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Born to Be Wild Kindle Edition

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 213 ratings

An outlaw biker. Car thief, meth dealer, rapist, and killer. Gets a last chance to be a good guy.

Philadelphia suburbs, 1971. Bobby Nauss is a quiet, parochial school student. After high school, he becomes a gun-toting member of one of the most feared motorcycle gangs in America. And once his life changes, he can never go back.

Liz Lande is young, blonde, and beautiful. But she has a knack for picking the wrong men. And when she falls in love with Bobby Nauss, the mistake costs her life.

The Warlocks motorcycle gang specializes in kidnapping young women, gang-raping them, and murdering them. And Bobby Nauss is ultimately convicted of dealing meth, raping a young woman, and murdering Liz.

In 1983, while serving his sentences in a maximum-security prison, he escapes. While law enforcement tries to apprehend him, he relocates, changes his identity, and begins a new life. To his new family, friends, and neighbors in Michigan, he’s known as a decent, generous, law-abiding citizen.

But has he really changed, or is he still a Warlock at heart?

Born to Be Wild takes you into a criminal, misogynistic subculture, and traces Bobby Nauss’s involvement in a horrific rape and murder, his cunning jailbreak, and his new life as a “model” citizen. This true crime saga takes 20 years to play out before Bobby’s finally brought to justice.

Buy Born to Be Wild now to discover this amazing story.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Barry Bowe stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. He became a writer at forty-five after being fired from a lucrative sales management position in Philadelphia in 1987. He moved to the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean and vowed to never again work in the corporate world and to learn the craft of writing. He taught algebra, geometry, and trigonometry at Country Day School, an exclusive private school, and he moonlighted as a bartender while taking correspondence courses in writing. He eventually landed a sports writing job with the territory's Daily News. As the only sports writer on the island, he covered soccer, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, horse racing, yacht racing, boxing, golf, tennis, sailboarding, fishing, and croquet. Born to Be Wild was originally published by Warner Books in 1994 and consisted of 80,000 words and became a Main Selection of Doubleday's Book of the Month Club and was translated into German under the title: Der Wilde. At that point, Barry Bowe quit writing for the next twenty years to devote his life to betting on racehorses and delivering pizza. In 2014, the passion to create returned and he revised the original version of Born to Be Wild by restoring the 40,000 words that he'd been forced to delete by the publisher to conserve space the first time around. The revised version is 124,600 words long. Since then, he published 1964 - The Year the Phillies Blew the Pennant and 12 Best Eagles QBs. More on the drawing board for 2015.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00HMTD0ZE
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ First Clue Publishing (January 15, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 15, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 5747 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 481 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 213 ratings

About the author

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Barry Bowe
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Barry Bowe was born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrant parents. A jock in high school, the Naval Academy recruited him to play football and sent him to the Naval Academy Prep School in Bainbridge, Maryland. But he got kicked out of the program two days before the beginning of Plebe Summer.

He subsequently lived in Philadelphia, New York, Fort Lauderdale, Venice Beach, Palm Springs, and the island of St. Croix. Before becoming America's Best Crime Writer, he fronted a rock group, managed fitness clubs, and taught algebra, geometry, and trig.

Warner Books published BORN TO BE WILD in 1992 - a true-crime saga about outlaw motorcycle gangs - and it’s still selling on Amazon to this day. Simultaneously, Bastei Verlag translated the book into German and published it as DER WILDE. Plus, it was a Main Selection of the Doubleday Book Club.

Prior to that, Barry wrote nearly 150 magazine articles for Official Detective - true murder cases from coast to coast, as well as on the islands of Puerto Rico, St. Croix, and St. Thomas.

He’s worked with some of the best homicide detectives in the country, testified as an expert witness at biker trials in federal court, and worked on a defense team with Dick DeGuerin in Houston, Texas - the latter in regard to Operation Lightning Strike, an FBI undercover sting of the Johnson Space Center. At that time, Barry spent three months in a safe house near Clear Lake, Texas, as potential collateral damage.

Barry moved from true crime to crime fiction ten years ago. Inspired by true cases he covered and real people he met, his fiction hits hard and rings true while combining murder and pursuit with parallel love stories.

He started his writing career in newspapers and was the first sports reporter to put future NBA Hall of Famer Tim Duncan’s name on the sports pages. To this day he remains a huge sports fan - especially for the Philadelphia Eagles and Phillies - and has written a couple sports books.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
213 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2024
I grew up in the area at that time and learned a lot of things that I didn't know about. I couldn't put the book down once I started reading it.
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2023
Must read if you’re into true crime! Especially if you live in Delco. My Dad used these guys, and these stories, as the reasons why I was never allowed out of the house. But reading this book brought home just how close we actually were to it all. I walked past one of the addresses listed every single day. I never doubted my Dad meant well, but this book leaves me a little breathless.
I bought the paperback and took notes while reading. Finished the book and immediately downloaded kindle version to always have it on hand!!
Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2014
I am not sure you can get this book anymore. I hope not, as the family has to live with what was written, and the children are grown and need to be able to go on with their lives, and not all of the book was as written. Let it be, and let it rest, and stop, where it is at.
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2023
I owned a headsop in Upper Darby between 1969-1988. We had heard about the wild parties at The Castle and the news reports about the missing girls over a six year period. My mother was working for the Lansdowne Police during this time. She would bring home stories about the bodies being found in the Tinicum marsh areas. Barry Bowe has done excellent research while writing this amazing true story. I was glued to each page, I knew so many of the names and places I could not put it down. If you’re from Delco this is a must read.
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2023
Easy and fast. Great Read
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2017
Barry Bowe has nailed this true story crime drama. When I attended Delaware County Police Academy in 1988, some of the Investigators who worked Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and specifically Robert Thomas Nauss, the central figure in this book.
This book tells many stories of the aspects from the cases from both the Good guys and the Bad guys. What began as police legends teaching cadets about Bobby Nauss etc to becoming friendly with Bobby's first wife Mary cookie Nauss to speaking with Bobby on the telephone where he had called Cookies apartment from Mahanoy State Correctional facility.
Great book if you like crime novels. Reading it provided me with lots of information I had not previously known. Great book very suspenseful.
5 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2018
Pretty good read, did give a good feel of that sub-culture of Delco in the 70's.
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2022
Unbelievable true story written by an incredible writer!! An absolute must read!!!!!!

Top reviews from other countries

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tupfenhund
5.0 out of 5 stars Philadelphia Warlocks 1% Bikers
Reviewed in Germany on January 2, 2014
Das Buch handelt von der außer ordentlich brutalen Biker Gang Warlocks in Philadelphia in den 1970-er. Sie begehen Verbechen, wie Mord, Massenvergewaltigung, Drogenhandel sowie PKW und Motorrad Diebstahl. Die Hauptperson ist der Killer Namens Robert Nauss. Ihm gelingt es sich über mehrere Jahre in Verfahren der Mordanklage zu entziehen. Nachdem die Polizei keinen Erfolg hat die Warlocks und ihn anzuklagen, wird eine Sondereinheit bestehend aus verschiedenern Behörden gebildet. Es gelingt endlich ihn hinter Gitter zu bekommen. Dem äußert gerissenen Nauss gelingt es jedoch aus dem Gefängnis zu flüchten und seinen illegalen Geschäfte über mehrere Jahre weiter zu betreiben. Das Buch ist flüssig geschrieben. Interessante aber auch sehr harte Story.
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