Lenny Petrocelli had it made until his gangland bosses decided to set him up as the fall guy for a child trafficking prostitution ring.
Lenny Petrocelli had always been a slacker, a mediocre low-life, getting by on his good looks and street smarts. One day he woke up. Entangled by his gangland bosses in the web of child prostitution and human trafficking, he was being set up as the fall guy to take the rap, if the horrifying but lucrative enterprise went down.
Seeing the violence and abuse young girls from Asia were subjected to in the gruesome world of sex slavery, Lenny did the most difficult but the most important thing in his entire life: He became a better person. Now he would risk everything, even his life, to put an end to this savage exploitation.
Peer into this awful world. See it through Lenny’s eyes. Discover what’s possible even in the face of the worst, most pernicious evil and cruelty.
Embrace the promise of redemption and the power of love.
If this gritty novel rings true, it’s for good reason. “Petrocelli” is based on actual stories from a violent and gruesome under-world, where millions of children and adolescents across the globe are held in bondage as slaves.
Excerpt
LOVE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD
The call to Lenny did not go well. Not from Alicia’s perspective. Lenny refuse to talk about anything on the phone and insisted they meet face-to-face. He kept saying the same things over and over about a gazillion times. He sounded frantic.
"You have to believe me!"
"It’s not what you think."
"Please meet with me."
"I need your help!"
"Please trust me."
She agreed to meet with him but only if she could bring someone.
Was she afraid of him?
Yes.
He frightened her. He had betrayed her. He filled her with anger. Shame. Vindictiveness. She reviled him. She loathed him. She despised him.
She hated him …
She loved him.
There. She said it.
Hearing his voice on the phone. Desperate. Pleading. Certainly not the cocksure, fearless, brazen Lenny she had always known. A completely different side of the man.
But still him. And as always happened, his voice went crashing through all of her feigned indifference, the real antipathy, the anger, the hurt, the protective walls, the Kevlar around her heart — and reached deep deep deep inside of her and unleashed the hot fury of … love.
It was an inexplicable, irrational, nonsensical, counterintuitive, destructive passion.
She hated him for it.
She loved him for it.
He was her poison pill.
He was her gateway to Paradise.
He was her arsenic-laced Kool-Aid.
People who take a cynical, fatalistic view of the human condition — or was it a realistic one? — suggest that there is hard-wired into the human organism, into each and every one of us without exception, a self-destructive flaw. Something lurking as a recessive gene or a subconscious latency. Some crack in the tile. Sometimes microscopic and nearly invisible. But there.
It was this defining glitch which ran as a silent partner to the fine-tuned rationalizations, beautifully-architected systems of thought, brilliantly-wrought and highly-sophisticated political and moral philosophies, paradise-embracing theologies, breathtaking mythologies and analogies and paradigms and models and hierarchies — all of which allegedly set man apart from the beasts of the jungle — which then went on to propel him toward the most hideous and shameful manifestations of his presence in the world: war, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, serial killing, rape. Always allegedly for some perceived greater or smaller good.
It was the congenital flaw that allowed high-minded God-fearing men to exterminate whole native populations to put in place settlements to glorify the very same God who commanded their morality and high-mindedness.
It was the gleam of suicidal curiosity in the eye of the man with his finger on the button.
It was what prompted a good family man to risk all and fuck his secretary.
It was the grenade with the pin pulled at the center of our souls.
Under the Dior, Versace, Gabbana, Donna Karan, de la Renta and Dolce, we all had a bomb strapped to our chests.
Lenny was Alicia’s bomb.
That was the gist of it.
These were the thoughts that Alicia was sharing with Christine right now, in a rambling, barely coherent monologue at the Mangiami Café in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
It was late Saturday afternoon, a few minutes before 6:00, the time she had agreed to meet Lenny. And Christine — sweet dear Christine, God bless her — had agreed to come along. They had arrived a little early. Christine still didn’t look very good. But at least she was out.
Christine was quiet, so Alicia was doing all the talking.
“I don’t understand it. Lenny is so completely the wrong person for me. But that’s the way it is. I’m going to tell you something I have never ever told anyone. I can barely admit this to myself. You know I was married. For almost three years. Do you know that on my wedding night, in the honeymoon suite of our hotel … I can see this like it was just yesterday. There we were, making love, the end of an exhausting but truly beautiful day. Sean was on top of me and my eyes were closed. And with my new husband inside me I was imagining that it was Lenny I was making love to. That’s right, Lenny. I am so fucked up.”
“Alicia. I don’t think we ever love someone for who they are. We love them for what we think they could be. Then we try to bring that out of them. That is the real joy of love.”
