Run, Brother, Run

Book excerpt: In 1968 the author's brother Alan was murdered by Charles Harrelson, notorious hit man and father of Woody Harrelson. Alan was only thirty-one when he disappeared and for more than six months his family did not know what had happened to him, until his remains were found in a ditch in Texas. There was an eyewitness to the murder: Harrelson's girlfriend, who agreed to testify. Even so, Harrelson was acquitted with the help of the most famous criminal lawyer in America. Writing with cold-eyed grief and lacerating humor, the author, a trial lawyer himself, shares intimate details about his striving Jewish family that perhaps set Alan on a course for self-destruction, and the wrenching miscarriage of justice when Alan Berg's murderer went unpunished.