The Boys from Biloxi: A Legal Thriller

by John Grisham

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The Boys from Biloxi continues to cement John Grisham as our preeminent storyteller when it comes to mysteries, thrillers, and court room dramas. He is always pushing us to examine all angles of the justice system. No one tells it better.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From “a legal literary legend” (USA Today) comes a gripping thriller of two childhood friends who find themselves on opposite sides of the law as adults, with all of John Grisham’s trademark twists and turns.

For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia.
 
Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends, as well as Little League all-stars. But as teenagers, their lives took them in different directions. Keith’s father became a legendary prosecutor, determined to “clean up the Coast.” Hugh’s father became the “Boss” of Biloxi’s criminal underground. Keith went to law school and followed in his father’s footsteps. Hugh preferred the nightlife and worked in his father’s clubs. The two families were headed for a showdown—one that would ultimately happen in a courtroom.
 
Life itself hangs in the balance in The Boys from Biloxi, a sweeping saga rich with history and with a large cast of unforgettable characters.

Don’t miss John Grisham’s latest novel, Camino Ghosts, and the upcoming Framed, his first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593469507
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/27/2023
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	18,120
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Grisham is the author of numerous #1 bestsellers, including The Firm, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Innocent Man, The Whistler, The Boys from Biloxi, and many more. His books have been translated into nearly fifty languages. Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system. He lives on a farm in central Virginia.

Hometown:

Oxford, Mississippi, and Albemarle County, Virginia

Date of Birth:

February 8, 1955

Place of Birth:

Jonesboro, Arkansas

Education:

B.S., Mississippi State, 1977; J.D., University of Mississippi, 1981

Website:

http://www.jgrisham.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

A hundred years ago, Biloxi was a bustling resort and fishing community on the Gulf Coast. Some of its 12,000 people worked in shipbuilding, some in the hotels and restaurants, but for the majority their livelihoods came from the ocean and its bountiful supply of seafood. The workers were immigrants from Eastern Europe, most from Croatia where their ancestors had fished for centuries in the Adriatic Sea. The men worked the schooners and trawlers harvesting seafood in the Gulf while the women and children shucked oysters and packed shrimp for ten cents an hour. There were forty canneries side by side in an area known as the Back Bay. In 1925, Biloxi shipped twenty million tons of seafood to the rest of the country. Demand was so great, and the supply so plentiful, that by then the city could boast of being the “Seafood Capital of the World.”

The immigrants lived in either barracks or shotgun houses on Point Cadet, a peninsula on the eastern edge of Biloxi, around the corner from the beaches of the Gulf. Their parents and grandparents were Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, as well as Croatians, and they had been quick to assimilate into the ways of their new country. The children learned English, taught it to their parents, and rarely spoke the mother tongues at home. Most of their surnames had been unpronounceable to customs officials and had been modified and Americanized at the Port of New Orleans and Ellis Island. In Biloxi cemeteries, there were tombstones with names like Jurkovich, Horvat, Conovich, Kasich, Rodak, Babbich, and Peranich. They were scattered about and mixed with those of Smith, Brown, O’Keefe, Mattina, and Bellande. The immigrants were naturally clannish and self-protective, but by the second generation they were intermarrying with the early French families and all manner of Anglos.

Prohibition was still the law, and throughout the Deep South most Baptists and Methodists righteously pursued the dry life. Along the Coast, though, those of European descent and Catholic persuasion took a dimmer view of abstinence. In fact, Biloxi was never dry, regardless of the Eighteenth Amendment. When Prohibition swept the country in 1920 Biloxi hardly noticed. Its bars, dives, honky-tonks, neighborhood pubs, and upscale clubs not only remained open but thrived. Speakeasies were not necessary because booze was so prevalent and no one, especially the police, cared. Biloxi became a popular destination for parched Southerners. Add the allure of the beaches, delicious seafood, a temperate climate, and nice hotels, and tourism flourished. A hundred years ago the Gulf Coast became known as “the poor man’s Riviera.”

As always, unchecked vice proved contagious. Gambling joined drinking as the more popular illegal activities. Makeshift casinos sprang up in bars and clubs. Poker, blackjack, and dice games were in plain view and could be found everywhere. In the lobbies of the fashionable hotels there were rows of slot machines operating in blatant disregard for the law.

Brothels had been around forever but kept undercover. Not so in Biloxi. They were plentiful and serviced not only their faithful johns but police and politicians as well. Many were in the same buildings as bars and gambling tables so that a young man looking for pleasure need only one stop.

Though not flaunted as widely as sex and booze, drugs like marijuana and heroin were easy to find, especially in the music halls and lounges.

Journalists often found it difficult to believe that such illegal activity was so openly accepted in a state so religiously conservative. They wrote articles about the wild and freewheeling ways in Biloxi, but nothing changed. No one with authority seemed to care. The prevailing mood was simply: “That’s just the Biloxi.” Crusading politicians railed against the crime and preachers thundered from the pulpits, but there was never a serious effort to “clean up the Coast.”

The biggest obstacle facing any attempts at reform was the longtime corruption of the police and elected officials. The cops and deputies worked for meager salaries and were more than willing to take the cash and look the other way. The local politicians were easily bought off and prospered nicely. Everyone was making money, everyone was having fun, why ruin a good thing? No one forced the drinkers and gamblers to venture into Biloxi. If they didn’t like the vice there, they could stay home or go to New Orleans. But if they chose to spend their money in Biloxi, they knew they would not be bothered by the police.

