If there is one kind of person who thinks about crime day in and day out more than anyone except perhaps a cop (and a very active cop at that), it is the shoe-leather New York news reporter. That was true in 1963, when Jimmy Breslin joined the Herald Tribune. It was true in the 1980s and 1990s when Times Square was a lair for thieves and prostitutes, the Port Authority bus terminal a sad first or last stop on a runaway’s journey, and murder in New York City topped 2,000 cases a year. And it was true yesterday whether it was at a solid online publication, at a linear television outlet, on a podcast, or within the diminished world of local newspapers. As Sam Roberts put it, this thinking was best done not behind a desk, but out on the street, where your feet slapped up and down.
And if there was anyone who knew how to walk down the city’s darkened streets and come back with the heart of the story or enter a funeral parlor where the gunned down lay in state and return to help you understand the world the gunned down had left, it was Breslin. If there was anyone who could walk into to a courthouse and walk back out and into a bar or a cafeteria and return to his desk and turn into words both the seriousness and the entertainment value of what he had seen—in other words, turn it into a short story, into literature—or who could sit across from a man who had been the Prime Minister of the Mob in America and bring you into the world of his retirement, it would be Breslin.
When he first set foot in the offices of the Herald Tribune in 1963, Jimmy Breslin was on the cusp of fame. From the Long Island Press, where he began his apprenticeship in sportswriting, he had turned to sports full time. Of sports reporting, it has been said, the best turn when they are young. It molds them, but their writing defines it as much as it defines them. Breslin wrote for the NEA syndicate (Newspaper Enterprise Association), for Sport magazine, for the Saturday Evening Post, for the Journal-American. He covered everything from Little League to “midget baseball” to college baskets to Willie Mays. At the Journal-American, one reporter remembers that listening to the “Rat-a-Tat” of Jimmy’s typing was like “watching Gene Krupa on the drums.”
But on the whole, as a sports reporter he was largely a journeyman.
While he credits, in one retelling of his influences (to Pete Hamill in 1988), Harry Grayson of the NEA with teaching him how to go to the loser’s locker room, what sports definitely taught him was how to write fast, against the clock.
Then he quit. It was 1960, and the Journal-American was a jail.
“He wasn’t there long . . . He left because he wasn’t doing what he wanted to. He wanted to write, but he wasn’t writing,” his Journal colleague sportswriter Dave Anderson said.
But before he quit, his sportswriting, free of daily tedium, had already begun to emerge in his magazine work. In May 1958, True—what was then called a “men’s magazine”—published under the headline “Racing’s Old Reliable,” a marvelous story that began like this:
The Thoroughbred horse racing capital of the nation is not at Calumet Farm, whose soft, sloping acres catch your eye, nor is it at ramshackle Churchill Downs, which catches your throat, or palatial Hollywood Park, which catches your bankroll. It is at 91-41 Chicot Court, which is a six-room house in an unpretentious section of New York City called Ozone Park.
The house has a cement backyard the size of a beer coaster and the driveway defies you to squeeze a car through without scraping the house next door. In the front, two tiny plots of grass border a brick walk. At 6:15 each morning, James E. Fitzsimmons starts down this walk as his son, Jim, pulls to the curb in a car.
Mr. Fitz is 83, and arthritis has bowed his spine so that he walks like a man carrying a keg of beer on his back and he uses an aluminum crutch under his right arm.
He began writing books. Sports books. The first of these was Sunny Jim. In this book his remarkable ability to synthesize detailed reporting with vivid, novelistic writing gave an example of what The New Journalism would become. The book and his next book, though he didn’t see them as such, were successors to the novel, as Tom Wolfe later in part defined this emerging journalism.
His first had to be Sunny Jim, the story of a horse trainer. Breslin exclaimed: “What else was I gonna write about. I grew up near a racetrack. It was all I knew.” Reading the book, you knew James Breslin was himself a thoroughbred.
On the Monday after Gallant Fox won the 1930 Kentucky Derby, the sun was just starting to gleam on the short-cropped, wet grass of Aqueduct’s infield when Mr. Fitz came to the rail, stop watch in hand, while Petee Wrack who was being pointed for the Suburban Handicap, bowed his neck against the exercise boy’s hold, and started to thump down the track to begin his workout. This is the way of the professional. Mr. Fitz had just won a Kentucky Derby, but here he was at work, first chance after it, just as he would have been if he had lost. The glamour and excitement and handshaking is for amateurs who have to be told that they are good. The big guy doesn’t need it. He goes back to the job. You don’t find much of this. For an obvious reason. Most people are amateurs.
