Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [247]
Hill and Pileggi’s success set off a rush to acquire Mafia books among the major publishers. In this, S&S was fortunate to be ahead of the curve. As with any other profession, word of mouth was the key to success. In wiseguy circles, the fact that S&S had published Bonanno’s and Pileggi’s books was enough to make us, for some time, the favorite publisher of organized crime. From telephone booths all over New York City I received calls from gravel-voiced gentlemen whose names ended in vowels, eager to sell me their story of life in the mob.
Some worked, some didn’t. A contract with a mob lawyer who promised to reveal where Jimmy Hoffa was buried didn’t work out, nor did a book on the bloodletting in the Philadelphia mob by one of the principal bloodletters. On the other hand, a relapsed mobster named Joseph (“Joe Dogs”) Iannuzzi, after failing with his autobiography, hit one out of the ballpark when he conceived of The Mafia Cookbook. Joe Dogs, an amiable felon whose beating at the hands of one Tommy Agro encouraged him to become a federal informant and witness, was an expert cook, having in better days prepared food for Agro’s crew in many a hideout. His cookbook became an instant success.
Joe had honed his skills while cooking for the marshals who guarded him and the FBI agents who came to question him about his former associates. In the end, it was partly due to Joe Dogs’s testimony that the heads of the major New York families were eventually convicted. There was a certain irony in the fact that a mob hanger-on, not even a “made man,” better known as a cook than as a criminal, had brought low such major organized crime figures as Tony Salerno, Carmine Persico, John Gotti, and Vincent Gigante, not to speak of the fact that Joe Dogs’s revelations about the mob were the indirect cause for the assassination of the Boss of Bosses himself, “Big Paul” Castellano.
It was the kind of thing that would have brought a faint smile of irony to the lips of Joe Bonanno. He had always believed that his colleagues were letting the wrong kind of element into their world, and neither Joe Dogs, with his pots of sauce, nor Tommy Agro, an undersize enforcer with a ridiculous hairpiece and a hair-trigger temper, would have seemed to him altogether serious as men of honor.
Cosa nostra had descended in one generation from the sublime to the ridiculous. The world that Gay Talese had written about with such seriousness in Honor Thy Father and that Bonanno himself had described so lovingly in A Man of Honor was reduced to grotesque comedy, enacted by buffoons. The “men of honor” had once controlled the streets, enforcing what they thought of as justice (of a fairly predatory nature, to be sure) by their own brutal code. Then, they had lived in the neighborhood; now they had mostly moved to the suburbs, and came into the city like any other commuters: warily, unwillingly, complaining about the dangers of being mugged by black or Hispanic kids. Mobsters no longer went out in the streets to run the numbers game or deal in drugs or loan money—they were afraid to. They drove in from Staten Island, or Westchester, or the Island, and huddled in the safety of their Cadillacs, paying black and Hispanic kids to do the grunt work for them. Their sons—those who had not gone to college to become doctors or lawyers—knew they didn’t own the streets anymore, that they had lost the neighborhoods to “the coloreds,” that the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn was more violent than they were, that the Chinese, the Vietnamese, and the South American criminal organizations were carving away what had once been sacred Sicilian territory, even in