partners, or was he an active participant in these crimes? His father's life was ended with five bullets placed into the back of his head - a mob-style execution, after he agreed to testify against his former friends and business associates.

The author's style of writing is engaging, descriptive and highly memorable. I especially liked the part about actor Cesar Romero being hired as a spokesperson for the Verde Lakes housing development, which turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The description of the prospective buyers arriving in a fleet of vans, having no idea that they were about to be swindled or oversold on a property that was too unstable to ever be developed for residential use. Every consumer should read Chapter 7, in which the methods of the salesmen are described in great detail, customers they described as 'Mickey Nothings' and 'Johnny Zeroes.'

The author also does an excellent job of capturing the time and place of the story - Arizona in the 1960's and early 1970's, when real estate developers wore bolo ties and cowboy hats, taking on a role, playing a game, even though most of them were born somewhere other than Arizona.

Ed Lazar was a young CPA living in Phoenix in the 1960's. He was married to Susie and they had two children - a boy named Zachary and a daughter named Stacey. Things seemed to be going along okay for the young couple, but Ed was restless and wanted more.

Hoping to grab the brass ring, Ed becomes involved with Ned Warren, a less-than-desirable character in land deals. Ned has a shady past, including some jail time for fraud. It turns out the land deals were more like Ponzi schemes and over-run with fraud. When investigators start closing in, Ed decides to cooperate and testify against his former business partner, Ned.

Ed refused protection and testified before the grand jury. His testimony went fine and he was told to come back a week later. He never made it - he was found brutally murdered in a parking garage stairwell the day before he was to testify again.

Ed son's Zachary was six at the time and doesn't really remember his father or anything about the events. In a search to know his father, he spent countless hours researching the events that led up to his murder. Evening's Empire is the result of all of his research.

I really do understand Zachary Lazar's motivation for researching and writing this book, but it just didn't work for me. I found the details of the land fraud schemes confusing and dry reading. There were so many people mentioned that it was just impossible to keep up with who all of them were. Most of the book is told in the third person, but every once in a while, it would change to first person for a short period and I found that confusing. I think there's a good story in all the land fraud in Arizona at the time, but for me, Evening's Empire wasn't it.

ISBN 0316037680 - Simply as a human being, it's easy to understand what would motivate someone to write a book like this. A parent who died when you were a child is a loss you're going to feel forever; for that parent to have been taken from you by violence has to leave a hole and a lot of questions, especially for a young child who was probably shielded from the details at the time.

Ed Lazar's murder in the 1970s is only the end of hard-to-understand events. Described as a fun-loving, quiet family man and accountant, Lazar hardly seems like the kind of guy who would throw himself into illegal activities with enough fervor to bring the wrath of the legal system and the Mafia down on his head. Still, that's exactly what appears to have happened as, on the eve of his grand jury testimony, he is silenced. More than thirty years later, his son returns to the story to find out more about what happened to his father.

Seeking answers and understanding is probably the most normal of responses to the murder of a parent - putting that quest out in book form is a step beyond and it's a step most people never take. I don't come away from this book entirely sure of author Zachary Lazar's purpose in taking that step. Two reasons come to mind and I discard making money, if only because that's distasteful. That leaves me with the suspicion that the reason is to paint a different public picture of his father to replace the "criminal accountant" image of three decades ago. The problem with this is, and Lazar might not be aware of it, that few people had ever heard of Ed Lazar, so few people had a negative opinion of him. This book simply throws more light on him and - because there is so little here - leaves him looking more like a criminal participant than before I opened the book.

As a genealogist, I can understand how hard it is to build a picture of a person whose life ended before yours really began. For that reason, I can appreciate the need to bolster the story with obviously made-up conversations and events. Lazar has taken people and known facts and drawn on the known to create details that seem in character and in keeping with the facts to flesh out the story. The disclaimer for this is hidden away, in tiny print, on the copyright page: "The events in this book are based on my research of what happened to my father over thirty years ago. Where the record was incomplete, I have written what I think might have taken place." This turns out to be the reason that I don't really like this book - the majority of it has the feel of being made of whole cloth and there are few reference points (articles, testimony, etc) to anchor it in reality.

