Satellite Boy

November 21, 2022
This colorful yet unconvincing dual biography mashes together the lives of Canadian bank robber Georges Lemay and American engineer Harold Rosen. True crime writer Amelinckx (Exquisite Wickedness) is at his sharpest recounting Lemay’s brushes with the law (he was suspected in the murders of two criminal associates and the disappearance of his first wife); his masterminding of the 1961 burglary of a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in Montreal, which netted $2 million ($19.2 million in today’s money); and his life as a fugitive. While Lemay was tearing through the Montreal underworld, Rosen, an employee at Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, Calif., was fighting to overcome technical, business, and regulatory hurdles to build a geostationary commercial communication satellite that would “provide twenty-four-hour global communications, something never before attempted.” His vision finally became a reality with the launch of the “Early Bird” satellite in 1965. To showcase its capabilities, the Communications Satellite Corporation produced a “splashy television special” that included a brief segment on Lemay, which led to his arrest in Florida. (He escaped from the Dade County Jail in Miami and was recaptured in Las Vegas). Amelinckx lucidly explains the technical aspects and spotlights the boon communication satellites provided to law enforcement agencies, but the link between Lemay and Rosen feels overly circumstantial. In this case, the sum is not greater than its parts.

February 1, 2023

The title of this book is the name that French-Canadian bank burglar Georges Lemay gave himself after a communications satellite led to his arrest. Amelinckx's (Exquisite Wickedness) book profiles Lemay and an engineer, Harold Rosen, who helped develop the first commercial communications satellite with a fixed orbit in 1965. Lemay was believed to be the mastermind behind one of the biggest bank robberies in Canadian history. The robbery, with more than $1 million stolen, occurred at a Montreal bank in 1961. Canadian police could not find Lemay until a Fort Lauderdale boat repairman who knew Lemay under an alias called the FBI after seeing a satellite TV broadcast of fugitives. The book's structure is chronological, starting in 1961 with the Montreal bank robbery, then Lemay's 1965 arrest, and ending with a recap of what happened to the players. The chapters alternate between Lemay's reckless antics and Rosen's drier satellite work. The book is entertaining and colorful; it reads like an expanded magazine article. For readers seeking a description of life on the lam, consider Dick Lehr's Black Mass, which is about the more careful criminal, Whitey Bulger. VERDICT Amelinckx's book is ideal for both true-crime and technology buffs.--Harry Charles

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2023
Hardened criminal meets the slide rule in a historical true-crime tale. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest, as freelance journalist Amelinckx does, that "master thief Georges Lemay and electrical engineer Harold Rosen...gave rise to the modern communication age, forever changing our world." Rosen deserves the accolade (none other than Arthur C. Clarke said as much), but Lemay is incidental, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time--namely, on a yacht slip in South Florida, where he was spotted after pulling off a major bank heist in Canada. He was spotted thanks to Rosen's invention of a geosynchronous satellite that allowed for simultaneous communication around the world. When Early Bird launched, the FBI, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard beamed out public-enemy photographs of Lemay, a dapper but vicious fellow, and he was caught. (He escaped, sending J. Edgar Hoover into a tizzy.) Amelinckx delivers two separate books that are thinly joined by that happenstance. In doing so, he makes some good points: Rosen certainly deserves more credit than he gets for having revolutionized satellite technology, for one, allowing the U.S. to pull ahead of its Soviet rivals in the space race, and Lemay makes for an interesting case who ought to have been put away for much longer than he was. After doing time for bank robbery and literally getting away with murder, in the mid-1970s, he got into "the lucrative drug business, focusing on...a more potent cousin to PCP that had its heyday as a recreational drug during that decade." Well known in Canada but less so elsewhere, Lemay makes a fine study in sociopathy. There are a lot of tangents to work through--e.g., it's not particularly germane to the author's yarn that the Beatles used Rosen's satellite technology to broadcast "All You Need Is Love" worldwide. Still, there are some nice twists and turns. An average book, but true-crime buffs and historians of technology will find points of interest.

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March 15, 2023
There are certain legendary events that define the space race: Sputnik in 1957, the creation of NASA in 1958, the first moon landing in 1969, the disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Overlooked is Intelsat I, which in 1965 became the first commercial communications satellite ever put into orbit. Without it, there would be no cable TV or cell phones. This invention by audacious engineer Harold Rosen is one of two subjects of Satellite Boy, the latest book from true-crime aficionado Amelinckx. The other is dapper supercrook Georges Lemay, who in 1961 pulled off the apotheosis of heists by robbing Montreal's Bank of Nova Scotia. Rosen and Lemay never met, but their stories would intersect when images of Lemay broadcast from Intelsat I, or ""Early Bird,"" led Canadian authorities right to him. As with Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, Amelinckx develops his two narratives suspensefully and in excellent historical detail before braiding them together with the skill of a master weaver. No account of the technocratic 1960s is complete without this thrilling tale.

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