Friends of ours: Harry Aleman
Bob Lowe's father told him not to get involved. Just keep his mouth shut and forget everything he saw. But to the 25-year-old blue collar mechanic, husband, and father, that was entirely out of the question. How could he? While walking his dog he saw his acquaintance, Billy Logan, murdered on the street right in front of him. And more importantly, he held the triggerman's gaze for four frightening seconds, enough to easily identify him in a mug shot book, lineup, or court chambers. In Lowe's mind, it was his simple duty as a citizen to I.D. the guy and put a killer behind bars.
But Bob Lowe's seemingly straightforward decision to do that duty in 1972 provided the catalyst for a 25-year hellish personal odyssey, all while being constantly on the move and looking over his shoulder for the bullet with his name on it. That's because the face that Lowe saw didn't belong to any garden variety street thug, but that of Harry Aleman, the feared, proficient and very busy hit man for the Chicago mob. And Harry had a lot of powerful friends.
EVERYBODY PAYS is not the story of Logan or even Aleman, but of how Lowe's life began to spiral out of control after his agreeing to testify. Little did he know that larger forces were literally conspiring against him. Although he positively identified Aleman immediately following the shooting, the corrupt investigating cops buried the information for four years. At the eventual trial, the presiding judge had been bribed, deeming Lowe "a liar" in open court. Left dangling when Aleman was acquitted --- and in real fear for their lives --- the Lowes entered the Witness Protection Program, beginning a harrowing litany of changes in their residence, job, lifestyles, and even identities.
The constant pressure drove Lowe to extended flirtations with booze, cocaine, petty crime, and estrangement from his family. After years of bitter thoughts and second-guessing of his actions, Lowe eventually does crawl back. The book closes with Aleman's 1997 retrial --- a historic overturning of the Constitutional "double jeopardy" clause --- and ultimate vindication for Lowe, who as an older, grayer man found himself giving the same testimony that he had 20 years earlier.
Possley and Kogan --- both experienced journalists for the Chicago Tribune --- keep the narrative fast-paced, to the point and interesting. They also know their turf well, particularly in their discussion of the hierarchy of the Chicago Mafia and how it differs from its flashier, more storied New York counterpart. Drawing on historical material as well as fresh interviews from most of the participants (save the incarcerated Aleman, who refused to talk with them), the pair paint a sympathetic but even-keeled portrait of Lowe, who was not entirely blameless for his subsequent misfortunes.
Ultimately, the large and looming question that hangs throughout the book is this: Was it all worth it? Was it worth it for Lowe to go through his own seven circles of hell for doing what he initially felt would be a simple and just action, or should he have heeded his father's advice to go deaf, dumb, and blind? The reader is left to ponder that for themselves --- as well as think about what they'd do in a similar situation. In either case, the book's title stands as both a warning and a thesis: in crime, everyone does pay --- and not just the guilty.
Thanks to Bob Ruggiero
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
After Winning Oscar, Scorsese to Direct "The Departed" Sequel?
The Academy Awards aired live from Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday. It was the most international awards show in Oscar history. Afterwards backstage, Martin Scorsese agreed to direct George Lopez, Carlos Mencia, and Paul Rodriguez in The Deported.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Goodbye Fellas
Friends of ours: Joseph Valachi, Bugsy Siegal, Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti
The perspective on organized crime that Thomas A. Reppetto developed from his career in law enforcement and more than 20 years as president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, tempered by a Harvard Ph.D., paid off handsomely in his 2004 book, “American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
,” which described the mob’s growth to its pinnacle in the mid-20th century. The writing was lucid, concise and devoid of sensationalism, rare qualities in the plethora of books by turncoat mobsters and their ex-wives, journalists, cops and aged Las Vegas insiders. This equally well-written sequel, “Bringing Down the Mob,” chronicles the Mafia’s near demise over the past 50 years. Following this specific thread of American history, general readers will benefit from Reppetto’s cogent examples of how changes in the culture at large affected both the mob itself and the tactics employed by law enforcement. Organized-crime buffs will be familiar with much of the material, but unaccustomed to seeing it assembled into so big and coherent a picture.
