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Sign up todayA License to Steal
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreAs early as the 1940s, Walter L. Shaw was thinking of speakerphones, conference calls, and call forwarding. Of the thirty-nine patents to his credit, those three telephonic breakthroughs were his biggest inventions, yet nobody knows his name. Ahead of the world by decades, Shaw spent a lifetime inventing and patenting the many means of communication we take for granted, but he was repeatedly cheated by shrewd businessmen and big corporations.
His son, Walter T. Shaw, was enraged by the ill treatment of his father and embraced a personal mission to even the score. Shaw Jr. became one of the most prolific jewel thieves in US history, while Shaw Sr., in order to make ends meet for his family, was persuaded to put his brilliance to work for the mob.
Walter T. Shaw, Jr., started his crime career as a bagman for the mafia and graduated to master jewel thief. He is now reformed and wrote A License to Steal about his father as an act of redemption.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
Reviews
“An unbelievable journey full of love, fear, violence, hate, and redemption.”
“Joe Barrett does a good wise-guy impression, telling the story of Walter T. Shaw, an unrepentant jewel thief and mobster.”
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