In Macedo, Katz found the story of a lifetime … It’s a credit to Katz’s skill, compassion and sheer doggedness...that Macedo emerges from this narrative not as the demon that he flirted with, but as an all too ordinary kid, sad and scatterbrained, neither malevolent nor particularly brave … The Rent Collectors is filled with such choices that are not choices: impossible crossroads in the lives of people constrained on all sides by forces that will not bend. Katz is acutely attentive not only to the flesh-and-blood personalities that make his story so compelling, but to the structures that both shape and confine them.

Katz has constructed an ethnography of the crime, locating it within the intricate lacework of history, geography, policing and politics that the crime was knotted to.

With admirable clarity and compassion, Katz unravels a complex narrative that has no easy answers.

Tackling immigration, the prison system, city ordinances, and the complicated bonds of family, the experience of reading The Rent Collectors is white-knuckle and, ultimately, wholly transformative..

A searing account.