By Jimmy Breslin. Ecco. 288 pages. $24.95.
Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who has covered New York City's metro beat for five decades, is no stranger to organized crime. As a cub reporter in the early 1960s, his coverage of the notorious Gallo-Profaci mob war led to his 1970 best-seller "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight."
Breslin has come to know some of the soldiers, capos, under-bosses and godfathers that populate the underworld. As he admits in "The Good Rat," his compulsively readable summation of many years covering the Mob, "In my years in the newspaper business, the Mafia comes down to one thing: circulation."
Breslin has never been conned by the brash talk or charismatic allure often associated with gangsters. If you've read his gritty columns, then you're familiar with the contempt and acidic humor that drips from his sentences. "The Mafia no longer sends great chords crashing down from the heavens," he writes in the new book. "As it dissolves, you inspect it for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are actually either unintelligible or ignored."
Breslin has many great tales in his arsenal, and in his rambling, scattershot style he gets around to most of them in "The Good Rat" (if only, at times, for the duration of a neatly downed shot glass). The gang's all here, from Crazy Joe Gallo to the Teflon Don himself, John Gotti. However, Breslin's primary focus is the recent criminal case of the so-called Mafia Cops. The revelations that stemmed from the trial (made possible by a bottom-feeder in the Mob Food Chain) were sickening -- even by gangland standards.
For approximately 10 years, a deadly arrangement existed between a capo in the Bonnano Family named Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, and two NYC police detectives named Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa. Their alliance had an appalling efficiency: Whenever Casso wanted a rival gang member eliminated, the cops would use the cache their profession provided them with to oblige. This resulted in about a dozen bullet-riddled bodies. The middleman who funneled information and money between Casso and New York's Finest was named Burt Kaplan.
A jeweler by trade -- home in the suburbs, daughter in law school -- Kaplan also happened to be a lifelong criminal. And having contemplated the remaining years of his life, he had become sure of two possible conclusions: a natural death behind bars, or an unnatural one on the street.
Neither seemed very appealing. So he took a deal -- and took the stand.
Omerta, the Mafia's "code of silence," is now just a quaint word in the dictionary. "The Good Rat" can be read as Breslin's dirge for the Mob, which has been brought to its knees by disregard for this once sacred tradition. Beginning in the 1980s, an unending parade of soldiers and capos have "flipped," taking the stand in courtrooms across the country (but primarily New York State) to point accusatory fingers at the "bosses" who once dictated their lives.
It's a tawdry tale, stripped of the veneer of romanticism that movies like "The Godfather" once gave organized crime. Toward the end of the book, Breslin describes a lineup of aged defendants: "They look like they should be waiting on a bench outside a supermarket pharmacy window somewhere in Florida."
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