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A review by jakewritesbooks
Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins, Joseph F. O'Brien
4.0
I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in front of a Manhattan steakhouse.
There’s an abundance of information out there now that shows that mobsters are not the nobless oblige Robin Hood thief-types portrayed by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Most of them are lower class humps who had few options in life and decided to take the path of violence. This was not the common understanding of the mob in New York City in the 80s. Castellano was the biggest boss of the biggest family and yet, he was somewhat regarded as “the Howard Hughes of the mob”, living out of the limelight in his massive Staten Island manor. The mystery only added to the mythos but once you look behind the closed door, you see what was at the end of The Irishman: a broken, sad old man.
The book recounts the FBI’s surveillance of Castellano and some of his cohorts. A lot of the information was covered in other spaces but it’s still a compelling look at how the agents hunted down and developed relationships with the don and others. I didn’t care for the grousing about how hard it is to attain search warrants and affidavits, especially since we’ve seen the FBI play fast and loose with the rules amongst people without high profiles and fancy lawyers, but I enjoyed this one almost in spite of myself. It’s eminently readable and gives a portrayal of a sad man at the head of a futile empire that glitters like gold but which is really just gilded trash.
There’s an abundance of information out there now that shows that mobsters are not the nobless oblige Robin Hood thief-types portrayed by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Most of them are lower class humps who had few options in life and decided to take the path of violence. This was not the common understanding of the mob in New York City in the 80s. Castellano was the biggest boss of the biggest family and yet, he was somewhat regarded as “the Howard Hughes of the mob”, living out of the limelight in his massive Staten Island manor. The mystery only added to the mythos but once you look behind the closed door, you see what was at the end of The Irishman: a broken, sad old man.
The book recounts the FBI’s surveillance of Castellano and some of his cohorts. A lot of the information was covered in other spaces but it’s still a compelling look at how the agents hunted down and developed relationships with the don and others. I didn’t care for the grousing about how hard it is to attain search warrants and affidavits, especially since we’ve seen the FBI play fast and loose with the rules amongst people without high profiles and fancy lawyers, but I enjoyed this one almost in spite of myself. It’s eminently readable and gives a portrayal of a sad man at the head of a futile empire that glitters like gold but which is really just gilded trash.