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Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob
Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob
Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob
Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob

Written by Matt Birkbeck

Narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

Sammy Davis Jr. lived a storied life. Adored by millions over a six-decade-long career, he was considered an entertainment icon and a national treasure. But despite lifetime earnings that topped $50 million, Sammy died in 1990 near bankruptcy. His estate was declared insolvent, and there was no possibility of it ever using Sammy's name or likeness again. It was as if Sammy had never existed.

Years later his wife, Altovise, a once-vivacious woman and heir to one of the greatest entertainment legacies of the 20th century, was living in poverty, and with nowhere else to go, she turned to a former federal prosecutor, Albert "Sonny" Murray, to make one last attempt to resolve Sammy's debts, restore his estate, and revive his legacy. For seven years Sonny probed Sammy's life to understand how someone of great notoriety and wealth could have lost everything, and in the process he came to understand Sammy as a man whose complexity makes for a riveting work of celebrity biography as cultural history.

Matt Birkbeck's serious work of investigative journalism unveils the extraordinary story of an international celebrity at the center of a confluence of entertainment, politics, and organized crime, and shows how even Sammy's outsized talent couldn't save him from himself.

A HarperAudio production.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateSep 16, 2008
ISBN9780061702495
Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob
Author

Matt Birkbeck

Matt Birkbeck is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of Deconstructing Sammy, The Quiet Don, and A Deadly Secret. He is also the executive producer of the hit Netflix film Girl in the Picture, which is based on his books A Beautiful Child and Finding Sharon. A former newspaper reporter and correspondent for People magazine, he’s also written features for Reader’s Digest, Playboy, The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Boston Magazine, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania.

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