TO DROP A DIME

To drop a dime is to rat, to squeal, to make that fatal call after which you are a marked man. Ira Pecznick, an admitted Mafia hit man who has made his bones many times, found himself out of favor with the Campisi family (a family within The Family) and facing life imprisonment. Still only in his late twenties, Pecznick is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants (in Poland he was called a Jew, in Israel a goy), whose fifteen years in the States have been spent building up a list of B&E's (breaking and entering), burglaries, stickups, payroll heists, murders, and jail sentences that the present book can only deal with in outline--there are so many. He's the genuine article, a total criminal. However, New Jersey's attorney general accepted Pecznick's desire to turn state's evidence, now has the Campisis behind bars. Pecznick has been released and given a new identity in another state. The story of a thicktongued thug as boneheaded as the butt of most Polish jokes. In its way as bloody as Jaws.