A Criminal Injustice: A True Crime, a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankleff (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Jay Salpeter (Author)
Key Phrases: nefarious scoundrels, tom spota, paper jumpsuit, Suffolk County, Marty Tankleff, Jerry Steuerman (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

When he went to bed on the night of September 6, 1988, seventeen-year-old Marty Tankleff was a typical kid in the upscale Long Island community of Belle Terre. He was looking forward to starting his senior year at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School the next day. But instead, Marty woke in the morning to find his parents brutally bludgeoned, their throats slashed. His mother, Arlene, was dead. His father, Seymour, was barely alive and would die a month later. With remarkable self-possession, Marty called 911 to summon help. And when homicide detective James McCready arrived on the scene an hour later, Marty told him he believed he knew who was responsible: Jerry Steuerman, his father’s business partner. Steuerman owed Seymour more than half a million dollars, had recently threatened him, and had been the last to leave a high-stakes poker game at the Tankleffs’ home the night before. However, McCready inexplicably dismissed Steuerman as a suspect. Instead, he fastened on Marty as the prime suspect–indeed, his only one.

Before the day was out, the police announced that Marty had confessed to the crimes. But Marty insisted the confession was fabricated by the police. And a week later, Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California under an alias. Yet the police and prosecutors remained fixated on Marty–and two years later, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to fifty years in prison.

But Marty’s unbelievable odyssey was just beginning. With the support of his family, he set out to prove his innocence and gain his freedom. For ten years, disappointment followed disappointment as appeals to state and federal courts were denied. Still, Marty never gave up. He persuaded Jay Salpeter, a retired NYPD detective turned private eye, to look into his case. At first it was just another job for Salpeter. As he dug into the evidence, though, he began to see signs of gross ineptitude or worse: Leads ignored. Conflicts of interest swept under the rug. A shocking betrayal of public trust by Suffolk County law enforcement that went well beyond a simple miscarriage of justice. After Salpeter’s discoveries brought national media attention to the case, Marty’s conviction was finally vacated in 2007, and New York’s governor appointed a special prosecutor to reopen the twenty-year-old case. At the same time, the State Investigation Commission announced an inquiry into Suffolk County’s handling of what has come to be widely viewed as one of America’s most disturbing wrongful conviction cases.

As gripping as a Grisham novel, A Criminal Injustice is the story of an innocent man’s tenacious fight for freedom, an investigator’s dogged search for the truth. It is a searing indictment of justice in America.

About the Author

Richard Firstman is an award-winning author and journalist whose books include The Death of Innocents, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Edgar Award winner co-authored with his wife, Jamie Talan. He has written for numerous publications, and his work as a producer has appeared on 60 Minutes. He was previously a reporter at large and an editor at Newsday.

Jay Salpeter, a highly decorated former New York City police detective and hostage negotiator, is one of the country’s top private investigators. His work has led to frequent appearances on Dateline, 48 Hours, MSNBC, Fox News, and Court TV (now truTV). In 2008, he co-founded the Fortress Innocence Group, the nation’s first private investigations firm devoted to overturning wrongful convictions.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 594 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (December 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345491211
• ISBN-13: 978-0345491213
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #198,957 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thriller, a whodunit, a mystery - only it's real, January 4, 2009

By	Denise "A Good Reader" (Long Island, New York) - See all my reviews

Got the book on New Year's Eve. Finished it last night at 1:30 am. Over the four days, I took breaks in between for meals and a New Year's Eve party and sleep. Other than that, I could not do anything else but read it. It's compelling, astonishing, riveting. Every thinking person on Long Island should know how a young boy's 17 years were stolen away and how the real murderers of Arlene and Seymour Tankleff just got away with it. Wow.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not guilty., January 5, 2009

By	T. Brady "Teri Brady" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished reading this book over the weekend and thought it was well-written and answered some of the lingering questions I had about the case. The majority of the book deals with the original trial and the events leading up to the murders, the history of the Suffolk County Homicide Squad, and the appeals. The last third consists of what happened when Jay Salpeter took over the case.

What I found most interesting was Arlene Tankleff had become a very active partner in her husband's business interests and was putting pressure on her husband to collect on Jerry Steuerman's enormous debt, and also things weren't going well with Seymour's business interests so there was a renewed sense of urgency on Seymour's end to collect on the debt. Among one of the more interesting interviews was with Frank Olivetto, a doctor who was at the poker game, and Myron Fox, Seymour Tankleff's attorney. The surviving relatives do not paint Marty as a perfect child, they do concede that he was very spoiled, but was always close with his parents and not capable of killing them.

In the section regarding the trial something jumped out from Norman Rein's testimony that is very telling. He states that in one point in the interrogation room that Tankleff suddenly went into "stream of consciousness" talking about his family. This is more consistent with someone who is in shock, not the business like demeanor described by James McCready. The author also does a good job describing what the rationale was amongst the jurors, and based on interviews with the few jurors who spoke to the media, they completely disregarded much of the physical evidence or misinterpreted it, so it's easy to see why they reached a guilty verdict

**Note to any potential buyers: I would read the review from David Kirshner with a huge grain of salt. The the article he wrote is debunked in the book as nothing more than two friends horsing around. As a matter of fact the father of the friend in question, Chris Pellegrino, wound up hiring an attorney because James McCready wouldn't leave his son alone, and was trying to pressure the boy into saying he felt threatened.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You Don't Have To Be From Long Island To Love This Book!, January 27, 2009

By	Ellen Sue (New York City) - See all my reviews

A Criminal Injustice is the most exciting, intelligent, compelling, well-written true crime book I've ever read (and I've read a lot of them). I don't know how they did it but the authors, Richard Firstman and Jay Salpeter, have somehow streamlined a complex case of murder, a coerced confession and unjust incarceration into a real page-turner. It doesn't matter that you may know how it ends, there are details here and major developments that still come as a surprise. It has all the elements of a great novel but is, of course, stranger than fiction. Can't wait to see the movie!