Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves.

Convictions: A Prosecutor's

Battles Against Mafia Killers,

Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves

By John Kroger

Assistant U.S. attorneys typically enjoy a lot of leeway and a low profile as they prosecute some of the country's biggest cases. But John Kroger laments the fact that the job can be so under the radar that, here and there in this well-written and exhaustively researched book covering his career as an AUSA, he often has trouble finding people who know what it is AUSAs actually do. Kroger became a superstar while he worked for the Justice Department, prosecuting bigtime criminals and making over 1,000 court appearances. But not even his own mother really understood what he did for a living, or for whom--she told people he was a district attorney.

Kroger became an AUSA in 1997, after graduation from Yale and Harvard Law. Almost immediately he started prosecuting mob operatives with such requisite amusing names as Sal "The Hammerhead" Cardaci and "Joey Brains" Ambrosino. He opens the book by describing the box of bones on his desk belonging to a former mobster, and the fear he felt awaiting his first guilty verdict.

An enormously able writer, he details the day-to-day life of a federal prosecutor, telling not only his own story--what he did, who he talked to, and how he made his decisions--but those of the people he tried in court. He so candidly explains both his good moves and his bad ones that the reader is treated to watching him turn into an experienced prosecutor before their eyes. Convictions also offers well-crafted portraits of everyone from Bill Clinton--working with him was like "walking at the side of a master"--to emotionally stunted and Shakespeare-quoting capos.

Kroger admits that prosecuting mob thugs led to a bit of paranoia in his personal life--"when I turned the key in my door, I always expected an explosion"--but he finds the fraud perpetrated by white collar Enron criminals like Andrew Fastow, in some ways, even more objectionable than those of mafia murderers. But the distaste he felt over his team's prosecution of Fastow's wife Lea for tax evasion, which threatened to send her to prison at the same time as her husband and the couple's two young sons to foster care, triggered him to re-evaluate his career altogether. Soon after, he fled for the safety of a professorship at Lewis & Clark College, which offered time to think, have a life, and write a great book about what it's like to be a federal prosecutor.

Convictions is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and available at www.fsgbooks.com in hardback for $27.