To most of his relatives, Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg, a racketeer and hit man who managed to kill on the order of 20 people before eventually being convicted and sent away, was a shande - Yiddish for source of shame. But to his great-nephew Eric, a talented and ambitious young journalist, Uncle Harold was also a gift from Got. First he profiled Heshy - that's what the Konigsberg family called Harold - for The New Yorker, and now he has expanded that article into an absorbing and marvelously told, if a bit overreaching, book, "Blood Relation."

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Courtesy the Jersey Journal
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280 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.

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Harold was a troublemaker from the beginning, "a malevolently wild creature in a house full of Sabbath-keepers," as Konigsberg writes. At the age of 11, he stuck up a DeSoto dealership with a knife. A couple of years later, when an older boy demanded a piece of the craps game that Harold was operating in an empty lot near his parents' home in Bayonne, N.J., Harold pulled a gun on him. Post-puberty, Harold's budding career as a criminal really took off. During the 1940's, 50's and early 60's, while so many of his fellow Jewish Americans led the sorts of square, virtuous lives that have since been immortalized by a handful of memorable Philip Roth patriarchs, he stole, ran numbers, hijacked, assaulted and murdered.

Konigsberg has done an enormous amount of research, interviewing his great-uncle in prison repeatedly, reading through thousands of pages of court testimony and speaking with dozens of people who knew him, from fellow hoodlums to F.B.I. agents. All this legwork comes through in his vivid portrait of Harold. Imagine a Nicholas Pileggi creation punched up by Woody Allen and you've pretty much got the idea: not long after being acquitted in his first murder trial, Harold checked with his family to make sure they were O.K. with his marrying a shiksa. Most impressively, Konigsberg resists the urge to romanticize his great-uncle, who could be charming - "adorable" even, according to one of his many lawyers - but who was, at bottom, a sociopath. The author's graceful, perfectly pitched prose is marred only by occasional journalistic tics, including the tendency to place the reader at the scene of too many interviews with peripheral characters.

But Konigsberg aspires to do more than merely recount Harold's exploits. At the heart of "Blood Relation" are the author's pursuit of his uncle's story and, inevitably, the mostly uniform reaction of his various relatives to his insistence on exposing this dark corner of family history. (Aunt Shelley sums up the consensus view at a family reunion in Las Vegas: "What does he have to do with us?")

Konigsberg is a likable narrator, and this secondary plotline produces some priceless moments. At the start of their first meeting in a prison in upstate New York, Harold orders Konigsberg to buy him a couple of ice cream sandwiches. One gets stuck in the vending machine, and a guard helps the author extricate it. "What are you, a cripple?" Harold asks. Later, when Konigsberg's grandmother learns that Harold has lost his temper and threatened to kill his great-nephew if he publishes an article about him, she calls her grandson to express her sympathy - for Harold: "Eric, they're going to punish him by putting him into a place where he doesn't get to leave or see anybody or talk to his daughters for the next two years. . . . Uncle Heshy's going to die in solitary."

At times, though, the narrative of Konigsberg's journey feels forced. He frames "Blood Relation" as an effort to uncover a hidden family secret, as though he has a personal stake in Heshy's story. The desire to give his search this added bit of urgency is understandable, yet not quite persuasive: Konigsberg and his great-uncle Harold are, as the title suggests, blood relations, but the connection feels pretty distant.

Konigsberg also works a little too hard to invest Heshy, and his family's attitude toward him, with deeper significance, quoting Jewish demographers and criminal psychiatrists to not especially illuminating effect, and straining to find meaning where it may not exist: "I wondered whether Harold's unlawful livelihood signified to the Konigsbergs how far they had been forced to travel in order to leave the ghetto behind, or how close to it they still were." By the end of the book, even Konigsberg is prepared to admit that the whole story may be less complicated than he was initially inclined to believe: "Now it is not so hard for me to see the wisdom of their defensive formations," he writes of his family, having at this point learned more than enough about his great-uncle the murderer. It's an honest, if not entirely satisfying, conclusion to a mesmerizing expedition.