The Book

COMING SOON: ONE MAN CRIME SPREE

THE BOOK

“Most of what follows is true… The rest is just how I remember it.”

In the dying days of the American Mob, there was a “neutral zone”—Erie, Pennsylvania. It sat about 100 miles from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. It was a sanctuary city for thieves, hitmen, and safecrackers who needed to vanish.

It was here that The Secret Seven operated. A crew so secret, we used to say we didn’t know who the other six were.

One Man Crime Spree is the raw, unfiltered memoir of Tim “Murph the Surf” Murphy, “The Kid” who drove the getaway cars, punched the safes, and survived the crash that killed the era of the Goodfellas.

THE HIGHLIGHT REEL

This isn’t just a story. It’s a series of collisions.

  • The Million Dollar Baby: The story begins with my grandmother, a Prohibition rum-runner who moved bootleg liquor across Lake Erie and bailed my father out of a Naval hospital with a roll of hundreds she kept stashed behind picture frames.

  • The 19-Foot Office: I didn’t work in a cubicle. I worked in a 1970 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, “Lucerne Aqua Fire Mist,” driving the smartest gangster in the Rust Belt, Jimmy “JR” Russell.

  • The Standoff: Picture this: A black Cadillac pulls up to the Crown Club. Inside is the crew of Russell Bufalino (the boss from The Irishman). Across the street, I’m sitting in the Fleetwood with a MAC-10 machine pistol and an 18-inch silencer across my lap, waiting for the signal to “spray that black Caddy”.

  • The Hitman: My near-brother-in-law was Ray Ferritto, the man who planted the bomb that killed Irish mob boss Danny Greene and brought down the entire Cleveland Mafia.

  • The Tragedy: The ride ends in a cage. On the Ides of March, 1985, while locked in Wende Correctional Facility, I received the letter that broke me: the love of my life, Mary Ellen, was dead from an overdose.

WHY THIS STORY?

To the producers, storytellers, and hunters: You’ve seen Casino. You’ve seen Goodfellas. You’ve seen Kill The Irishman. But you haven’t seen this Blue Collar Underworld.

  • The Setting: Erie, PA is an untapped noir landscape. A “den of thieves” caught between the Great Lakes and the rust belt, where police corruption was just the cost of doing business.

  • The “MacGyver” Element: This isn’t just about muscle. It’s about mechanics. I wasn’t a thug; I was a technician. I built custom silencers, programmed police scanners with crystals stolen from Radio Shack, and engineered tools to punch safes.

  • The Arc: This is a redemption story with teeth. It goes from the adrenaline of the “Monday Night Football” lottery racket to the brutal discipline of doing 1,500 pushups a day in solitary confinement, ending with a 35-year career as a legitimate Control Systems Engineer.

The Secret Seven are coming.

GET NOTIFIED

The statute of limitations has run out. The stories are ready to be told. Sign up SOON to be the first to know when One Man Crime Spree hits the shelves.

Disclaimer: Names and details are based on the author’s recollection. Some names may have been changed. The author is not a lawyer, just a survivor.