BOOK 'EM PARTY.(The Talk of the Town)(Stanley Alpert's The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival)

SHOUTS & MURMURS, by Paul Rudnick

Nine years ago, Stanley Alpert was kidnapped at gunpoint after dropping a woman off at her apartment building in the Village. He had met her on the subway, less than an hour before, and on a whim invited her to join him in a cookie-buying mission; he got Entenmann's, she got Chips Ahoy. Then he walked her back to her apartment and asked if she'd like to go out for a cup of tea. She declined--it was late. He asked for her business card, left, and shortly thereafter, as he recalled last week, "I felt a tug at my elbow and there was an automatic machine gun at my gut."

Alpert was blindfolded and held hostage for the next twenty-five hours by a gang of four men and three accomplices. When he informed them that it was his thirty-eighth birthday, they offered him drugs and the services of a teen-age prostitute. (He politely refused both.) Then, remarkably, they turned him loose in Prospect Park. Alpert, who happened to be a federal prosecutor, recounted his ordeal in studied detail, but detectives and F.B.I. agents were initially dubious. Like Alpert's captors, they couldn't believe that a successful thirty-eight-year-old man would be unmarried and asking women on the train out for tea.

Recently, on Alpert's forty-seventh birthday, a number of those detectives and federal agents, along with dozens of old friends, a handful of ex-girlfriends, and the so-called Cookie Lady herself, gathered at an East Village bar called Crime Scene to celebrate the publication of "The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival," Alpert's first book. The four kidnappers, who had not known that Alpert was a prosecutor, and who had intended merely to max out his A.T.M. cards, are all now serving time upstate--nearly twenty years apiece. Sam Miller, a twenty-five-year veteran of the N.Y.P.D., addressed the crowd, saying, "Stan was the best witness that I've ever come across--he's the most amazing person I know." Miller's old partner, Larry Riccio, who has retired from the force, clapped Alpert on the back and said, "I'm glad we can laugh about it now." Riccio had been a tea-date skeptic.

Scott Dunn, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, stood on a banquette. "It's a story of suspense," he said. "It's a story that reads like a roller-coaster ride. It's a story of one man's efforts to overcome ...