All you needed to enjoy this book was to enjoy reading. You would learn everything you needed to know about horseracing along the way, as you became immersed in the life of James Fitzsimmons.
His second book was the successful and humor filled Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? It delights as it recounts the hopelessness of the first season of the New York Mets, a team that since that day has had enough haplessness to continue to bring a smile to the fan who can identify better with that than with a drawer full of World Series rings.
This is the one that took him from sports to what he called, in his Runyon book, “the main event.”
The night gave Runyon material . . . He got it the only way you can, by hanging out with people for long hours. Through so many decades in the city, only a couple of people ever came around with enough guts and energy to do a thing like this, and then at the end of the night they came up empty because they couldn’t write well enough to do a travel pamphlet.
The main event was news, and most often news involved crime and dark streets, amber saloons or rooms whose walls were thick with municipal-grade paint.
He gave you a view of the judge that you could only see from the worn defense table or through the eyes of the defendant, and a view of the proceeding that could only be found at the bar across the street from the courthouse, where you could listen as the defendant held court. The way he vividly brought you there was in the lyrical rhythms of short sentences, the kind that transport you until you lift your head, shake it and head for the doors as they open to the white tile and cement platform of your subway station. This was Breslin. When he achieved clarity, found irony, or in some other way made his point he would summarily say: “Beautiful!” Inhale. And leave the old joint, heading for the newspaper’s EXIT sign and turning his face toward tomorrow.
He started his day on the phone earlier than most. He ended it later than many. He usually used more shoe leather and worked as hard as or harder and gathered his facts as well or better than any reporter whose front-page beat was the cops, courts, jails, and the victims of the streets of New York. Then he returned to his desk, tie undone, cigar bitten to shreds and gave his editors exactly what they needed: something special.
He wrote millions of words. He spent many thousands of hours across sixty years of newspapering, mostly; magazine writing, which paid good money sometimes; and book writing steadily. Working the phones, walking the streets, stalking the halls of justice, and most of all climbing to the stories at the top of the stairs. The dream—always a deadline out of reach—was the same dream as that of those feature writers at the Trib so many years earlier: to be a novelist. That would probably have been a waste of his real talent. And he knew it.
He was, in fact, as the cable TV company HBO described him in the title of a documentary, A Deadline Artist:
July 13, 1963—“Tony’s Fluke Day”
August 13, 1963—“A Way of Life: Mourning a Gunned Down Man”
September 27, 1963—“Valachi: A Flashback”
September 29, 1963—“A Retiring Frank Costello”
October 1, 1963—“An Intensive Hunt for Kidnap Clues”
October 22, 1963—“The Last Gallo Living at 51 President St.”
November 13, 1963—“The Visitors”
These seven pieces of crime writing span the first year he spent at the Herald Tribune. His byline began appearing in 1963 and continued appearing through 1967, when that paper—with its originally vertical layout of gray type in six to eight columns, including shipping news and timetables—ran its presses for the final time and closed its doors, the victim of a labor dispute led by a man, Bert Powers, who thought he was a union leader but who cared little for writing and less, it seemed, for the city of New York, where he and his members earned their living.
It was a time when news, for many, continued to be delivered in ink. It was a time that could be viewed as a beginning to the end of an era in organized crime, a time when a redeeming quality could be found or imagined and put into prose. A time when crack dealing, beheading, and setting fire to whole families were not the most salient traits of gangsters. When they killed each other quietly, to send one kind of message, or left a body on a doorstep to send another.
In the first of these pieces, “Tony’s Fluke Day,” we join Jimmy Hoffa’s confidant in the powerful 180,000-member Teamsters Union. Tony Provenzano, boss of the 13,000-member Local 560 and head of the 80,000-member Joint Teamsters Council, was in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, for his sentencing.
It did not seem like a bad morning at all. The boss, Tony Provenzano, who is one of the biggest men in the Teamsters Union, walked up and down the corridor outside of this Federal courtroom in Newark and he had a little smile on his face and he kept flicking a white cigarette holder around.
“Today is the kind of a day for fishing,” Tony was saying. “We ought to go out and get some fluke.”
That is how the story began, with you in the halls of justice with the troupe of players—labor racketeers, it would seem—as they got ready for their star to go on stage.
It was a very good way, this fooling around yesterday morning, to kill time while they were waiting for the judge to send somebody out and tell them that he was ready to sentence Tony Pro for extorting money from a trucking firm.