“God, Christine. That is so you. So brilliant. So incomprehensible …”
Alicia’s train of thought was halted by the sight of Lenny coming through the door.
Christine saw the look in her eyes and turned to see for herself.
Lenny was much better looking than she had imagined. Though he had a worried look on his face, he still seemed confident, in command. His face even more striking the closer he got. Character and intelligence in his eyes. Not the thug or rough character she had expected.
Lenny got halfway into the long narrow café and spotted them. His eyes locked on Alicia. She met his gaze and tried to give nothing away. She was feeling such a wild mix of emotions, she wasn’t sure where one ended and the next began.
Lenny sat down. No one spoke for a full two minutes. The silence was as thick as cement. Alicia just continued to stare at him. He looked at her. Looked away. Looked at her.
Christine broke the deadlock. Stating the obvious.
“I’m Christine. Alicia’s friend.”
Correction from Alicia.
“Best friend.”
“Pleased to meet you. I wish the circumstances were better.”
Alicia. “So do I.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You already said that.”
“Alicia. We both know that I’ve been a fuck-up most of my life. So maybe I get what I deserve. But what has happened … this is not what I bargained for.”
“You’re a well-paid sleazeball. What could be better?”
“Okay. Touché. I can’t go toe-to-toe with you in a battle of words. You’re way too clever for me. So just let me lay out a simple proposition. You can take it or leave it.”
“Twenty words or less.”
“Okay. Better than that. Here it goes.”
“That’s seven.”
Lenny looked squarely into Alicia’s eyes. It was so intense it was all she could do to hold on and return his gaze.
“I want to do better.”
“That’s twelve.”
“That’s it.”
“Why are you calling the Bishop, Lenny?”
So much for tip-toeing around the issue.
“He knows everybody. The people I need to get to. My only way out is to blow this thing apart. Take it down. I can’t do this anymore. I‘ve got to get out. Before they kill me.”
“So you want to save your own precious hide. What if your hide is not worth saving?”
“Then the least I can do is set free a lot of very sweet innocent young girls who deserve better than the hand they’ve been dealt. If I get blown away, call it collateral damage.”
Two more minutes of dead silence. This time Alicia was looking down. She didn’t want Lenny to see that she was crying.
“Alicia. I talked to the Bishop. Very briefly.”
Whispering. “I hope it went well for you.”
“It went. We’ll see.”
Christine stared straight ahead. Not knowing what to think. A newsreel played in her mind. A disconnected collage. Nong Khai. Bishop Mulcahey. Bangkok. The Djin Djin girls. Danny’s funeral.
Alicia still could not bring herself to look at Lenny.
His phone rang.
“Fuck! I hate these things.” Popped it open.
“Yes?”
“Ed here. You’re going to San Francisco. We’ll meet you there.”
“When?”
“You leave in three hours. Maybe it’s a little short notice. But that’s the way it is, Petrocelli. You’re on US Airways 5966 leaving Kennedy at 9:10. That’s Kennedy. You got that?”
“Right. Right. US Airways 5966. Kennedy. I’ll call you as I’m boarding.”
He closed the phone and slipped it into his coat pocket.
“I’m sorry. I gotta go.”
He was out the door. It was 6:15 and the long-anticipated, much-dreaded meeting was over. Alicia was still looking at her hands, palms up in her lap. Christine watched Lenny all the way out the door, then turned to Alicia and put her finger softly to her cheek.
“He’s a very handsome man. Whatever he’s done in the past, I think he’s a good man.”
“Christine, with my whole heart and soul, I hope you’re right.”
Professional Reviews
In “Petrocelli” the vast underworld of illegal sex commerce with minors is masterfully revealed.
John Rachel is a most unusual author, having done many different things in his life, and lived in many places throughout the world. As he writes in his blog: “Since leaving America in August 2006, I’ve traveled to thirty-two countries.” He has lived in the parts of the world where the sex-trade thrives, as he writes in his introductory “Note from the Author” in “Petrocelli”:
“But it was the time I spent during 2007 living in Africa, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia which really codified my understanding of the flesh trade for both sweatshops and the sex service industry. It is currently estimated that human trafficking is annually a 36 billion dollar business worldwide. I have also read there are more than 25 million people in the world kept in bondage as slaves. I fear this is a low figure.”
“Petrocelli” is a novel, a work of fiction. But the writing is so very real. John Rachel describes in detail what he obviously considers the moral outrage of sex trafficking, but he writes with a passion to tell a good story and inform – never to shock, much less to titillate.
