Michael Cieply: An Old Book And Some Thoughts About De Niro’s Dual-Role ‘Wise Guys’
deadline.comEveryone’s gone to the festivals. But here on the home front, one thing still leads to another. Last Saturday, I picked up a slightly tattered copy of an old crime biography, Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld, at one of those sidewalk libraries.
Published in 1974, the year after mob boss Costello died at the age of 82, the book was written by his long-time lawyer George Wolf with co-writer Joseph DiMona.
As lawyer books go, it wasn’t bad. Lots of first-hand anecdotes. Not too much ax-grinding. And a reasonably clear re-telling of an oft-told saga about what they used to call “The Syndicate,” from tawdry roots in New York’s Italian ghettos, through the Italo-Jewish alliance of bootlegging gangs, to political machinations, over-throw of the old Sicilian crime lords, Murder Inc., Bugsy Siegel, Las Vegas, the Kefauver hearings and beyond.
You’ve been there many times in many movies, some good, some less so. The Godfather. Bugsy. Mobsters. Etc. But what caught my eye was an Amazon delivery notice tucked in the book, with an address in the vicinity of Robert De Niro’s TriBeCa quarters.
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