There, in 120 three-syllables-or-less words (if you don’t count Provenzano), six commas and five periods and no contractions, you had all you needed to know about the play you would see through Breslin’s eyes.
But what makes for a masterful piece of work—and is seen in all the pieces that follow, written by a 36-year-old man who has come into his powers almost fully now—is what happens next, which is the element of time: the clock on Tony Pro’s life.
On June 11, a jury convicted Provenzano of extorting $17,000 from the Dorn Trucking Co. Provenzano . . . generally is regarded as the Teamster most intimate with Jimmy Hoffa, the union president. Tony Pro makes $80,000 a year. He stands to blow it all.
Now, he sat at a brown wooden table desk, with two lawyers on his left, and he folded his hands in front of him and waited. The courtroom was silent. The clock on the wall in the rear made a loud click when it hit 11:15. The courtroom has white granite walls broken up by brown wood and red drapes with gold wreaths on them. Four brown pillars, red drapes between them, formed the backdrop for Judge Shaw . . .
The two United States Attorneys who prosecuted Tony Pro sat alone. They were young-looking and expressionless.
“They look like the kind of kids you used to copy off in school,” Danny Rubino, one of Tony Pro’s closest friends said.
And it is this touch that captures, even better than a courtroom artist, the plight of Tony Pro.
These kids were the timekeepers. And they recommended to the judge what time might fit the crime that the jury had found.
“Mr. Provenzano,” the judge said, “if you have anything to say at this time I will listen to it.”
Tony got up and walked to the lectern in front of the Judge. He had on a gray sharkskin suit and gray tie. He is a short, heavy-set guy who has the puffed eyelids of one who used to fight. Drops of sweat sat on his upper lip. Tony took out a handkerchief and wiped them away. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and talked to the judge like he was a kid back in school and trying to answer a question.
“All I care to say is that I told the truth in the stand and I stand on the truth I told with my hand on the Bible.”
Nervousness made him stammer a little. He does not talk too well, but you do not need an elocution course to run a Teamsters Union. You need muscle, and Tony has plenty of that.
But none of it would matter now. His entourage of muscle was a troupe of extras relegated to the back rows.
The simplicity and speed with which Breslin captures time, speeds it up and slows it down in short sentences that sparkle like Tony’s ring, is what matters now. It was just 11:15. Between then and 11:30 the judge sentenced Tony to seven years and of course the federal insult of a fine on top—$10,000, which was certainly more than he would earn for even seven years of prison labor. And this now is where Tony’s gold wristwatch would be replaced by roll call, chow time, yard time, lockdown time, and all the other kinds of government time that are part of prison.
“The time has come to serve notice on those who show no respect for the rights of others that such action will not be tolerated. Extortion is a vicious type of crime. The penalty should be appropriate to deter others of like mind . . .” the judge said.
Time. Time in the hall. Time before the judge. Time on bail. Time for an appeal. Time in prison. All this time, which Breslin could make you feel as if you were seeing things through Tony’s eyes and hearing things through Tony’s ears.
The room was silent. The clock made a lot of noise when it hit 11:30.
Tony Pro’s two lawyers were at the table, right at his elbow, and each had a hand against his forehead and they were busy taking notes as the judge talked. And all of Tony’s guys were back in the seats behind him. But yesterday morning Tony Pro was all alone as he stood in the courtroom, because the words were for nobody else . . . The judge was talking only to Tony Pro and it was bad. The sweat formed all over Tony’s face. He was alone no matter who was in the room with him.
Then he stops the clock and tells the reader, you, because like the words between the judge and Tony, Breslin is only talking to you, what it means:
This is how it comes to all of them. They can bluster and laugh and everybody slaps them on the back, but at the end they have to stand alone and nobody can do anything for them.
It is a moment of emphasis that will reappear in other columns: the real sentence—whether prison, divorce, or death—is that the person at the center must endure this fate alone. Every reader understands it.
And then we are out of the court and across the street at “a bar called the Red Coach . . . [where] The bartender put a portable radio in front of Tony, so he could listen to the radio tell him his sentence.”
Breslin is there, a place where only the confidants can be, observing them as they listen to the radio make it real. The crime and the sentence and Tony’s fate are now available to anyone who could listen.
At the bar, he is pleasant company. You can’t buy a drink around the guy. Picking up checks has always been his reputation. Everybody in Jersey who stands with Tony Pro always tells you that.
“When I stopped driving a truck 12 years ago,” Tony was saying, “I got $6.40 a day. Now drivers here get $26.20.
