In 1992, Vicky Gallas opened escort services in Orlando, Florida. Two years later she became the focus of an intense criminal investigation that resulted in her arrest in late 2001, and subsequent jury trial. With her fighting spirit and her unwillingness to buckle under an unrelenting pattern of intimidation, the author became the only owner of an escort service in the United States brought to trial on organized crime charges and found innocent.

In this hard-hitting memoir, Gallas reveals how racketeering and organized crime charges were brought against her based on evidence so flimsy that agents and prosecutors could not get a wiretap or a warrant to search.

The real story begins in early 1993, with the discovery of blocks on escort service telephone lines in Orlando area resort PBX systems during large convention bookings. The author unknowingly walked into the middle of one of the biggest ongoing conspiracies in US history, and as she discovered, the blocks began in the late 1980s and were not isolated to the Orlando area, but were also transpiring in Las Vegas and later in numerous other US cities. Though there have been civil suits filed in Nevada and federal courts over the blocks by other victims of the conspiracy, to this day the practice has evolved and continues unabated by the powerful group that concocted the conspiracy so long ago. The real story is the relentless pursuit of Vicky Gallas by powerful people with so much to lose if the truth were to be exposed.

For anyone fascinated with the foibles of our criminal justice system, the sensational Orlando connection, and how escort services really work, this is a must-read book. 

Author Website

John Kennedy was President when five young men, one of them white, sat in at a downtown New Orleans lunch counter. The same five sat in at the Tulane University cafeteria three months later. The University didn’t change its “whites only” policy, nor did Woolworth’s, but in May 1961, the Parish School Board announced they would open the Orleans public school system “a grade at a time” to children of all races.

Wood came to New Orleans on his motorcycle looking for adventure. The first night, he crashed a hotel wedding reception, hustled a Bourbon Street strip joint, was swept up in a police raid, got a part-time job as an animal caretaker, and met the women of his dreams–all three of them.

For a quarter of a century, Professor Mason lived in New Orleans hiding from life. All he wanted was to protect his daughters, though he didn’t know how to begin. For Mason as well as Wood, the integration movement is an intrusion, at best scenery glimpsed from a passing train. For Barcus, a long-time political operative, the sit-ins represent opportunity, a chance to serve as a well-paid “consultant” and to bestow patronage. His friendship with Leonard Zellner, the white boy who sat in among the blacks, was an explainable embarrassment. His pursuit of Little Hamilton, a biological imperative. But when Leonard’s life is threatened and Little Hamilton thrown in jail, Barcus has to choose. Projected on the proscenium of this novel of character development are a sit-in at a five and dime, a meeting of the Congress on Racial Equality, students lounging about the Tulane Cafeteria, Leander Perez lecturing at the Civic Auditorium, a Citizen’s Council fund raiser in the Garden District, and Wood and Maggie in the back seat of a borrowed car.

Questing Marilyn: In Search of My Holy Grail, Personal Growth Through Travel, takes readers on a uniquely personal Quest to sacred and historical sites in England and Ireland.

You will visit

• Stonehenge
• Avebury
• Glastonbury
• Bath
• Tintagel
• Kilkenny
• Dublin
• and other favourites of travellers

I confront how what I was taught to believe influences my life as an adult.

• Explore myths and legends.
• Question beliefs.
• See how group dynamics provoke relationship issues.
• Learn life skills.
• See how I create a plan that allows me to experience deep joy and satisfaction.
• Experience how my change in energy brings me new experiences in rich and marvellous ways that might appear to be coincidences.
• Readers feel they are present on the journey.

