William Bastone, Daniel Green & Barbara Glauber: The Smoking Gun: A Dossier Of Secret, Surprising, And Salacious Documents

Scandal and police-blotter addicts accustomed to getting their fix from E! network programming, "Page Six" of the New York Post, News Of The Weird, or checkout-line gossip rags have an invaluable online source in thesmokinggun.com, a web site that offers the pure, uncut stuff. Thanks to the Freedom Of Information Act of 1966, American citizens are allowed access to all declassified government documents, including police reports, FBI memos, courthouse files, patent applications, and other public records available upon request. By skipping the middleman and going straight to the journalistic source, the snarky humorists at The Smoking Gun bypass the judicious edits and flowery language of writers and reporters, delivering the news in its rawest form. Bureaucratic papers, they've discovered, are the ultimate form of deadpan comedy, because such papers reduce even the most outrageous and excessive behavior to the mundane tone of a parking ticket. An exhaustive treasure of celebrity mishaps, frivolous lawsuits, bizarre crimes, misbegotten inventions, and unclassifiable curiosities, The Smoking Gun compiles the site's greatest hits along with a smattering of new material. Some of this stuff has received media coverage, but the unfiltered details add another level to reports such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's draconian contract with the hired help (as the editor jokes, "a leak to The National Enquirer would set a maid back $55.2 million") or Marilyn Monroe's official Certificate Of Conversion to Judaism after she married Arthur Miller. More often than not, celebrities' quirky excesses take precedent over their scandals, because the former look juicier on paper. It's one thing to talk about garish gangsta accessories, but it's another to see Death Row founder Suge Knight's $76,500 receipt for diamond jewelry. The Smoking Gun devotes an entire chapter to the backstage requirements of big-name musicians, inspired by Van Halen's request that all brown M&M's be removed from the dressing-room candy bowl. The section on government files includes an interesting sample of historical footnotes, such as Richard Nixon's 1937 interview results for a position with the FBI and Monica Lewinsky's résumé ("able to take direction, extremely enthusiastic"). But the funniest material tends to spring from extraordinary acts performed by ordinary people, like a prison inmate who wants to sue Penthouse for not "showing all" of Paula Jones as its cover advertised, or a crude IOU for a used truck to be paid off at $40 a blow job. Though its arcane oddities are hard to digest all at once, The Smoking Gun cuts the bureaucratic red tape and gives readers an obsessively documented tour of pop history's underside.