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30 Jan 07 Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business I must admit I was skeptical that Pistone could find enough loose ends in the Donnie Brasco story to fill another book. However, while there is some repetition, the ex-agent provides enough new information to keep us very interested. And, frankly, the repetitive parts are quite entertaining - Donnie Brasco's thrilling adventures are worth recalling. The first portion of the book is basically a summary of the Donnie Brasco deep-undercover experience with many of the gaps filled in. Some details apparently had to be kept secret until court cases had been processed. Pistone also takes the opportunity to correct some impressions created by the movie based on his bestseller. He takes issue with some of the sentimental and self-critical Johnny Depp moments in the film. "I never experienced any doubt, uncertainty, or reservation," he writes. "I did not make Lefty [Ruggiero] a Mafia gangster... Lefty and his Mafia underground nation is America's enemy. I was an American FBI agent... In the end, I was proud to bring Lefty to justice, and I'm even more proud of the devastating short- and long-term effects on the Mafia that people have credited, in part, to my work." Pistone recalls for us the criminal activities ("unauthorized by the Bureau") he engaged in while undercover as "Donnie," an associate of the Colombo and Bonanno Crime Families. His admitted crimes include a murder conspiracy, hijacking and a number of other offenses. But Pistone admits he would have gone further in order to protect himself. Underworld associates like Brasco might be called upon by Mafia superiors to perform gang "hits." Pistone decided that, if confronted with a situation in which he had to kill an underworld character or face the certain wrath of the mob, "...the wiseguy would go. I knew the FBI would not stand behind me on something like that. Well, let me call it what it is - murder in the first degree." The situation nearly came up in 1981, first in the murder of the Three Capos (when Bonanno bigshot Joseph Massino nixed Brasco's participation) and then as Brasco was assigned by Bonanno caporegime "Sonny Black" Napolitano to assassinate Bruno Indelicato. Indelicato went into hiding, and Pistone was pulled from his assignment before the nightmare scenario had a chance to develop. The rest of the book is devoted to Pistone's post-Brasco experiences as a courtroom witness against the Mafia. Working with prosecutors, like then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani of New York, he participated in some blockbuster trials, including the Bonanno Family case, the Pizza Connection, the Mafia Commission case, the conviction of Bonanno boss "Big Joey" Massino, and the Mafia Cops trial of 2006. Pistone's description of the trials is anything but bland. He provides compelling and often gory detail, while recounting the defeats of the mob through the past 25 years. Pistone has a different co-author for "Unfinished Business," former Delaware prosecutor Charles Brandt who wrote "I Heard You Paint Houses." However, the writing style - using casual phrasing and rhythms that would be at home in city street corner conversations - remains uniquely Pistone. This is an informative and entertaining book. |
"A tough and refreshingly unsentimental overview of what is essentially the end of the American Mafia." | ||||||
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05 Dec 06 The Violent Years: Prohibition and the Detroit Mobs He discusses the warring factions of the Sicilian Mafia, as well as Polish and Irish ethnic gangs and the predominantly Jewish Purple Gang. He suggests credible causes for underworld conflicts, such as the Giannola-Vitale war, and shares the specifics of gang crimes and underworld hits. Kavieff is not at all stingy with facts, but he still writes efficiently and keeps the story moving quickly - possibly a tad too quickly for a casual reader. The book weighs in at just about 200 pages of easy-to-read type. The Violent Years is a must-read for organized crime historians and those interested in the Motor City's past. |
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10 Sep 06 "Superthief: A Master Burglar, the Mafia and the Biggest Bank Heist in U.S. History" is the highly engaging and very readable life story of master burglar/drug trafficker Phillip Christopher. Through the frequent use of the first-person, author Rick Porello provides a look inside the mind of a professional criminal. We are treated to the details of Christopher's life -- from his Catholic, blue-collar upbringing in the Collinwood district of Cleveland, Ohio, through his spectacular criminal successes and equally spectacular blunders, to his declining years as an easy target of state and federal law enforcement -- in what is purported to be Christopher's own words. We share Christopher's real-life experiences in family, business, underworld and prison situations. His lengthy and continuing rollercoaster ride through the criminal justice system is particularly educational. Christopher seems to have encountered every unfair advantage and unfair disadvantage built into that system. Due to its frank handling of its subject matter, I suspect this book will cause those who have invested in electronic security systems to lose quite a bit of sleep. The thwarting of alarms, the acquisition of secret allies among security company employees