The First Ward II: Fingy Conners & The New Century - Paperback

by Richard Sullivan (Author)

The Ultimate Anti-Hero Was In Fact An Actual Historic Figure: Fingy Conners. But a forgotten and discredited actual hero, James "Big Ben" Parker, is deprived his due.

African American James "Big Ben" Parker stood in line to meet President William McKinley, unknowingly waiting directly behind McKinley's assassin Leon Czolgosz. Parker jumped on Czolgosz, driving him to the ground and helping disarm him before the President's secret service detail could react. Praised initially, within days his story has been re-written to remove him totally from his valorous interception.

Deprived of the very enterprise that initiated his vast fortune after his loss to laborers in the infamous Scooper's Strike of 1899, Fingy Conners sets out on a path of retribution: scorched-earth revenge on the entire city of Buffalo by way of destroying its economy and upending its multi-million dollar investment in the construction of the 1901 Pan American Exposition. Fingy schemes to control the entirety of the grain shipping and milling trade by moving the entire business out of the country to Montreal, where he enjoys dual citizenship. However, Alderman John P. Sullivan has an ace up his sleeve: his wife's powerful Canadian cousin.

Based on actual events and the real people who drove them, The First Ward II: Fingy Conners and The New Century documents the rivalry between dock-walloper-turned-multi-millionaire politician Fingy Conners and two brothers who emerged from the Buffalo Orphan Asylum to claim political power: Alderman John P. Sullivan and Buffalo Police Detective-Sergeant James E. Sullivan. Their lives intersect with the giants of their day; world champion boxing hero cousin John L. Sullivan, humorist Mark Twain, Presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and publisher William Randolph Hearst.

Interwoven amid the drama are details surrounding the challenging construction, and ultimate triumph, of Buffalo's 1901 Pan American Exposition, followed in 1907 by the most successful Old Home Week ever held in the US-which doubled the city's population-bringing the past vividly to life.

Author Biography

Embarking on his writing career at age 15 as news editor of his high school newspaper, Richard Sullivan's first serious venture into the world of journalism came at age 18 as an undercover reporter in Toronto at the height of the Vietnam War, where he posed as a draft dodger in order to document the plight of the thousands of young Americans who had fled there. At age 19 he joined up with the Clyde Beaty-Cole Bros. traveling circus for an expose on the social order within that world, then at age 20 hitch-hiked his way around Europe for three months on a budget of only $500, ending up in a Polish hospital suffering from dysentery during the apex of communism. With no money to pay the bill, the hospital staff opened a window, turned their backs, and listed Sullivan officially as "escaped". Sullivan completed 55 extensive photojournalism assignments for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine and 13 for Los Angeles Magazine. In 1987 he traveled to Veracruz for the Wall Street Journal at the invitation of the European engineers constructing Mexico's Solo Palma nuclear power plant, which was being built with bastardized and discarded materials. In 1992 he was awarded his first exhibition as an artist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the following year won the American Airlines Travel Journalism Award for his Hawaii photo-guidebook, Driving & Discovering Oahu. In 1997 he repeated that success with Driving & Discovering Maui & Molokai. Both books are updated with each printing and continue to be steady sellers to this day. Reclaim Your Youth, published in 2009, was the product of twenty-five years in the world of fitness and bodybuilding. The First Ward Volume I, Sullivan's first novel, was published in 2011, followed by Volume II, Fingy Conners & The New Century, in 2012.