“To the ruling class, Larry Davis is society's nightmare, a horror-film monster who keeps coming back every time you think you’ve put him away for good. But to the powerless, Davis is a resistance fighter ... ”

“Sinatra remained white America’s last completely satisfying definition of masculine style — to somewhat disconcerting effect, let me add”

Until he started shooting himself in the foot with great regularity, Giuliani benefited from an elegiac media reception of a kind not seen in this town since the salad days of Thomas E. Dewey

“One could use that 18 1/2-minute buzz on the June 20 babble session with Hank Haldeman as a sound track for a Kenneth Anger movie which would be titled 'Nixon Sinking.' ”

“To judge from what the President said, any hint of lawlessness can be redeemed if undertaken unselfishly for patriotic reasons. It's an argument that would have warmed Nazi hearts at Nuremberg.”

“The truth of a time and place is, of course, always illusive; but no historian can tell the story of Miami in the last decade without acknowledging one gigantic fact of municipal life: cocaine.”

“His office’s apparent mishandling of solid BCCI leads is fair crit­icism of him whether he did or did not know about it: he missed a golden opportu­nity to examine the so-called Bank of Crooks and Criminals”

"Since October 1985, rock has been attacked from city halls, statehouses, fundamentalist pulpits, and the executive echelons of the FBI."

The fundamental question about the Koch administration is no longer why the mayor gave power to so many crooks, but exactly what happened years ago when whistleblowers, law enforcement investiga­tors, and private citizens first tried to warn him