Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves.

• Position: Book review

Convictions: A Prosecutor's

Battles Against Mafia Killers,

Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves

By John Kroger

Assistant U.S. attorneys typically enjoy a lot of leeway and a low profile as they prosecute some of the country's biggest cases. But John Kroger laments the fact that the job can be so under the radar that, here and there in this well-written and exhaustively researched book covering his career as an AUSA, he often has trouble finding people who know what it is AUSAs actually do. Kroger became a superstar while he worked for the Justice Department, prosecuting bigtime criminals and making over 1,000 court appearances. But not even his own mother really understood what he did for a living, or for whom--she told people he was a district attorney.

Kroger became an AUSA in 1997, after graduation from Yale and Harvard Law. Almost immediately he started prosecuting mob operatives with such requisite amusing names as Sal "The Hammerhead" Cardaci and "Joey Brains" Ambrosino. He opens the book by describing the box of bones on his desk belonging to a former mobster, and the fear he felt awaiting his first guilty verdict.

An enormously able writer, he details the day-to-day life of a federal prosecutor, telling not only his own story--what he did, who he talked to, and how he made his decisions--but those of the people he tried in court. He so candidly explains both his good moves and his bad ones that the reader is treated to watching...