“I’m going to play cards,” Tony said.
He picked up his change and shook hands good bye and left in his union-owned Cadillac.
And now it’s time to leave. This ending would have been enough for even the best reporter.
At this point, the article is approaching the final tally of 2,360 words. It’s a feature report of a length perfect for a standard-sized newspaper like the Trib. It was already maybe twice as long, or even a little longer, than the tabloid columns of the next phase of his newspaper career. But the Rockefeller Republican audience of the Trib, even the reinvigorated Trib where he worked, was an audience that rode the commuter trains in from the suburbs, and not so much the subway trains in from the distant reaches of Rockaway Beach, Far Rockaway, Brighton or Marine Park or Broad Channel or Woodlawn and Jerome, way up in the Bronx on the border to the suburb of Yonkers. Those trips could be a crowded hour or more with not enough elbow room to neatly fold back the pages of a paper set up as a broadsheet like the Trib. The trip on the commuter trains often had a comfortable seat, and even when crowded a bit more elbow room. And that is precisely how the story was written. With a bit more elbow room, for an audience that did not move its lips when it read.
And now, as their ride came to an end, so did the story: Everyone has gone home, the courthouse has emptied, and the bartender has wiped down the surface of the bar. Breslin has not left, for there is one last thing to leave you with.
Three blocks away, in a cafeteria that you had to go two flights down to get into, Richard Levin, who was one of the United States Attorneys who prosecuted Tony Pro, had lunch on a tray—scallops and a fruit salad and iced tea.
He is only 31 . . . He didn’t even have a handkerchief in his pocket . . . He never would make it with Tony Pro . . . Nothing on his hand flashed. The guy who sunk Tony Pro doesn’t even have a diamond on his pinky.
And this is how it comes to all of them. They can bluster and laugh, but in the morning when the other reporters wake up, Breslin will have stayed longer, gone to greater lengths, and told a better story. This intelligent tenacity, unlike some of his storytelling mechanisms, is not learned in schools and cannot be taught there. This is how to write about crime in a newspaper. It is seen in each of these examples of crime writing that followed.
This crime writing certainly fit the Herald Tribune ethos as a writer’s paper. It had long been known as one, well before the arrival of Jock Whitney and his money, the stable of Young Turk editors with their energetic new page layouts and the writers and their “New Journalism.” They fit the ethos, but they went well beyond what had come before. Theirs was the kind of portraiture that broke down forever the false wall of objectivity that had stood between the reader and the events. It brought the audience into the drama. Breslin closed the distance by moving back and forth between author, omniscient narrator and character who you could touch and feel and who could himself touch and feel. Breslin was fully present.
The old lady came in as old Italian women always come when they have to see the dead.
That is how “A Way of Life,” which appeared in the paper one month later, begins.
“Valachi: A Flashback” appeared in the paper on September 27. It begins like this:
It was a big, new Cadillac and Joe Valachi admired it. He had it parked on 116th St. near Pleasant Ave in East Harlem on this afternoon in 1953 and he was standing in front of a candy store talking to a couple of kids in their early 20’s, but he kept his eyes on the car while he talked. Joe was sure he was a big deal because of the car. A gangster without a Cadillac didn’t even qualify in his book.
“A Retiring Frank Costello” comes just two days later, on August 29. It is simply brilliant.
At 10 o’clock, when the waiter brought another round of anisette and coffee, Frank Costello looked at his watch and said it was going to be the last drink of the night.
He had to be up at 7:30 in the morning so he could take his poodle for a walk along Central Park West.
Costello, by 1963, had come a long way from the streets of East Harlem and the shelves of grocery store that his father established before summoning his son and the rest of his family from Sicily.
He had become the Prime Minister of the Mob and prided himself on diplomacy and restraint, and it was often noted that he never had carried a gun. This is not to say he didn’t have rivals and opponents killed. He did. But when his boss, Lucky Luciano, was sentenced to Sing Sing, it was Costello who took control of the assets of the Lucchese crime family and who created the commission that brought order if not peace to the Mob’s lucrative trade in gambling, labor racketeering, and vice.
And now, twelve years after he had walked out of the Mob hearings held by Senator Estes Kefauver, he was a detached observer of the hearings at which Joe Valachi was the star witness. Just a few days earlier, for the editions of September 27, Breslin had written:
Cadillac and all, Valachi was only a little guy in New York when he was around. But right now, he is a lot more than that. Today, Joe Valachi is big thing in this town.