“The most important message of this book, however, is the introduction of travel as a tool towards self-exploration and self-acceptance. Often, due to the busyness and chaos of daily life, individuals don’t have the luxury or time to truly understand who they are and what they want from life. However, during a vacation, normal routines and responsibilities can be temporarily forgotten. Thus, vacation time is the perfect time to reflect on these very personalized aspects of one’s life, how he or she feels about that life, and what they need to do to make his or herself happy. Moreover, this analysis need not take place in Britain or Ireland. In fact, where the reader’s quest starts and ends is completely unique to that individual.” Tami Brady M.A., Co-Dean of the School of Religion and Spirituality, archaeological consultant, freelance writer, Calgary, Alberta. www.tcm-ca.com

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A year ago, Diana decided to return home, get a teaching credential, and work with kids as mixed up as herself. Going through the boxes in the garage, the stuff her family had been lugging around for as long as she could remember, she found a record of another dropout from another generation. Her father’s Berkeley Barb articles were in those boxes, along with some short-story attempts, and the responses to Aimai Cristen’s ad in the Barb’s personal column. She wanted to discuss them. Her professor father was reluctant, afraid where their discussions might lead.

” Young attractive girl, 24, searching for love, compassion, joy from a man who can provide financial security. Write Aimai Cristen, Barb Box 3689, Barb Office, 1234 University Ave, Berkeley CA 94709.”

An odyssey through the late 1960’s from L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium to Berkeley and Altamont, this novel describes a daughter’s search today for her father and herself. 

Agreeing to spy for the Confederacy, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a bilingual McGill student, survives the Battle of Baltimore to join the hundreds of correspondents who have flocked to Washington to report on the forthcoming War Between the States.
A balloon ride brings him to Bull Run.  Appalled by the carnage among the green troops on both sides, he follows a Confederate deserter into the hills of Kentucky where he meets the young Protestant girl who will later become his wife.
Rested, he resumes his mission, spying on the disposition of the Union troops at Mill Run and Shiloh.  Assigned to report on holes in the Union Naval Blockade, he travels down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then across the Southern States by train through Mobile, Macon, Savannah, and Charleston.
Captured at Chancellorsville, he is sent to the Federal prison at Point Lookout.  Once he is free, he heads for home, riding to New York with a trainload of draft protestors.
The man who returns to Montreal, hardened by travel, war, and the constant need to live by his wits, is far different from the boy who left. 

Amusing and entertaining nostalgic incidents from the life of planters: Tea and Coffee, between 1959 and 1992 and covering NE India(Dooars and Assam)and Papua New Guinea.Planters and their families lived in remote areas of the country where they made their own entertainment and lived lavish lives in large bungalows.The Managers were considered minor Gods by the labor who held them in high esteem.A Managers word was ‘law’ and incontrovertible.

At the finale of his critically acclaimed first memoir, In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker has found his paradise at the end of the road in outback Central America (Pavones, Costa Rica), and is working of the screen adaptation of the book, commissioned by Sean Penn and a major Hollywood studio. Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is the story of Weisbecker’s paradise, its underbelly, his fall from grace with the powers that be in Hollywood and the publishing business, plus the near loss of his life due to the writing of the book; he exposes a double murderer and, more dangerously, the love of his life as a sociopath. Interwoven through the various catastrophes that test him on every level, are Weisbecker’s reflections on the process of writing the book itself and the nature of nonfiction. Weathering his after-writing throes, writer’s queasy gut, and hemorrhaging forehead (from staring at the blank page), Weisbecker maintains his sanity and perspective through his wry, sometimes wildly funny take on his own fears and flaws, and through retreat into the purity of the simple act of riding a wave.

“As his sanity, health and existence are simultaneously mangled, Weisbecker somehow manages to solve a murder, wrestle the dark side of paradise, and wind up on multiple third world hit lists… Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is a necessity for anyone who believes truth is indeed stranger than fiction… an entrancing, thoughtful and darkly humorous calamity.”

–Surfer Magazine

“Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is a writer’s book about writing. And when I say writer, I mean Writer. I’ve already compared Weisbecker’s writing with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s, and now I’m going to compare it to Mark Twain’s. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is a Writer. Mark Twain is a Writer. And Allan Weisbecker is a Writer.”

–James Maclaren, Ink 19 Magazine