King of the Sunset Strip

"Mr. Stevens's own personal L.A. Confidential. A great visit back to the L.A. of the 1950s, with all the gangsters, punch-outs, honeys, hey-hey, and Tinseltown landmarks you could want. A time long gone but, luckily, not forgotten. Recommended!" —Norm Stringer, True Crime Ink"Stevens's startling account of his friendship with Mickey Cohen and his boys brings you face to face with '50s Tinseltown, its glittering surface and its darkest corners. With rich detail of Hollywood and its great hangouts, you are there in the di, smoke-filled interiors brushing past Burt Lancaster, Sanfra Dee, and Frank Sinatra. Irresistible!" —Laurie Jacobson, author of Dishing Hollywood: The Real Scoop on Tinseltown's Most Notorious Scandals"A struggling actor meets the mob in the person of Mickey Cohen, and he allows his fascination with The Life to nearly do him in. But he relates his experience with sardonic humor of a survivor who 'lived to tell the tale' and now would do well to turn it into a screenplay." —William J. Helmer, author of Baby Face Nelson and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre"Vividly written and packed with shocking disclosures. King of the Sunset Strip delves in to the dark side of the Hollywood story and exposes a world in which seeing the light is followed by savage retribution or death." —Rose Keefe, author of The Man Who Got Away: The Bugs Moran Story and Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O'Banion, Chicago's Big Shot Before Al Capone"This story unfolds like a work of well-written fiction. Unfortunately for Stevens, life wasn't imitating art. What the youthful Stevens experienced [was] the unfolding realization that he had been seduced into a world of fear and danger. [His] period of experimentation with the mob became a 'psychosocial moratorium' or a coming-of-age story unique in the literature of true crime." —;M.K. Gustinella, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, forensic evaluator for Orange County Superior Court