The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld" (Weinstein Books, 224 pages, $24.95), by Tom Folsom: Joey Gallo wrote poetry, argued about the meaning of life, dug jazz and read Camus. Also, he was handy with a chain whip, had a talent for extortion and bit the ear off a jailhouse enemy.
Part thug, part beatnik ? Gallo lived in two worlds that really didn't overlap too well. Before he was rubbed out in 1972 at age 43, Gallo lived a colorful life that made for one of the strangest mob tales ever. His existential flirtations spice up an already good gangland yarn in Tom Folsom's "Mad Ones" about power, mayhem and dirty dealing. Gallo is a compelling character, a sort of thinking man's hoodlum, probably psychotic, but also fearless. "My life is one foot in the coffin and the other on a banana peel," he says. "But I don't care."
Joey and his brother Larry were mob muscle from Brooklyn. The Gallos are believed by many to have engineered the infamous hit on mobster Albert Anastasia as he sat in a barber chair in 1957. Things heated up for the brothers when they took on mob boss Joe Profaci, and Folsom does a good job detailing the so-called Profaci-Gallo wars, in which the Gallos and their motley crew were vastly outgunned. The coup attempt ends with predictable results.
The real fun of this book is the reader is never quite sure what's going to happen on the next page. Larry survives getting garroted. Joey takes up painting. A guy named Jelly gets sliced up into bits on a boat. Joey stares down Robert Kennedy; Joey has Sunday dinner with actor Jerry Orbach. You couldn't make this up ? though Jimmy Breslin did write up a fictionalized Gallo story in "The Gang Couldn't Shoot Straight." Orbach played the character based on Joey.
The title "Mad Ones" comes from a Jack Kerouac quote about the Beats. And Folsom writes in a Beat-inspired rat-tat-tat prose that fits the material. The high-velocity writing does go off the rails sometimes. Hipster lingo is laid on so thick that it sometimes gets confusing who we're reading about, or whether a scene is in the Village or in Brooklyn.
The story slows a little after Larry dies (cancer) and Joey does a stint in prison. Joey was released after a decade to a different city ? a pleated pants and Bing Crosby kind of guy in a Jimi Hendrix world. With his brother dead and his old gang either hunted down or gone turncoat, it was essentially over for Crazy Joe even before he ate his last meal at Umberto's Clam House. Like his cohorts in the Beat Generation, Crazy Joe never found what he was looking for.
