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King Of The Gypsies

King Of The Gypsies

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Description for KING OF THE GYPSIES by Peter Maas:

Across the country today a father and a son ceaselessly track each other---with the death of one of them the predictable outcome. They are fighting for the leadership of the most violent of the sixty-odd gypsy tribes that roam modern America, unseen and unnoticed by the ordinary citizen.

There are perhaps a million or more gypsies here---nobody knows exactly how many, not even the government. They no longer live in horse-drawn caravans on dusty roads; they live in cities, drive cars, have telephones and credit cards. Yet they do not go to school, neither read nor write, don't pay taxes, and keep themselves going by means of time-honored ruses and arrangements. Gypsies themselves recognize the contrast they make, and they are proud of it: "All right," one old gypsy woman said, "it's true that we steal with the hands, but you Americans---"you" steal with the pencils."

In this gripping and dramatic book, Peter Maas unfolds the story of gypsy life today as it really is, and how gypsies come to terms with---or battle---the average American they scorn. Only slightly less astonishing than the facts which Mr. Maas records in his book---the bloody and sometimes hilarious warfare that marks the recent history of the gypsy clans, the amazing details on the ways of gypsy women fill the tribal coffers and gypsy children assist in classic "cons"---is the single fact that he got so much gypsy information in the first place, since gypsies make the Mafia seem like an open society in their fierce defense of the privacy of their centuries-old customs and taboos.

Peter Maas has assembled more than these facts, however. In KING OF THE GYPSIES he reveals the traumatic events that ensued when King Tene Bimbo, before his death in 1969 the most powerful and feared of gypsy chieftains, skipped over his many sons and bestowed his leadership on Steve Tene, the one grandson who had rejected the codified life style of gypsy society and was actively urging other young gypsies to do the same. This unprecedented development shook the gypsy establishment and pitted young Steve against this own father, who---enraged at being passed over---triggered a deadly clash whose passion and drama have yet to be played out.

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