Body Mike: The Deadly Double Life of a Mob Informer

Body Mike presents the startling, real-life mob revelations of Joseph Cantalupo, the most effective "wiseguy" informant in years.

Cantalupo was like a son to crime leader Joseph Colombo. He became personal notary to "chairman of the board" Carlo Gambino. He did business in partnership with Genovese crime-family boss Frank "Funzi" Tieri.

Cantalupo was a young guy on his way up, a hustler confidant of top value to the Mafia—and to the FBI.
For six years Cantalupo wore a body mike in compromising situations and recorded incriminating conversations in secret late-night drives in his bugged Lincoln.

In an unsparing expose, Joe Cantalupo takes you deep into real life and death in the world of organized crime. He saw it all and tells all: the gang rubouts, real estate scams, loansharking, heists, Mafia weddings and funerals.

A marked man, Cantalupo writes about the unsettling, often terrifying life of the informer, about living under the Witness Protection Program after his testimony and about his frustrated attempts to lead a normal life undercover. Never has there been a Mafia book so vivid, so revealing and so totally human a disclosure as Body Mike.

Cantalupo is the son of a Brooklyn real-estate dealer who did business with the mob, and he in his turn became involved with several Mafia bosses, including Joseph Colombo, Carlo Gambino and "Funzi" Tieri. An incorrigible gambler, he found himself threatened by the mob for his debts. In due course he became an FBI undercover agent and informant; his testimony was influential in sending some two dozen criminals to prison. Writing with the Newsday reporter who coauthored Mafia Princess with Antoinette Giancana and My Life in the Mafia with Vincent Teresa, he tells a story not unlike those related by others on the fringes of or in organized crime who have turned against the mob--until he discusses the federal witness protection program, which he shows to be seriously flawed and, in many cases, actually dangerous for those it is meant to protect.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.