CONFESSIONS OF A MAFIA BOSS - GASPIPE
by Philip Carlo

The author's parents were friendly with Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, former Lucchese underboss, so Carlo got to interview Gas in his prison cell in Colorado, where he's serving several consecutive life sentences plus 455 years. The result: such spectacular profundities as "it was kill or be killed," or "I guess he got carried away with the job." Meanwhile he describes Casso as "a man of honor," "always as good as his word," "generous friend," "excellent husband and father," and, oh yes, psychopatic killer.
Casso turned rat after the trail of murders he committed intersected with the defections of several formerly close "friends" to the Witness Protection Program. Gas thought he'd made a deal with the Feds to serve 6.5 years in return for ratting out a host of bad guys, including the two crooked NYC detectives and a couple of FBI agents. But, according to Carlo, the Feds with whom he made the deal didn't want to hear about any crooked FBI agents. Nor did they want to hear about how their star stool pigeon, Sammy Da Bull Gravano, was a major drug dealer. So they reneged on the deal, and Gaspipe will never see the sun shine again.

The short of it is that you will find everything you need to know about Gaspipe and his spectacular fall in Guy Dawson's "The Brotherhoods : the True Story of Two Cops who Murdered for the Mafia," and Selwyn Raab's matchless "The Five Families." Meanwhile, Carlo's account, which adds nothing to the above, is filled with the kind of bad writing that would be an embarrassment in a freshman term paper. His meager account is padded out with spectacular displays of bad writing. He uses the worthless cliche, "In a very real sense," at least once every other page. Gaspipe and his wife "made love softly..." (I'm sure Gas described that to him in intimate detail); March, 2005 was "a blisteringly cold winter"[sic]; etc.

In the book jacket, Carlo describes himself as having earned "a Ph.D in the ways of the street." A G.E.D. in English Composition would have served him better.


Ntra la porta tua lu sangu � sparsu,
E nun me mporta si ce muoru accisu...
E s'iddu muoru e vaju mparadisu
Si nun ce truovo a ttia, mancu ce trasu.