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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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