Word: underboss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Allegation 2: that Frank was involved with the Mob. Now, I have been asked about this charge many times, and I always give the same response: Just because Frank posed for pictures with every leading capo, underboss and cement contractor of the day doesn't mean that he joined them in their nefarious underworld activities. Oh, occasionally he rode along on a hit or two, but that was just one of those social obligations a star of his stature is expected to discharge. He never really liked...
...Pretend You Don't See Her by Mary Higgins Clark 2. Last Rights by Philip Shelby 3. Underboss by Peter Maas 4. The Partner by John Grisham 5. Star Trek: First Contact by J.M. Dillard...
...beyond the scope of this reviewer's expertise to adjudicate the accuracy of events as related by the title figure to author Peter Maas in Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia (HarperCollins; 308 pages; $25). Like most people when you get right down to it, our protagonist--the most famous snitch in Mob history, the man whose testimony helped put "Teflon Don" John Gotti behind bars for good--sees himself as a voice of reason in a world of blowhards and sociopaths. A contract on his brother-in-law, which Gravano himself doesn...
Like Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can't get enough of, Al Pacino or no Al Pacino. Both Gravano and Maas (author previously of The Valachi Papers) claim Gravano will get no money from this de facto memoir. But why a man who recently left the federal witness-protection program would want to draw such attention to himself is a mystery. Maybe, given his gift for aphorism, he's thinking about going out on the corporate lecture circuit. "There's enough people to shoot in the head...
...Anthony Salvatore Casso, 52, one of the nation's most feared Mafia leaders, surrendered -- hands up high, dripping wet -- to an FBI SWAT team. Cracked one agent: "He didn't have his gun in the shower like in the spaghetti westerns." Federal agents say that Casso, a Lucchese family underboss street-named "Gaspipe" (possibly because of his blowtorch safecracking skills), was hated within the crime family because of his penchant for ordering hits simply because a fellow mobster annoyed him. "We felt that some of the tips were coming from the Luccheses," says FBI agent Donald North, who supervises organized...