A novel about young Asian girls being kidnapped and sold into the prison of forced prostitution can never be pleasant. It is brutal, as many of the reviews indicate; but how could it be otherwise, given the world it describes. The brutality is redeemed by the truth revealed to us about the evil practice of sexually exploiting and destroying the lives of children for money.
Much of what we encounter in this novel comes to us through the experience of Lenny Petrocelli, and his relationships with very bad guys, and very sad victims of the sex trade. The presentation of the reality of both sides of sexual exploitation (perpetrator and victim) is a revelation. Lenny begins as a clueless worker (“a slacker, a mediocre low-life”) in the underworld, who learns as we the readers learn, about the sordid details of the world-wide sex trade to which he has unknowingly become a part through the evil machinations of his Chicago gangster bosses Harold Danko and Ed Valley.
Somehow Lenny Petrocelli evolves into a decent person with some heroic characteristics. Like the world we live in, he never becomes “great” or “perfect.” He becomes real, and he does indeed become a better person – especially through his coming to know and care about the young female victims of the sex trade. Yes, his transformation is inspiring, as is the courage displayed by some of the Asian sex-trade victims – “the Djin Djin girls.”
There is one small aspect of this novel that had particular resonance with me because I am a Vietnam Veteran. Early in the novel, the author introduces a very unremarkable young man, who embodies all of the American virtues to include devout Christianity and the adherence to sexual abstinence before marriage. He is introduced as “Big John,” and in 1967 he volunteers to be an Army grunt in Vietnam. From a normal, all-American boy he develops (devolves) after more than two years of seeing death and destruction in the killing fields of Vietnam, into a raging man with no conscience and an endless appetite for revenge. The author makes this malignant transformation utterly believable within nine pages, as “Big John” becomes a serial killer who stalks Asian women in America. Author John Rachel is able simultaneously to demonstrate the absurdity and destructive toll of the Vietnam War upon one formerly normal guy, and by implication the destructive force of this War on all Americans.
The writing is superb, the characters are real and varied, and the vast underworld of illegal sex commerce with minors is masterfully revealed.
There is one other aspect of this novel, and the writing of John Rachel, and that is his sly wit and sense of irony. That is a natural by-product of his intelligence, and his realistic view of the world in which we live. This sense of irony is no more evident than in the “Epilogue,” about which I will restrain from commenting further so as not to spoil a reader’s future enjoyment.
This novel engages you with the fine mind of John Rachel. I feel lucky to have been enlightened and absorbed by my reading of “Petrocelli” and my encounter with the world of Lenny Petrocelli.
A hard-hitting eye-opening novel.
Right off the bat I must say that this was not an easy read for me; very few things make me uncomfortable, this book did that to me, which is a testament to talented author John Rachel and his well-researched novel.
Small time crocked low life ‘Lucky’ Lenny Petrocelli becomes embroiled in the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors for an outfit operating out of Chicago; New Yorker Lenny is way over his head. And while the Djin Djin girls ply their trade in the dirty streets of Brooklyn, Bishop Mulcahy and a brutal serial killer with a messiah complex try to clean the streets. The Bishop by railing the community, the serial killer with brutality learned in the Vietnam War. Multiple story lines converge to make Petrocelli a compelling read worthy of a place in the New York Times Best Seller List as stories like this one are worthy of National attention, as the ‘Author’s Note’ reads in the introduction: … “It is currently estimated that human trafficking is annually a 36 billion dollar business worldwide. I have also read there are more than 25 million people in the world kept in bondage as slaves. I fear this is a low figure.” Another thing of note is that despite the subject matter; author John Rachel writes in a witty, world weary manner, with believable characters in a world where greed rules; profit above all else, even the lives of innocent children. Powerful stuff.
A bombshell of a novel about the child sex trade and prostitution.
I don’t think there is another subject that makes my blood boil quite like child sex trafficking, and John Rachel’s novel does that in spades. When small-time sex trade operator Lenny Petrocelli’s Chicago bosses tell him they’ve got big things planned for him, he sees a brighter future for himself. After all, it’s a simple matter of going to Thailand, Laos Vietnam and a few other places, recruiting beautiful prostitutes to smuggle to the US, and getting them going in what is projected as a multimillion dollar nationwide business that Lenny will run. When he discovers that the “recruits” are under-age girls, and anything that goes wrong is his fault, he realizes what kind of guys his bosses are. “Slime-balls” is far too mild a word for these two thugs, and I won’t use the word that comes immediately to my mind, but I think you get the picture. I can see my fingers closing around both their necks, and I am not by nature a violent person. Brining children into the sex trade just to make loads of money is worse than evil. Sad to say, everything that happens in this story is real.
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