and within local police departments and the prying open of safes and vaults are all discussed in detail. Porello-Christopher stop just short of providing a primer for aspiring safe-crackers. The various elements of the 1972 burglary at the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel, the biggest bank heist in U.S. history, are expertly rendered. Those are the book's positives, but unfortunately they are not the whole story. While I enjoyed Superthief and remain a Rick Porello fan, there are some noticeable flaws in the book. For one, it is difficult to accept many of Christopher's statements as fact. Examples: his Robin Hood-like escapades as a child thief, botched jobs that were always someone else's fault and the high esteem in which mob bosses, union leaders and even prison personnel universally held him. Porello provides little obvious help as we strive to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is rare corroboration in the form of a quote from a girlfriend or a law enforcement officer, but Christopher's story appears to have been left pretty much just as he told it. Another problem stems from Porello's inclusion of the word "Mafia" in the title. Phillip Christopher was never a "made" guy, and the Mafia has a very small, supporting role in the book. Some of the more interesting Mafia episodes of the time/place are tossed in as asides, though Christopher had nothing to do with them. The Mafia remains off in the distance and out of focus. Though Christopher spent a lifetime living this story and Porello spent five years writing it, what lies between the front and back covers seems thin and could have been better crafted. A bit of narration in the middle chapters could have helped drive home the importance of the Laguna Niguel heist. The reader is liable to plow right through it, judging it to be a disappointment. Insight also is lacking. While we are thrust inside Christopher's mind, we find little in the way of illumination there. He committed burglaries, he repeatedly tells us, because he wanted a lot of money. (Willie Sutton reborn.) We're dragged along into deceit, infidelity and murder without knowing why. We readers are left in the uncomfortable position of being within the mind of a person we cannot understand and do not like. At the bottom line, this is a good story, entertaining and informative, requiring minimal effort and investment from the reader. It should someday become an exciting movie. However, it falls far short of its considerable potential as a window into the mind of a career criminal. |
"A well-written, fast-paced and insightful look at an historic crime rarely attempted."
"Superthief is the best insider’s view of the criminal life since Pileggi’s Wiseguy." | ||||||
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14 Mar 06 Just out in paperback, The Last Godfather by Simon Crittle is a fast-moving account of the rise and fall of Bonanno Family boss Joseph Massino. Crittle presents the details of Massino's crimes, rackets and relationships and explains the power wielded by the man known as the "last godfather." Crittle does a fair job of generating and maintaining reader excitement with a near-stream of consciousness writing style. That style, however, could be frustrating for readers looking for sequential history. One of the results of the author's oh-by-the-way and let-me-go-back-to tendencies is a book that frankly doesn't merit even the 256 pages it has been given. There is plenty of repetition (readers might get the impression that Massino was guilty of eighty murders rather than eight). Some excerpts of court testimony are provided. But a few of those fail to illustrate the author's points and come across as mere filler material. For me, the book missed the mark by failing to provide more underworld context. Former Bonanno boss Philip Rastelli, for example, comes across as just another name and isn't given as much attention as the demolition of a couple of gas containers in Maspeth, Queens. While we are told that the Bonanno family is a vast criminal network with affiliate organizations in at least three nations, we are essentially shown just a handful of guys in a couple of old buildings on Long Island. These omissions are not a problem for readers familiar with the mob, and Crittle's book seems to be intended as the latest installment in a series of journalistic accounts of the New York underworld, building on the still-warm bios of John Gotti However, the most frustrating lack of context occurs in the overall theme of the book. From the cover on, Crittle constantly repeats the "last godfather" and "last of the old world gangsters" theme (the mentions call to mind the similarly ridiculous titles of 1981's "The Last Mafioso" and 1988's "The Last Days of the Sicilians"). He doesn't fully explain how Massino was the "last" of anything at all or why we should be interested. Only in the final pages, after acknowledging that Massino already had been replaced by the time the book was written, does he finally come clean: "Time will only tell who'll be the next Last Godfather..." |