In 1950 and ’51, the Kefauver Senate committee’s televised hearings on the Mafia introduced mobsters into American living rooms, the lasting images being close-ups of Frank Costello’s manicured hands — he did not want his face on camera. The public outcry was short-lived and the Mafia cruised comfortably until 1957, when, in Apalachin, N.Y. (population 350), more than 60 Mafia notables attended a conference that was raided by the state police. As Reppetto says, the media have often presented the raid as “some hick cops stumbling on a mob conclave.” He debunks that interpretation and shows how the publicity moved the resistant J. Edgar Hoover to action, so that “from Apalachin on, the United States government was at war with the Mafia.”
As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy led the next sustained attack on organized crime. He focused obsessively and successfully on Jimmy Hoffa, who was allied with the Mafia while serving as president of the two-million-member Teamsters union. Kennedy also brought before the TV cameras Joe Valachi, a low-level Mafia soldier who, with some coaching, provided extensive information “without revealing that much of it had been obtained through legally questionable electronic eavesdropping.” A new name for the Mafia emerged from the hearings — La Cosa Nostra — which allowed Hoover to say he had been right all along: there was no Mafia; there was a Cosa Nostra organization, exposed by the F.B.I.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Las Vegas provided a battlefield on which the F.B.I., armed with bugging equipment (and caught using it illegally in 1965), defeated the mob, which had been involved from the start of significant gambling in Nevada in the 1940s. Bugsy Siegel put up one of the first casinos on the Strip, the Flamingo. Las Vegas was designated an “open city,” in which any mob family could operate. As Reppetto writes, mobsters “secured Teamster loans to build casinos that they controlled through fronts, or ‘straw men.’ ” (Frank Sinatra lost his license as owner of a Nevada resort for allowing the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, reputedly his “hidden backer,” to frequent the hotel.) These casinos had overseers appointed by the controlling family to run “the skim,” cash siphoned off before the casino take was put on the books for tax purposes. The poorly chosen overseers played a large role in bringing down the mob in Las Vegas, generally being far too violent and unsophisticated to operate in a milieu that demanded a veneer of respectability. Reppetto points out the factual basis of much of Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese’s script for the film “Casino
,” including the chilling scene of Joe Pesci squeezing a victim’s head in a vise until an eye pops out (although that incident actually happened in Chicago). The mob’s management of Las Vegas turned out to be “a disaster,” Reppetto says. “Once it was the Mafia that was well run, while law enforcement plodded along. ... The situation was now reversed.” In the 1980s, corporations began to take control of the casinos.
One of the great hurdles the government had to clear at the start of its war on the Mafia, Reppetto says, was that the approach required to bring down a criminal organization ran “counter to general principles of American criminal justice”: “The usual practice, investigating a known crime in order to apprehend unknown culprits, was reversed. Now the government was investigating a known criminal to find crimes he might be charged with.” The most potent weapon was developed in 1970 — the RICO statute, to which Reppetto devotes a full chapter, pointing out that it took its creator, G. Robert Blakey, a decade of proselytizing before prosecutors would employ it.
A minor quibble: I think the book gives short shrift to the effect of the witness protection program, without which far fewer mobsters could have “flipped” over the years. As to Reppetto’s belief that the Mafia is in serious decline? At any time in the past, asking an average American to name major mob guys might well have elicited several of the following: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti. Who comes to mind today?
Thanks to Vincent Patrick whose novels include “The Pope of Greenwich Village
” and “Smoke Screen
.”
The perspective on organized crime that Thomas A. Reppetto developed from his career in law enforcement and more than 20 years as president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, tempered by a Harvard Ph.D., paid off handsomely in his 2004 book, “American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
,” which described the mob’s growth to its pinnacle in the mid-20th century. The writing was lucid, concise and devoid of sensationalism, rare qualities in the plethora of books by turncoat mobsters and their ex-wives, journalists, cops and aged Las Vegas insiders. This equally well-written sequel, “Bringing Down the Mob,” chronicles the Mafia’s near demise over the past 50 years. Following this specific thread of American history, general readers will benefit from Reppetto’s cogent examples of how changes in the culture at large affected both the mob itself and the tactics employed by law enforcement. Organized-crime buffs will be familiar with much of the material, but unaccustomed to seeing it assembled into so big and coherent a picture.In 1950 and ’51, the Kefauver Senate committee’s televised hearings on the Mafia introduced mobsters into American living rooms, the lasting images being close-ups of Frank Costello’s manicured hands — he did not want his face on camera. The public outcry was short-lived and the Mafia cruised comfortably until 1957, when, in Apalachin, N.Y. (population 350), more than 60 Mafia notables attended a conference that was raided by the state police. As Reppetto says, the media have often presented the raid as “some hick cops stumbling on a mob conclave.” He debunks that interpretation and shows how the publicity moved the resistant J. Edgar Hoover to action, so that “from Apalachin on, the United States government was at war with the Mafia.”
