Word: breslin
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...final months of life, Mobster Joey Gallo developed an unusual friendship with Actor Jerry Orbach and his wife, Writer Maria Curro. Orbach had played a role patterned in part after Gallo's life in the movie version of Jimmy Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Out of the blue, the Orbachs got a call from Gallo, who wanted to meet his screen counterpart. The three saw each other almost daily after that. The Orbachs told TIME correspondent James Willwerth how they felt about Gallo. It is a picture that his rivals-and victims-would...
Jerry remembers: "Breslin's book had portrayed Joey as a clown. Then when I met Joey, I was absolutely amazed to find out that maybe he had been a wild kind of nut before he went to prison, but something had happened to him inside. He'd done nothing but read there, and it was startling to talk with him." Marta adds: "When he asked me whether I preferred Camus or Sartre, I almost fell into a plate of spaghetti...
MAFIA business is not precisely booming these days, but business about the Mafia has never been better. There are nearly 1,000,000 God father hard covers in print, and over 10 million paperbacks. Jimmy Breslin's bestselling comic novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight - said to be a takeoff on the chaotic exploits of Brooklyn's Gallo gang - was recently reincarnated as a movie. Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father, a detailed and understanding portrait of the son of Mafia Boss Joseph Bonanno, has been on the bestseller lists for four months...
Italians, however, might-perhaps ought-to take special offense. Jimmy Breslin's comic novel recorded the exploits of a sad-sack mob of Brooklyn hoods with good-humored scorn. Waldo Salt's chaotic script turns Breslin's characters, which were already caricatures, into vicious racial stereotypes. Everyone is either venal, murderous, retarded or deformed; and since they are almost all Italians, one might be tempted to conclude that everyone whose ancestors were born between Sicily and Milan is a feeble-minded racketeer...
...Breslin went on to say that a neighbor of his, killed in Vietnam, "died to keep alive the lies of some people who thought they were very important...