The writing style is easy to read, if periodically awkward. The author veers, now and then, from telling a tale to being a part of it. It's not hard to follow, it's just awkward because it's a bit random. Had Lazar chosen to write the story of his own journey, it would probably have been a superb read. It might have cost him more in personal pain, but the payoff for the reader would have been tremendous. That might sound callous, but that's sort of the point - books are for readers. This book feels like it's for the author.

- AnnaLovesBooks

At the beginning of Evening's Empire, Zachary Lazar tells us that he will attempt to reconstruct the events that led to his father's murder as an attempt to "get to know" who his father was. This is ironic to me, because after reading the book, I feel that this was the one thing Lazar did not do. We get a mildly interesting story of real-estate fraud, political corruption, and the mob, but not about who our main character was.

Here's what we do find out: Ed Lazar was a CPA who was naive and probably just a bit too hungry for money. (As Zach Lazar says on page 117, "...Ed could see the limitations of his own scruples... At times, they seemed to constitute a kind of failure." Lazar went into business with Ned Warren, a powerful "real estate man" from Phoenix, and together they sell titles to land that doesn't exist. (This is not the problem it would seem given Warren's well-connectedness to folks in state government and, as we find out, to the mob). When some straight officers begin to investigate, and the scheme begins to be uncovered (and the extent of it is uncovered to Ed Lazar), Lazar does what he can to remove himself as far as possible from the situation, offering to testify against Warren. Predictably, he dies before this testimony happens.

The reason I subtract two stars from my review is simply that our main goal - to find out who Ed Lazar was and what motivated him - is never done, and it is quite odd to tell a story without elaborating on the main character. Because of that, the story - interesting as it may be - is a bit of an empty factual recounting. Why did Ed Lazar get involved? We are not sure. How much did he REALLY know about what was going on? We are not sure. What was his personality like? The son doesn't even try to piece together the father in this regard.

It is a shame, too. The book was written quite well, alternating between the author's use of the third-person narrative (referring to his childhood self as a character) and first-person reflections on the strange process of researching the murder a father you don't know well.

Had the characters been drawn well and the book not felt like a factual retelling bereft of detail, I may have given this book four or five stars. As it stands, I felt the book was average - not strong, not weak, but decent and forgettable.

Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, died when Zachary was only six years old. Just the mere fact of that loss would make for an interesting book. However, Edward Lazar was murdered - in a hit ordered by his former partner Ned Warren. How does a CPA get himself involved in that situation? Isn't it all just crunching numbers and income tax forms. Why would he even need to testify at a grand jury against his former boss?
Apparently for Edward Lazar, the answer was no. He got involved with a huge land fraud scheme in Arizona. The same lots of land were sold over and over to different customers. Some of the lots weren't even inhabitable, but that didn't stop Ned Warren from performing this type of fraud.
Zachary Lazar decided to try to figure out the bits and pieces of his father's life. He does that the hard way - by immersing himself in police reports and recollections of "old friends". I admire that he had the guts to tell this story as it isn't very pretty. No one wants to think of a parent mixed up in a huge fraud. There's a lot of things that go on in the shadows of life that probably remain in the shadows - especially when it has to do with your parents.
Zachary Lazar manages to make some sort of sense of this huge web of lies. It's difficult to judge whether Edward Lazar was just a patsy being played or he was fully involved with all aspects of the land fraud. But it is a very interesting book about how a family gets destroyed by corruption, even just by being around it.
There are no neat tie ups at the end, but that's because it's based on a true story and all of us know things don't tie up neatly in real life. Despite that or maybe because of that, I recommend this book highly.

