Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780806137322)

Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma's most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In Oklahoma Tough, poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood "King of the Bootleggers." Oklahoma Tough is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett's life story possible. Ron Padgett brings this vanished world to life with candid and sometimes comic descriptions of criminal life. Particularly insightful and entertaining are interviews in which former bootleggers, family members, friends, and enemies speak openly about their lives.

Author: Ron Padgett
ISBN-10: 0806137320
ISBN-13: 9780806137322
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Language: English
Published: 01/01/2003
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 9.06h x 5.96w x 0.75d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 06/28/2015 pg. 17