The Tao of Blow: Violence, Consequences and Redemption with Bloody Knuckles

There’s a convention in the world of reviews. When an album, book, or film nears release, the artist’s team floods the press with advances and reviewers time their pieces to hit on the big day. Then comes the carousel of interviews—Zoom, phone, in-person, a global blitz that sells the story until the spotlight skitters off to the next thing. What this system forgets is the “Missed the Boat” crowd—those of us who stumble onto the good stuff after the promo dust has settled. Does art expire just because the tour ended? The Gangster’s Guide to Sobriety hit in 2022—call it three years old and decidedly off-cycle. Fuck that expiration date. I’m reviewing it now because it spoke to me, and because everyone I’ve pressed it on has come back with the same verdict: raw, poignant, quietly transformative.

Richie Stephens is an Irish-born former gangster turned Hollywood actor and speaker, a man whose life swerved from crime, addiction, and near-ruin to a daily practice of not becoming the catastrophe he once counted on. Co-written with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, the book tracks him across continents and through the criminal underworld before he limps—bloodied, not sanctified—into the rooms of recovery. The 12 Steps are the scaffolding, not the sermon. He isn’t handing out pamphlets; he’s taking inventory in public, turning each principle over like contraband and seeing what it’s really made of. On the page, you admire the craft. In your ears, you believe the man. The audiobook is the right vessel for this cargo: the Irish lilt, the gallows humor, the split-second pivots from menace to mercy. The pauses hit like swallowed confessions. The jokes arrive with that half-second of “should I laugh at this?” The shame doesn’t read as literary technique; it sounds like a throat clearing before an amends.

Stephens’ story lives in the grey, where most of us actually keep our furniture. He knows the criminal life was wrong, and he owns the harm, but he also shows how an average dude can make one short-sighted choice, then another, then another, until the map just reads HERE BE MONSTERS. Civilians will feel the jolt when he tosses off, almost casually, that he “did some coke,” in the middle of an otherwise uneventful moment because for most people that’s not a Tuesday—it’s a moral cliff. For him, it became ballast. Reality, or the thing he called reality, kept sliding off the table; coke was the paperweight. That’s the cold brilliance of the book: it documents in real time how addiction redraws the border between normal and nuts, until the unthinkable becomes routine and the routine becomes the only way to feel the ground.

Too many memoirs from people still in their prime tap the brakes right when the blood hits the tile. Stephens doesn’t. He drags every skeleton into daylight—drugs, violence, sex workers, infidelity, and a frankly shocking disregard for his family at times—and he does it without self-pity or self-justification. Paradoxically, that’s what makes him trustworthy; if he’s willing to torch his own mythology, you can believe the rest. The book also refuses the cheap absolutions of the redemption industrial complex. Any crime-to-recovery arc risks slipping into “badass to Buddha,” a neat little arc with a halo at the end. Stephens largely dodges that by staying granular and grubby—he reports the price, not just the payoff. When the acting career enters, you feel the gravitational pull of narrative neatness, but he keeps a hand on the wheel: progress report, not canonization.

Because the Steps frame the thing so tightly, there’s a limit baked in. He doesn’t spend much time on non–12-Step paths, and some readers will want more of the people in the blast radius—the partners, family, friends who absorbed the shock. Fair. But this is meant to be a first-person field report, not a sociology thesis, and measured by that aim it hits. What lands hardest is the moral clarity without sanctimony: the delusion that “our crimes only hurt other criminals” is named and dismantled; the inventory is exhaustive; the amends aren’t performance art, they’re debts paid in installments. As someone in recovery, I recognised the gravitational pull he describes and the relief of cutting the rope. A guy in one of my meetings likes to say, “I’m not here for the things I’ve done, but for the things I haven’t done.” Stephens embodies that—less a victory lap than a daily refusal to become the headline he used to chase.

So no, don’t file this under “another addiction memoir,” and don’t mistake the 12-Step spine for sermonising. This is a white-knuckle dispatch from the borderlands between who you are and who you keep becoming. The voice is evidence; the honesty is the receipt. And for the next 24 hours—and then the next 24, and the next—the ending is as happy as it needs to be: he didn’t do the thing today. In this story, that’s everything.