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09 Mar 06 Some long-overdue comments on Rick Porello's Corn Sugar and Blood: The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia: This isn't the most impressive-looking OC book, and New York/Chicago/LA snobs are likely to dismiss Cleveland as no more than a mob backwater. But "you can't judge a book by its cover," and Ohio was certainly one of the more important regions for American Mafia development. One other thing is undeniably true - Rick Porello can tell a story. This carefully researched 1995 book deals capably and at length with Cleveland-area underworld rackets and conflicts from just before the start of Prohibition through the 1970s. It succinctly (just over 200 pages) chronicles the long mob histories of the Porello and Lonardo clans. My two minor quarrels with this effort are that the author was apparently not interested in Ohio mob developments before the arrival of his ancestors and the Lonardos and that the apparent underworld feud between the two rival clans seems to have been given a quick coat of whitewash. |
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09 Mar 06 Two other worthwhile books have received little more than regional attention. They are the two volumes of Celeste A. Morello's Philadelphia history: Book 1 of the set, which deals with the period 1880-1931, was released in 1999. Book 2, 1931-1946, hit the shelves a couple of years later. As a crime historian, I treasure these books. As a reader, however, I was a bit disappointed. Morello appears to be a far better historian/researcher than she is a writer. She apparently had difficulty weaving an overabundance of facts into a coherent story. Accounts of underworld incidents often interrupt other accounts or character descriptions. While those aspects of the books diminish the reading experience somewhat, they barely put a dent in the author's overall achievement. Morello seems to have a rare understanding of the Sicilian psyche and illustrates the importance of old-country rivalries in making sense of underworld conflicts. Due to her willingness to tap into records neglected by other researchers, to her critical eye, and to her grasp of Sicilian tradition, the two volumes of Before Bruno contain a wealth of information that won't be found elsewhere. |
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20 Jul 05 In Gangster City (Barricade Books, 2004), Downey sifted through New York's municipal archives in an effort to make sense of the city's criminal history. That he undertook such a project is impressive in itself. That he delivered a coherent and readable book on such an enormous topic is amazing. Gangster City deals with organized crime before, during and just after Prohibition. Without neglecting the popular Mafia characters of the period, Downey gives appropriate weight to other ethnic criminal organizations. "Legs" Diamond, "Mad Dog" Coll, "Killer" Madden and Monk Eastman take their rightful places in Big Apple organized crime history. New York-based readers should enjoy Downey's second appendix. In it, he pinpoints the city locations of major underworld events. The book also features a decent index and sixteen pages of photographs. The book would have benefited from a couple of maps. |
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18 Jul 05 John Dickie's Cosa Nostra (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) tracks the Mafia underworld back to Italian unification efforts in the 19th Century. It explores the growing influence of the Sicilian criminal element and its flight overseas in the 1920s to escape Fascism. Dickie notes the reestablishment of Mafia authority in Sicily following the Second World War and describes intergang friction on that island from the 1960s to the present day. Dickie's work is the latest to illustrate England's fascination with the Sicilian Mafia. Though the book's jacket claims it is the "first English language history of the Cosa Nostra," readers of James Fentress's "Rebels and Mafiosi" (which certainly seemed to be in English when I read it a few years ago) will experience some deja vu. The book appears to have been very well researched. The subject matter might be a bit too heavy for the casual reader, and Dickie does not help matters with his academic writing style. If you are fond of short sentences and are fearful of semicolons, this one's probably not for you. The book contains a helpful bibliography, a good index, sixteen pages of photographs and a few maps. |
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21 Dec 02 I found the movie adaptation of Gangs of New York to be very entertaining. And it was wonderful to be able to "see" the Five Points of the Civil War Era. The director was obviously aware of many of the photographs of that place and time and brought them to life. The trip through Bandit's Roost is one example. The film's characters are certainly fictional and the setting is exaggerated, but there is something of value here to organized crime historians as well as movie lovers. |
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(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). Two decades after wowing us with Donnie Brasco-related revelations, former undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone returns to tie up some loose ends.
(Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2001). Historian/engineer Paul R. Kavieff handles his complex topic capably and professionally, providing us with a window into an active and influential Detroit underworld often neglected by other writers. The author of "The Purple Gang" broadens his focus for this, his second book, to explain in detail the activities and interrelationships of the Detroit area's significant Prohibition Era criminal organizations.
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