Gangland: How the FBI Broke the Mob - Softcover

Blum, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671900153 ISBN 13: 9780671900151

Publisher: Pocket, 2002

Synopsis

In the bestselling tradition of Wiseguy and Boss of Bosses -- the inside story of the fall of the "Teflon Don"

The team: A handpicked squad of FBI agents -- led by a war hero determined to get the job done. The target: John Gotti, the seemingly invincible head of the richest and most powerful crime of modern-day Untouchables, the FBI's C-16 Organized Crime squad, who finally ended the cocky crime lord's reign of terror.

Drawing on unprecedented access to FBI records and agents, bestselling author and prize-winning journalist Howard Blum tells the riveting and suspenseful story behind the headlines. Here is the deadly game of cat and mouse that pitted Gotti, his ruthless henchmen and his elusive law-enforcement mole against the Bureau.

It is a tale of courage, murder and betrayal. From Mafia backrooms to FBI squad rooms, from the high-tech electronic invasion of Gotti's headquarters to the desperate effort to expose the mole, Gangland is more shocking than fiction -- an instant Mafia classic.

About this title

From AudioFile

Investigative reporter Howard Blum tells how an elite FBI squad brought mobster John Gotti to justice after six years of pursuit. Actor Jerry Orbach had developed an outstanding career playing the quintessential cop, and his talent adds greatly to the recording. His dry "just the facts" reading provides a documentary style, and he occasionally uses Italian accents to distinguish among a large cast of speakers. The abridgment makes the story fast-paced and clipped; at times, shifts between scenes are abrupt. This won't bother those who want a good story while commuting or jogging, but listeners who want to know all of the details will do better to read the book. J.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews

John Gotti now sits in a top-security federal prison, locked into his cell 23 hours a day, allowed to shower once a week. How the Mafia's capo di tutti capi reached that sorry fate is the subject of Blum's intensively researched, hypnotically absorbing true-crime report. There have been other excellent books on Gotti (e.g., John Cummings and Ernest Volkman's Goombata, 1990), but none written with Blum's flair for drama (Out There, 1990, etc.). What the former New York Times reporter does here is give Gotti a worthy opponent: FBI agent Bruce Mouw, hero to Gotti's villain, Eliot Ness to his Al Capone. To trace Mouw's pursuit of Gotti--which Blum dates back to the June 1980 day when the ``gangly, rather scholarly-looking'' Iowa-born agent was named to head the Bureau's Gambino Family squad--the author conducted 108 interviews and ``made [his] way through a wall-high pile of transcripts.'' As Blum intercuts between Mouw's squad (which included Joseph F. O'Brien and Andris Kurins, whose surveillance of Gotti's predecessor, Paul Castellano, they detailed in Boss of Bosses, 1991) and Gotti's ``crew'' as it rises to power, this diligent research reveals itself in unusual details about Gotti's character (his affair with another mobster's wife; his courtroom reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra); in suspenseful re-creations of the bugging of Gotti's various headquarters; in inside information on how Mouw suborned Gotti's underboss. Blum tends to overmelodramatize--highlighting faint rumor (e.g., that Gotti chain-sawed the man who accidentally killed his young son); overplaying certain themes, like Mouw's hunt for a cop-mole, or the Dapper Don's smirk--but there's no denying the fire-breathing power of his Gotti or the cinematic slickness of his account of Mouw's dogged, righteous manhunt. FBI knight slays Mafia dragon--and Blum milks this latter-day fairy tale for all it's worth. (First serial to New York Magazine; film rights sold to Columbia Pictures) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0671900153
• ISBN 13: 9780671900151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432