As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy led the next sustained attack on organized crime. He focused obsessively and successfully on Jimmy Hoffa, who was allied with the Mafia while serving as president of the two-million-member Teamsters union. Kennedy also brought before the TV cameras Joe Valachi, a low-level Mafia soldier who, with some coaching, provided extensive information “without revealing that much of it had been obtained through legally questionable electronic eavesdropping.” A new name for the Mafia emerged from the hearings — La Cosa Nostra — which allowed Hoover to say he had been right all along: there was no Mafia; there was a Cosa Nostra organization, exposed by the F.B.I.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Las Vegas provided a battlefield on which the F.B.I., armed with bugging equipment (and caught using it illegally in 1965), defeated the mob, which had been involved from the start of significant gambling in Nevada in the 1940s. Bugsy Siegel put up one of the first casinos on the Strip, the Flamingo. Las Vegas was designated an “open city,” in which any mob family could operate. As Reppetto writes, mobsters “secured Teamster loans to build casinos that they controlled through fronts, or ‘straw men.’ ” (Frank Sinatra lost his license as owner of a Nevada resort for allowing the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, reputedly his “hidden backer,” to frequent the hotel.) These casinos had overseers appointed by the controlling family to run “the skim,” cash siphoned off before the casino take was put on the books for tax purposes. The poorly chosen overseers played a large role in bringing down the mob in Las Vegas, generally being far too violent and unsophisticated to operate in a milieu that demanded a veneer of respectability. Reppetto points out the factual basis of much of Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese’s script for the film “Casino
,” including the chilling scene of Joe Pesci squeezing a victim’s head in a vise until an eye pops out (although that incident actually happened in Chicago). The mob’s management of Las Vegas turned out to be “a disaster,” Reppetto says. “Once it was the Mafia that was well run, while law enforcement plodded along. ... The situation was now reversed.” In the 1980s, corporations began to take control of the casinos.One of the great hurdles the government had to clear at the start of its war on the Mafia, Reppetto says, was that the approach required to bring down a criminal organization ran “counter to general principles of American criminal justice”: “The usual practice, investigating a known crime in order to apprehend unknown culprits, was reversed. Now the government was investigating a known criminal to find crimes he might be charged with.” The most potent weapon was developed in 1970 — the RICO statute, to which Reppetto devotes a full chapter, pointing out that it took its creator, G. Robert Blakey, a decade of proselytizing before prosecutors would employ it.
A minor quibble: I think the book gives short shrift to the effect of the witness protection program, without which far fewer mobsters could have “flipped” over the years. As to Reppetto’s belief that the Mafia is in serious decline? At any time in the past, asking an average American to name major mob guys might well have elicited several of the following: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti. Who comes to mind today?
Thanks to Vincent Patrick whose novels include “The Pope of Greenwich Village
” and “Smoke Screen.”
Friday, February 23, 2007
Virtuous Trepidation: The Black Hand of the Mafia
Dive deep into the complicated world of an internationally connected Mafia in Carl E. Prichard's new fictitious book, "Virtuous Trepidation: The Black Hand of the Mafia".
When low-level hit man and thief Antonio Spinelli stumbles into the wrong job, he loses his partner and fatally wounds an FBI agent who is on a mission to arrest the drug dealer Spinelli was robbing. He is fortunate enough to escape with his life, though, and enough heroin to buy a new identity and five years in the French Foreign Legion.
Upon his return to the United States, he takes a new wife, the beautiful Ruthie, and a new moniker, "the Frenchman." He meets up with another criminal known as Shaggy Dog and his beautiful, high-class hooker girlfriend in Las Vegas. The two men go into business together and complete some very successful heists, but run into trouble when a job leads them to Italy and they kill the only son and daughter-in-law of Gus DePhillips, the most powerful Mafia don in the United States.
When Gus learns of the deaths, he vows revenge. He and his second-in- command, Frank Tomasino, begin a country-wide campaign to seek out the guilty parties and make them pay.
