Stanley N. Alpert - The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival

This book is all true, nonfiction. The quotes during the kidnapping are re-created from what actually happened and are obviously not a perfect transcript, though every event described in those quotes and the rest of the book really happened just as I tell it. Where the quotes seem the most outrageous or funny they are closest to actual, direct quotes, according to my memory. Descriptions of events that occurred where I was not present and some of the dialogue in connection with those events are re-created based upon interviews with the people involved. The details of the investigation are based on police reports, interviews with NYPD detectives and FBI agents, interviews with witnesses, videotaped confessions, and court records. The records directly confirm a good deal of the kidnapping details that I relate from memory. Where opinions are expressed, that is what they are. Many of the names, particularly last names, have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Street addresses have been changed, as well. The names of the detectives and agents are real.

I want to thank my agent, Ron Goldfarb, for seeing the value in this book and inspiring me to finish it. Thanks to the people at PutnamNeil Nyren, Ivan Held, Susan Allison, and Michael Barsonfor their decision to publish this book and the genuine human concern they exhibited about what I had experienced, and to Neil Nyren for his wonderful and incisive edits.

I n New York City, 1998, crime was down, but not out, as I was to learn the night before my thirty-eighth birthday. All the experts agreed that it should have gone the other way. My case should have been handled as a homicide.

Blindfolded, I could hear the leader of the gang pulling duct tape off a roll, the sound framed by a bitter night wind that filled the open trunk of the car where my body was headed. I sat in the backseat on the hump, a gangsters right leg pressed to my left, another gangsters leg pressed to my right, each jabbing a pistol at my chest. I had no idea why God had done this to me, and I felt definite I was about to meet him and find out.

Maybe it shouldnt have been a big surprise. I grew up in New York in the 1970s, and things had been a little unbalanced then: Vietnam, drugs, race riots, and crime, crime, crime. My grandparents and great-grandparents had sailed to America for streets rumored to be paved with gold, but for me, Brooklyn had had streets paved with land mines. Getting off the bus on my way home from a high school night out, I would have to steel my nerve and sharpen my senses, praying that no figures would emerge from an alley or behind a parked car, knives unsheathed, faces gripped with determination, those with less taking little from me. I cant tell you how many times I ran, fought, or gave up a few bills to buy the bastards off.