He was writing about his dad at the time, working on what would become All the Money in the World, and found himself channeling Stanley’s sloppy ethics and courtroom charisma, spinning lies about the landmarks his tour groups would pass, lies he couldn’t correct once his creativity had won him a promotion. He hurried home to New York and found work as a tour guide for Japanese businessmen. But any desire for a geographical buffer between him and their dysfunction was short-lived. When his parents noticed how fat their habits were making him, they took Siegel to judo lessons-which led to his learning Japanese and taking up residence, twice, in the Far East. She whisked her son away on lavish European tours of a quality her husband, she said, could never appreciate: The entire family ate compulsively, but Siegel’s mother insisted that she and her son at least did so with discrimination. Siegel invited her husband’s criminal clients into the family circle as though they were orphans and runaways, victims rather than perpetrators. The essays aren’t chronological they untidily slide back and forth in time, evoking the sense of futility we all feel at our trying and failing to straighten out the messes that made us.
![sins of the father 2002 sins of the father 2002](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BN2M1MDAxMzItZTIzZC00OWQ4LWIzNzUtY2Q1ODUxY2IwN2U1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzMwOTY2NTI@._V1_.jpg)
He describes his childhood in the 1970s, the family’s legal drama in the ’80s, his early days as a writer in the ’90s, and the years leading up to his father’s 2002 death. Robert Anthony Siegel writes with the intense care of an adult child who will never make sense of the manner in which he was raised but can’t give up romancing it. This essential dishonesty set Robert Anthony Siegel on his mission to find some semblance of truth in his memories of them. Lies large and small held the family together. Now I’m examining his life for him.” And now, so is her son. That was one of his problems-he lived the unexamined life.
![sins of the father 2002 sins of the father 2002](https://images.immediate.co.uk/remote/m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTNjMmI4OTYtNTQ2YS00NTBkLThjMDEtYzFhYmE3MjhjZTZjXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjM2MDYzMjY@._V1_.jpg)
Siegel’s mother, who was a lawyer too until marriage and only went back to work when the DEA went after her husband, says of Stanley what seems the book’s mission: “Oh, it’s never too late to understand people. But they’re far simpler people than the patriarch himself. These drug traffickers, murderers, pimps, and Hells Angels are transfixing characters. Glimpses of filial insight add up to a portrait of a big-hearted and brilliant but bizarre father’s devotion to his clients. With his third book, Criminals: My Family’s Life on Both Sides of the Law, a memoir made of essays, Siegel the younger moves on to a medium better suited to a subject too strange for fiction. And he became nearly as entangled with his clients’ lives as with his family’s-enough to face charges stemming from the DEA sting that inspired his son Robert Anthony Siegel’s first book, the 1997 novel All the Money in the World. New York criminal attorney Stanley Siegel loved his clients, even though they were evildoers, almost as much as he loved his wife and children. Sometimes a father leaves his son no choice but to become a novelist.