Word: carcaterra
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...Carcaterra then jumps forward a decade or so. He has become an aspiring journalist, and his friend Michael is now an assistant district attorney. Tommy and John, hardened by their abuse in confinement, are hired gunmen. One night, in a Hell's Kitchen restaurant, the two spot one of the guards who tormented them and shoot him dead, in full view of other patrons. After their arrest, Michael persuades the D.A.'s office to let him try the case. His superiors, of course, know nothing about his lifelong friendship with the defendants, and Michael does not tell them he plans...
Some of these suspicions arise naturally from Carcaterra's incredible first-person tale. He and his three best friends, so he says in the book, grow up in Hell's Kitchen, a working-class neighborhood on the West Side of midtown Manhattan. An adolescent prank in the summer of 1967 goes terribly amiss and causes serious injury to an elderly man. As a result, the four friends are sent to an upstate New York correctional facility for boys, where they are repeatedly raped, beaten and tortured, physically and mentally, by four sadistic guards...
...Carcaterra seems surprised that anyone would doubt that all this actually happened to him and his friends. "It's hurtful, in truth," he says. "When some people with nothing but their own opinions don't believe it, there is little you can do to combat them." At the same time, the author admits that nearly all the details in Sleepers are fictitious, intentionally altered to disguise his friends -- only the one he calls Michael, he says, is still living -- and Hell's Kitchen sources. "You have to change dates, names, places, people. The way they looked; you have to make...
...author thus dismisses objections from the Manhattan D.A.'s office that Michael, with only six months' experience there, could never have been assigned to a homicide case. Such nitpickers are missing the point. In reality, as opposed to the book, Michael was not a six-month assistant D.A., Carcaterra says, and he was not necessarily working in Manhattan either. "The what, where and when these things happened," he insists, "were not as important to me as the fact that they did happen...
...since Joe McGinniss began dreaming up things that Senator Edward M. Kennedy might have thought, in The Last Brother (1993), has there been such an elastic and accommodating definition of nonfiction as Carcaterra's. Truth matters, but it has nothing to do with petty details. An author who wanted to write about the Yalta Conference, say, but not about Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would remain equally true to the topic by naming the principals Larry, Curly and Moe and placing them in a Tijuana saloon...