An authoritative look at a once-rampant predator now at bay.
True-crime veteran Carlo (The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, 2006, etc.) chronicles the extraordinary life of Lucchese family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso.
Such is our Mob-obsessed culture that Paul Castellano, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, John Gotti and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, Casso contemporaries that figure prominently in this narrative, require no introduction. Because of widespread publicity surrounding the arrest and trial of dirty NYPD cops Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito (see Jimmy Breslin’s recent The Good Rat) the public has only recently been alerted to Casso, the Mafia chieftain at whose behest the detectives killed. Within La Cosa Nostra, though, Gaspipe was famous, thanks to his vast network of law-enforcement contacts, stoolies and plants. As an inter-family bridge builder, he was celebrated for his lucrative crime schemes, feared for his expertise and readiness to use a .38 revolver and admired for his discretion and reliability. Notwithstanding his eventual decision to break his vow of omerta and cooperate with law enforcement, Casso sits today in a supermax prison, in part at least, because he knows too much. Fearful of opening him to cross-examination, prosecutors have declined to permit Casso to testify at Mafia trials where the lies fellow rat Gravano told—testimony upon which numerous convictions rest—would be exposed. Moreover, Casso knows too much about the crooked cops and FBI agents who for years helped him break laws and evade capture. Thanks to a family connection—his mother was once Casso’s wife’s best friend; his sister used to babysit the Casso children—Carlo has the real goods. He shares all the lurid particulars about a criminal career stretching from a South Brooklyn boyhood, to Casso’s Mafia-arranged, no-show union job at age 17, to his early murders, to his notoriously effective B&E crew, to his becoming a “made” man in 1974, to his making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1990. Though the prose too often gets in the way—no observation unrepeated, no cliché unuttered—the inside information about the lifestyle, rituals, killings and betrayals is priceless.
An authoritative look at a once-rampant predator now at bay.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-142984-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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