The people who hate my writing can blame Norman Mailer, John Steinbeck, Alan Sillitoe and Jimmy Breslin. They are the quartet of authors who made me want to write for a living. Three of the four, though, felt slightly out of reach when I started putting pen to paper. Sillitoe was English; Steinbeck was a classic, and Mailer's journalism, if not his early fiction, didn't read like anyone else's. And didn't seem to be a style within my reach.
But Breslin wrote columns for NYC newspapers in the early 1960s that seemed approachable, stylistically. He was Irish, he was avowedly working-class, and he wrote about taverns, sports and gangsters, three subjects I knew something about growing up in ethnically divided, sports-crazy, crime-ridden Cincinnati.
Steinbeck is long dead. Mailer died last years, and Sillitoe's novels no longer are published in the U.S. (Except for his early classics, "Saturday Night and Sunday Night" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - well worth searching for and reading), but Jimmy Breslin, despite age, near-death and changing times, is still publishing.
His latest book is "The Good Rat," the story of Burton Kaplan, an associate of Mafia figures who decided, after a lengthy imprisonment, to turn state's evidence.
Breslin uses Kaplan's star-witness turn against two "dirty" New York City police detectives, who killed for the Mafia, utilizing their access as cops to get away, literally, with murder eight times, to explain the recent history of the Mob in the Big Apple.
You might be tired of Mafia stories, but Breslin grew up in the same neighborhoods as John Gotti, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano and other murderous scumbags, and he writes about them with a contempt built on familiarity, but also with understanding and the darkest of black humor. Breslin revisits gangster bars like Pep McGuire's, the famed tavern where reporters and gangsters traded tales and threats: to publish or to kill. Breslin was an invited guest at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street the night John Gotti, the Teflon Don, celebrated his acquittal on murder charges. The Gotti mob had bought a juror and beat the FBI, Rudy Giuliani and the city of New York.
But the victory came at a high price as law enforcement decided they had to put this arrogant mobster away. They came back at Gotti with new charges, using his own enforcer, Sammy Gravano - who was crazily allowed to skip on 19 murders as payback for fingering his boss - and they put him away in a maximum-security prison where he later died.
Gravano's story is here, too. Witness-protected, hidden in the Southwest, and later arrested for running a desert drug ring - once a serious thug, always a serious thug.
For a spectrally witty look at dark doings, try "The Good Rat." You might be appalled but you'll be laughing at times, too. And Breslin still has a way with words.
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