Forced into hiding, the Frenchman, Shaggy Dog, Ruthie and Nancy Jean hide out in Las Vegas. In the meantime, the Detroit Mafia begins to crumble and the national organization suffers when Gus is assassinated. The equally ruthless Frank is set to take over in the United States, but he is soon beckoned to Italy by the Italian don who offers him control of the entire organization. While the Frenchman and Shaggy Dog are given great opportunities to advance within the organization, their inability to resist beautiful women leads to their eventual downfall.
"Readers who like nicely tied-up stories of ribbons and lollipops may quickly toss this book aside, for this is a book that takes you deep into the life and death, the power and the fear that is organized crime," Prichard says. "The action is fast-paced and the storyline uncomfortably plausible."
This complex tale of connections and killings will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Don't miss this thrilling story of betrayal, deceit and murder.
Prichard lives in the Rocky Mountain region in the western United States where he writes full-time. He has written two previous books, "Silent Agony
" and "Fate's Left Hand
"
When low-level hit man and thief Antonio Spinelli stumbles into the wrong job, he loses his partner and fatally wounds an FBI agent who is on a mission to arrest the drug dealer Spinelli was robbing. He is fortunate enough to escape with his life, though, and enough heroin to buy a new identity and five years in the French Foreign Legion.
Upon his return to the United States, he takes a new wife, the beautiful Ruthie, and a new moniker, "the Frenchman." He meets up with another criminal known as Shaggy Dog and his beautiful, high-class hooker girlfriend in Las Vegas. The two men go into business together and complete some very successful heists, but run into trouble when a job leads them to Italy and they kill the only son and daughter-in-law of Gus DePhillips, the most powerful Mafia don in the United States.
When Gus learns of the deaths, he vows revenge. He and his second-in- command, Frank Tomasino, begin a country-wide campaign to seek out the guilty parties and make them pay.
Forced into hiding, the Frenchman, Shaggy Dog, Ruthie and Nancy Jean hide out in Las Vegas. In the meantime, the Detroit Mafia begins to crumble and the national organization suffers when Gus is assassinated. The equally ruthless Frank is set to take over in the United States, but he is soon beckoned to Italy by the Italian don who offers him control of the entire organization. While the Frenchman and Shaggy Dog are given great opportunities to advance within the organization, their inability to resist beautiful women leads to their eventual downfall.
"Readers who like nicely tied-up stories of ribbons and lollipops may quickly toss this book aside, for this is a book that takes you deep into the life and death, the power and the fear that is organized crime," Prichard says. "The action is fast-paced and the storyline uncomfortably plausible."
This complex tale of connections and killings will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Don't miss this thrilling story of betrayal, deceit and murder.
Prichard lives in the Rocky Mountain region in the western United States where he writes full-time. He has written two previous books, "Silent Agony
" and "Fate's Left Hand"
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Goomba Diet: Living Large and Loving It Book
The Goomba Diet is the personal lifestyle guide from Steven R. Schirripa--Bobby "Bacala" Baccalieri from The Sopranos and author of "A Goomba's Guide to Life". Developed over decades of dreaming about and then living the high life, it's a how-to guide for happy living--how to duke a maître d', how to order a good meal, how to be a good father, a good husband and a good friend, and how to behave at a wedding, a funeral, and on the job.
The Goomba Diet is for everyone with an appetite for life, and for everyone who understands that the key to happiness isn't found in a smaller waistline but in a bigger heart. Like Steve says, "There's a lot of skinny actors wearing black turtlenecks and tending bar right now who'd kill for a part on The Sopranos. This fat goomba is doing all right for himself."
So relax! Stop worrying about how much youýre eating, and start worrying about how much you're enjoying it. Lose weight if you like--but live! Put a fork in your right hand, a hunk of bread in your left, and mangia like you mean it.
The Goomba Diet is for everyone with an appetite for life, and for everyone who understands that the key to happiness isn't found in a smaller waistline but in a bigger heart. Like Steve says, "There's a lot of skinny actors wearing black turtlenecks and tending bar right now who'd kill for a part on The Sopranos. This fat goomba is doing all right for himself."
So relax! Stop worrying about how much youýre eating, and start worrying about how much you're enjoying it. Lose weight if you like--but live! Put a fork in your right hand, a hunk of bread in your left, and mangia like you mean it.
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