Because of him New York is the hottest city in the country. There are so many wiretaps on phones around town that people in several spots around the city would be better off making calls on a network television show. They would have fewer people listening to them.
Now Valachi was a character brushstroked into a portrait of someone who was as important to the Mob as a Medici was to the city-state of Florence.
Costello was sitting with a couple of friends at a table in this East Side restaurant and nobody else in the place seemed to notice him.
Which seemed strange because now, with crime hearings on in Washington, you automatically thought of Frank Costello. In 1951, when the first Senate crime hearings were held, Costello was the name which put the show over. Day after day, the television cameras showing only his hands, Costello sat in a Federal Courtroom at Foley Square and faced the Kefauver Committee’s questioning. But there is to be no Frank Costello in Washington when the hearings resume today and the old star was saying that he may not even look at them on television.
“My agent told me not to go this time,” he was saying. “The last time I never got any of the re-run money. The residuals. They’ve been showing the same film off and on for 12 years and I never got a check yet.”
Costello had on a gray pin-striped suit and dark heavy-rimmed glasses. He fingered a box of English Oval cigarettes and he said he did not want to talk even about the weather, but when he was asked about Joe Valachi, he nodded his head and said, yes, he knew the guy.
“I knew him as Cago,” he said. “I knew him from when I was on vacation.”
“Where was that?”
“Where was that?” Costello repeated. “Vacation, you know, when I was away.” He waved a hand in the general direction of Atlanta.
“I tell you,” he said, “I never knew the guy before I saw him there. I didn’t know anything about the guy. Just that everybody down there called him Cago. Now a couple of weeks ago I see his pictures in all the papers and they say his name is Valachi.”
“He talks about you,” Costello was told. Valachi has testified that Costello was the head of the crime syndicate in New York until Vito Genovese replaced him.
Costello shrugged. “I can’t stop a man from talking,” he said.
“One thing he is talking about is all new to me. This Cosa Nostra. I tell you the truth, I never heard anybody use that expression. But you ought to use it. It sounds colorful.”
And here you have the writing. And Costello’s vision of himself as a celebrity with an agent offering Breslin some advice. “It sounds colorful.” It makes for one of the first portraits, and one of the great portraits, created by reporters who were called The New Journalists. Breslin and the others were simply hungry, hungry for fame, and they knew how to earn that fame by telling the truth in compelling, insightful, wonderful prose.
THE LAST GALLO LIVING AT 51 PRESIDENT ST.
The last Gallo living at 51 President Street is the grandmother, Mrs. Big Mama Nunziata, who is 77 and never scared easily before and sees no reason why she should start backing off now. She lives alone in a bare, four-room apartment on the second floor of the empty three-story building which once housed the Gallos, and their armed gang. . . . Mrs. Big Mama Nunziata would spit at a forest fire. She has seven children, 28 grandchildren and 22 great grandchildren, but she lives at 51 President Street, where all the trouble is, because three of the grandchildren, Joey, Larry and Albert Gallo, need the help, not the rest of the family . . .
There was this Sunday morning a while back when somebody in Brooklyn deliberately set off loaded rifles and two members of the Profaci gang, the Gallo rivals, were badly hurt. One of them was Carmine Persico. Since Persico had once tried to garrot Larry Gallo, the police, acting on a wild hunch, went looking for Larry.
They busted into 51 President Street, and for their troubles ran into Mama Nunziata, who was in a mood to fence with them. “Larry?” she said. “He watches the televeesh with me all night.”
“Mama,” one of the detectives said, “the guy who tried to strangle Larry got shot pretty bad and we want to ask him about it.”
“Oh,” Mama Nunziata said. “Is this boy, is he all right?”
“He’s not dead, but he’s hurt pretty bad.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, he’s not dead,” she said. “So tell me, this boy. Is he a good boy or is a bad boy?”
“Bad,” the detective said. “Very bad.”
Mama smiled in triumph. “Then it’s better off he dies.” That ended the interview.
Later, when Larry came back to 51 President Street, Mama Nunziata sat quietly in the apartment and kept looking at him.
“What’s the matter, Larry,” she said, “you can’t shoot straight?”
From this column, a bestseller was born and published in 1969: The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The book is filled with humor, and as it is from a time before the Sopranos came into living rooms and slurred many Italian Americans and delighted many others with the Mob’s crude speech and cheap crime, it can be forgiven today for its weaknesses and praised for its humor. It became a movie in 1971. It made lots of money. It featured a young actor named Robert De Niro.