Unlike a Whodunnit, this book lays out early whodunnit, why they did it and how it was done. Lazar then fills in the details through exhaustive research and interviews put into dialogue. It must have been gut wrenching for Zachary Lazar to research and reconstruct the events that led to his father' murder. The last chapter describing the murder lacked the bloody details some may seek but the outline was sufficient to bring home the horror of the last few minutes of Ed Lazar's life.

It is a little difficult to feel much sympathy for Ed's financial predicament after he was a willing partner with his murderer in schemes to ripoff retirees and small developers by selling some land they didn't own or useless parcels totally unfit for development. The lure of easy money was Ed Lazar's downfall as it could be with any of us who say, in Ed's words, "I've grabbed the brass ring..." when he entered a partnership with his future assassin.

Besides the personal side of the story, Mr. Lazar has built a strong indictment of law enforcement and regulatory agencies of that time (any time?) who look the other way while incredibly obvious scams unfold all around them - witness Bernie Mayoff and the SEC.

Be prepared to work a little to sort through the large cast of characters and the alphabet soup of storefront corporations designed to confuse any dilligent regulator of the time and contemporary readers. The effort is worth it.

Zachary Lazar's father was Ed Lazar, an accountant who was killed by hit men in Phoenix in 1975. This book is an attempt by Zachary to examine the crime as well as get to know his father better. Zachary has few memories of Ed because he was only six when his father died. As you might expect, he gets a bit obsessed with the crime the more he delves into it.

Ed's biggest mistake was going into business with con man Ned Warren. A notorious criminal who masterminded land fraud deals, Warren ordered the hit on Ed when he learned his former accountant was going to testify. The book is best at depicting Arizona in the 1970s--a corrupt, greedy place that provided the perfect place for Warren's criminal activities.

At times the book is confusing. It's difficult to keep track of the land deals and the who's who of criminals. However, overall, the story is fascinating, gripping, and poignant.

Evil doesn't go around looking repulsive. Instead it seduces with comradery, charm and excitement. Or it will sidle up to you in the guise of a mentor deeply interested in promoting your success. But it is not a protege that is sought, it is prey.

This is what happened to respectable middle-class accountant Ed Lazar in the mid-1970's during the Phoenix boom years. Ed Lazar was recruited by real estate "investor" Ned Warren and in a few short years went from young hopeful to paper millionaire and then even more swiftly to alarmed suspicious employee. His painful extrication from the Warren empire culminated in his grand jury testimony indicting Warren for land fraud. Days before his second testimony he was executed by the mob. Only forty years old he left behind a wife, daughter and six year old son, Zachary.

Bewildered by his father's death and grappling with the blank space left by his absence young Zachary begins asking questions. His father led an unpretentious life not the easy glamour of a high rolling con artist. Clearly intelligent, how could his father be so easily duped? Was he a hapless stooge, a carefully chosen fall guy, or another corrupt member of the Warren complex?

Difficult questions to ask and to answer as Zachary retells his search in this short readable biography. Along with gaining a rudimentary understanding of money laundering and real estate scams he must also confront how much danger there was on the periphery of his father's association with Warren and how much brutal violence is the underpinning of what we often see as sanitized white-collar crime.

At the same time as he is gaining a working understanding of how the underworld operates he is piecing together the personality of his father from a patchwork of interviews, site visits, police reports and newspaper articles. Given the emotional closeness of the author and the difficulty in pulling such disparate sources into a cohesive story the writing is sometimes choppy. Additionally the tone may read as a bit detached for those expecting the melodrama of the typical crime show with its comforting characterizations and easy moral solutions. The author must have had to pull back just to find the guts to finish the search. His dad was hooked up to the kinds of folks you never want your loved ones to ever meet. Taking all of this in could not have been easy and I found the tone an authentic extension of the author's actual experience.

Zachary Lazar kept it real unadorned and uncomfortable to read because this kind of story should make us uncomfortable. I commend him not only for taking the journey but also for sharing it. A good read for true-crime afficionados and also for those interested in questions of evil because what happened to Ed Lazar can only be classified as pure wickedness.