Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History

As a child, Helene Stapinski lived in a Jersey City apartment above the Majestic Tavern, a dive where her uncle Henry, the neighborhood bookie, ran numbers. Trying to stay a few steps ahead of the police but arrested three times, Henry lived in fear that his phone lines were tapped. And Helene counted him as one of her most upstanding family members. In a voice so true and unique that you know you're in the hands of a born writer, Stapinski recounts the epic drama of growing up surrounded by family members who lived and died by the maxim that it's far better to take than to pay. The dinner Stapinski's mother put on the table was swiped from the cold-storage company where her father worked. The toothpaste they used was lifted by a friend who worked in the Colgate factory. The books on their shelves were smuggled out of a book-binding company in Aunt Maryann's oversized girdle. And there were darker deeds in the family past -- a cousin gunned down by police, a great-grandmother murdered by her husband. The Mafia, the Catholic Church, toxic waste, the DMV, and corrupt local officials are all part of this sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking family history, a story as polluted as the Jersey City air. Stapinski tells an extraordinary tale that, unlike the swag of her childhood, is her very own.