Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss - Hardcover

Carlo, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061429848 ISBN 13: 9780061429842

Publisher: William Morrow, 2008

Synopsis

Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso is currently serving thirteen consecutive life sentences plus 455 years at a federal prison in Colorado. Now, for the first time, the head of a mob family has granted complete and total access to a journalist. Casso has given New York Times bestselling author Philip Carlo the most intimate, personal look into the world of La Cosa Nostra ever seen. This is his shocking story.

From birth, Anthony Casso's mob life was preordained. Michael Casso introduced his young son around South Brooklyn's social clubs, where "men of honor" did business by shaking pinkie-ringed hands—hands equally at home pilfering stolen goods from the Brooklyn docks or gripping the cold steel of a silenced pistol. Young Anthony watched and listened and decided that he would devote his life to crime.

Casso would prove his talent for "earning," concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring into New York vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Casso also had an uncanny ability to work with the other Mafia families, and he forged unusually strong ties with the Russian mob. By the time Casso took the reins of the Lucchese family, he was a seasoned boss, a very dangerous man.

It was a great life—Casso and his beautiful wife, Lillian, had money to burn; Casso and his crew brought in so much cash that he had dozens of large safe-deposit boxes filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. But the law finally caught up with him in his New Jersey safe house in 1994. Rather than stoically face the music like the old-time mafiosi he revered, Casso became the thing he most hated—a rat. It broke his family's heart and made the once feared and revered mobster an object of scorn and disgust among his former friends. For it turned out that a lifetime of street smarts completely failed him in dealing with a group even more cunning and ruthless than the Mafia—the U.S. government.

Detailing Casso's feud with John Gotti and their attempts to kill each other, the "Windows Case" that led to the beginning of the end for the mob in New York, and Casso's dealings with decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—the "Mafia cops"—Gaspipe is the inside story of one man's rise and fall, mirroring the rise and fall of a way of life, a roller-coaster ride into a netherworld few outsiders have ever dared to enter.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Carlo was born and raised on the mean streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—the same streets Tommy Pitera hailed from. There, Carlo earned a Ph.D. in street smarts, and he escaped a life of crime by writing about it with unusual insight. He is the author of the bestsellers The Night Stalker, about notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez, and The Ice Man, about infamous Mafia contract killer Richard Kuklinski. Carlo lives with his wife, Laura, in New York City.

From AudioFile

If you'd like to vicariously observe contract killings, lucrative robberies, and meetings with Mafia bosses, you've found the right audiobook. Now in prison, Cosa Nostra boss Antonio Casso tells all to the author in a blatant violation of OMERT--the code of silence. His double life of loving family man and relentless killer hardly seems possible--unless you're familiar with Tony Soprano. Alan Sklar's deep, raspy voice fits the noir tale of violence and death. His delivery stays matter-of-fact and detached while describing dozens of assassinations, often preceded by torture. When necessary, Sklar's Italian kicks in so well one can almost see his arms waving. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061429848
• ISBN 13: 9780061429842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368