Criminal activity got a major boost in 1941 when the military built a large training base on land that was once the Biloxi Country Club. It was named Keesler Army Airfield, after a World War I hero from Mississippi, and the name soon became synonymous with bad behavior from tens of thousands of soldiers getting ready for war. The number of bars, casinos, brothels, and striptease joints increased dramatically. As did crime. The police were flooded with complaints from soldiers: rigged slots, floating roulette, cheating dealers, spiked drinks, and sticky-fingered prostitutes. Since the owners were making money they complained little, but there were plenty of fights, assaults on their girls, and broken windows and whiskey bottles. As always, the police protected the ones who paid them, and the jailhouse doors revolved with GIs. Over half a million of them passed through Keesler on their way to Europe and Japan, and later Korea and Vietnam.

Biloxi vice was so profitable that it naturally attracted the usual assortment of characters from the underworld: career criminals, outlaws, bootleggers, smugglers, rumrunners, con men, hit men, pimps, leg-breakers, and a more ambitious class of crime lords. In the late 1950s, a branch of a loose-knit gang of violent thugs nicknamed the Dixie Mafia settled in Biloxi with plans to establish their turf and take over a share of the vice. Before the Dixie Mafia, there had always been jealousy among the club owners, but they were making money and life was good. There was a killing every now and then and the usual intimidation, but no serious efforts by one group to take over.

Other than ambition and violence, the Dixie Mafia had little in common with the real Cosa Nostra. It was not a family, thus there was little loyalty. Its members—and the FBI was never certain who was a member, who was not, and how many claimed to be—were a loose assortment of bad boys and misfits who preferred crime over honest work. There was no established organization or hierarchy. No don at the top and leg-breakers at the bottom, with mid-level thugs in between. With time, one club owner managed to consolidate his holdings and assume more influence. He became “the Boss.”

What the Dixie Mafia had was a propensity for violence that often stunned the FBI. Through its history, as it evolved and made its way south to the Coast, it left behind an astonishing number of dead bodies, and virtually none of the murders were ever solved. It operated with only one rule, one hard-and-fast, cast-in-stone blood oath: “Thou shalt not snitch to the cops.” Those who did were either found in ditches or not found at all. Certain shrimp boats were rumored to unload weighted corpses twenty miles from shore, into the deep, warm waters of the Mississippi Sound.

In spite of its reputation for lawlessness, crime in Biloxi was kept under control by the owners and watched closely by the police. With time, the vice became roughly concentrated into one principal section of town, a one-mile stretch of Highway 90, along the beach. “The Strip” was lined with casinos, bars, and brothels, and was easily ignored by the law-abiding citizens. Life away from it was normal and safe. If one wanted trouble, it was easy to find. Otherwise, it was easy to avoid. Biloxi prospered because of seafood, shipbuilding, tourism, construction, and a formidable work ethic fueled by immigrants and their dreams of a better life. The city built schools, hospitals, churches, highways, bridges, seawalls, parks, recreational facilities, and anything else it needed to improve the lives of its people.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for the novels of John Grisham
 
“John Grisham is about as good a storyteller as we’ve got in the United States these days.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“In all of Grisham’s best books . . . the reader gets good company, a vigorous runaround and . . . a bit of a legal education.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“Grisham’s books are smart, imaginative, and funny, populated by complex, interesting people.”—The Washington Post
 
“The law, by its nature, creates drama, and a new Grisham promises us an inside look at the dirty machineries of process and power, with plenty of entertainment.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“John Grisham owns the legal thriller.” —The Denver Post

From the Publisher

In true Grisham style, this audiobook has a rich historical background, which narrator Michael Beck weaves through its tale of deceit, betrayal, and murder. Two boys, Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco, grow up as friends in 1960s Biloxi, Mississippi. They remain friends until their teen years when Keith’s father becomes a well-known prosecutor and Hugh’s father becomes the biggest gangster in town. Beck’s narration brings the red-hot flavor of Mississippi culture to life for listeners. His Southern accent is deliciously warm and inviting, and every character he plays is distinct. He delivers humor with outstanding rhythm and timing. This is another expertly performed novel that Grisham fans won’t want to miss. E.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2023 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

2022-09-14
Friends turn foes in this Mississippi mix of courtroom and crime.

In 1960, 12-year-olds Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco are Little League fast-balling all stars and great friends in the Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, Mississippi. They’d love to make it to the big leagues one day, but alas, this story isn’t Field of Dreams. The lads’ lives diverge dramatically: Keith studies hard at Ole Miss, becomes an attorney, and sets up a law practice, while Hugh thrives in a seedy underworld of strip joints, honky-tonks, prostitution, and “unchecked vice” along “the poor man’s Riviera.” The Category 5 Hurricane Camille flattens Biloxi in 1969 and gives Keith many clients from cheated insurance policyholders. Unfortunately, Camille doesn’t clean up the local underworld so much as rearrange it. So Keith decides to run for district attorney and put criminals behind bars. At first, corrupt county sheriff Fats Bowman isn’t worried. “Need I remind you,” he tells his gang, “that the graveyard is full of politicians who promised to clean up the Coast?” But he and Hugh soon feel the heat from Keith, and they fight back hard. Plenty of murders stoke the story’s engine, naturally leading to courthouse scenes where the author excels. But how far will Hugh Malco go to keep Biloxi dirty and profitable? He wouldn’t try to hurt his old pal, would he? This is a multigenerational tale also starring Keith’s and Hugh’s fathers, Jesse and Lance. Perhaps because the novel spans decades, a lot of material feels like summary—readers quickly learn that many residents are of Croatian descent, and there are barely enough mentions of Black people to acknowledge their existence. The interpersonal dynamics make the story, because attentive readers will suss where the plot is going from a country mile away. For one thing, it’s a straight line save for one humongous surprise. But the author is always an engaging storyteller even when he could add another twist or two.

Not vintage Grisham but still a worthy yarn.

Kirkus Reviews