When Frank’s accountant comes up dead and one of the Minna Men is arrested for the crime, Lionel begins to suspect he knows little about the dimensions of Frank’s criminal enterprises. Lionel then turns to a pair of wiseguys, two old school Italian gangsters for whom Frank worked, but they offer little help. Her answers are evasive, and when a city detective interrupts their visit, Julia refuses to answer his questions and departs. He is surprised to find she already knows and is, in fact, packing a suitcase. He decides to begin by breaking the news to Julia, Frank’s now widow. He has few clues and only knows that a giant of a man kidnapped Frank. Frank dies that night.ĭistraught by the loss of his mentor, Lionel vows to find the killers. On the way to the emergency room, Frank refuses to identify his assailants to Lionel. Lionel and the Minna Men pursue, but by the time they catch up to Frank’s kidnapper, Frank has been knifed and left for dead in a dumpster. There, they are stunned to witness Frank, coming out of the center, suddenly snatched at knifepoint and forced into a waiting car.

Now in his thirties, Lionel and the crew accompany Frank during a routine stakeout to a Zendo, a Zen meditation center in Upper East Side Manhattan. The boys, dubbing themselves “Minna Men,” have worked for Frank for close to 20 years. Frank Minna, a charismatic hood who ran a moving service that fronted for a small-time detective agency, recruited Lionel, along with three other boys from the home, to serve as minions doing gofer jobs: surveillance, stakeouts, and client shadowing. Because of his odd speech habits and peculiar tics, such as touching people and even kissing them (he will not understand Tourette’s syndrome for some time), Lionel made few friends. Lionel Essrog, an orphan, grew up in a boys’ home in Brooklyn. Although the movie generated modest critical enthusiasm, aficionados of the novel pointed to several significant alterations the movie took with the original storyline, most notably moving the era from the late 1990s to the 1950s and introducing an entirely new storyline about a Harlem activist and a corrupt city planner. In 2019, 20 years after its publication, Motherless Brooklyn was released as a film directed by Oscar-nominated actor Edward Norton, who played Lionel Essrog. Motherless Brooklyn was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Gold Dagger, awarded annually in the UK for the best crime novel of the year.

Osierocony brooklyn jonathan lethem