Sleepers, Paperback/Lorenzo Carcaterra

Paperback edition of this compelling true story. Four boys growing up in New York's violent West Side are sent to a reform school when a prank goes disasterously wrong. They are subjected to twelve months of systematic mental, physical and sexual abuse. Ten years later one of the boys is a journalist (the author), one is a lawyer and two are killers for the mob. The last two stumble on one of their torturers and shoot him dead and their friends undertake an audacious plan to get them acquitted and instead put their persecutors on trial. Powerful stuff indeed.