The fame and the piles of money—for a writer from Queens—that the movie would earn Breslin in the years right after the book came out would cause nothing but grief for the editors that came later in his life. Famous. Flush. Aggrieved. Breslin would repeatedly launch one of his crusades against stability at home and at work. But through it all he would follow Mama Nunziata’s advice and stick to one thing:
“This Valachi,” she was saying, “what does he do? He’s with a Genowaysee for 30 years and all of a sudden he stool pigeons . . .
“Look,” she said, the hands out in front of her now, “what do these people want? Do they want to be a gangster, a thief and a stool pigeon all at the same time? That’s no good.
“You got to stick to one thing.”
And of course came the Lion, mascot for a time of the Gallo gang, and perhaps more famous in the movie than De Niro or even the star, Jerry Orbach. Off screen, in what could feel ironic, Orbach would be friends with Crazy Joe Gallo, the Mafia clown prince whose lion it had been, and Orbach was with him, celebrating with champagne at the Copacabana nightclub the evening before Gallo’s forty-third birthday on April 7, 1972, when Gallo would be gunned down around 4:30 A.M. inside Umberto’s, a red sauce Italian clam joint on the corner of Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The Gallo party was about to dig into second helpings of scungilli, shrimp and pasta, according to the New York Post, when the four assassins burst in and opened fire. Gallo had tried for his gun. Too late. He stumbled out the front door and died.
This was the Mob in all its ruthlessness. These were not the gangsters of Runyon, who were warmhearted and could be made to sing in a musical and who welcomed Runyon to their tables, in effect to become their Homer and make them heroic.
“Don’t go near Tenth Avenue,” Breslin quoted Runyon as being warned when he returned to New York after covering the baseball season. “They got a lot of killers there.”
“‘Where on Tenth Avenue,’ he said.
“If there are killers, he reasoned, then that means there are also a lot of crap games and, even better, loose dolls. When he got to the corner of Tenth Avenue and 47th Street, he took one look at the guys standing around and wishing mightily for trouble, and at once he felt at home.”
The Mob, in all its history, had never been warmhearted. Its assassinations, extortion and bombings, and preying on honest Italian American shopkeepers were well known from its earliest days. But now they were becoming ugly celebrities and soon they would have John Gotti, perhaps the ugliest of all.
[Sammy the Bull] Gravano and Johnny Gambino went to the boss, John Gotti, who conducted thuggery out of two social clubs, each with the same dreary brick fronts . . . They are an indictment of the film and news businesses that, without understanding, have made Gotti and all about him so deliciously sinister. When the whole thing consists of dreary little people in preposterous storefronts, dungeons really.
Breslin does not write about them often, but when he does, this is the shift in tone from his writing about the labor racketeer, Tony Pro, and the Prime Minister, Frank Costello.
Gravano, who is trying to trade his stories for his life, testifies that he and Gotti sat in a clubroom and thought they were God and a murder was ordered and then they went to dinner.
This version is informed not just by the facts, but by his wife, another honest, gifted Italian American who had to live in the shadow of Mob stigma, something Breslin mentions in his writing. He would rarely find humor in gangsters later in his career, though his deft touch could still make you smile—as it does in his 2008 book The Good Rat, which chronicles the crimes of two cops who were Mob hit men with badges. As a reviewer noticed, he wrote operatically, but he captured the repugnance of these men.
He became but the first of eight murders that Burt Kaplan admits to perpetrating along with Gaspipe Casso and the two detectives Eppolito and Caracappa. That there could be more than only eight is at least possible. You get tired of confessing to all these killings and just stop. Anyway, who wants to hear about another in a long line of bad guys shot in the back of the head?
Breslin’s earlier comedic version of the Gallos descends from Runyon, and he captured through Big Mama Nunziata the buffoonery of this deadly world:
“It used to be crazy here. They had the lion. Ooohhh, what a big head he had. He ate $5 worth of steak every day. We got him out on the leash walking down Umberto’s, and this fellow comes up from the docks and he says, ‘What a big head that dog got.’
“I say to him, ‘Dog? That’s no dog. What’s the matter with you? That’s a lion.’ You should have seen him run back to the docks . . .
“Then Joey had the panel truck and he put the lion in the back all cops stop him one day . . .
“Joey says, ‘Please don’t open the back of the truck. It’s very bad.’
“You know how nosey those cops are. This one goes right to the back and opens the doors to the truck. So here’s the lion, with the big head, and the cop he yells and starts to run. Joey got to grab the lion before the lion chases the cop.”