Dead Ringer: An Insider's Account of the Mob's Columbian Connection

A John Gotti trial spinoff tells the stories of Joe Cuffaro, a go-between for Colombian drug lords; Leo Fraley, one of Pablo Escobar's top ten smugglers; and Bill Gately, a top U.S. Customs Special Agent who helped bring them to justice. 10,000 first printing.

Gatley, an employee of the U.S. Customs Service; Joe Caffaro, a Sicilian-born businessman with Mafia ties; and Leo Fraley, an American career criminal who became involved in Colombian drug-smuggling--these men are an unlikely trio to be the subjects of the same book. Yet all played major roles in court cases which tied the Medellin drug cartel to the mafia in Sicily and thence to the U.S. mafia. That the tie exists is no revelation to those who read news stories about organized crime, so this volume by Gately and freelancer Fernandez is hardly eye-opening; nor are their portraits of American mobsters as stupid and greedy and Columbian drug lords as cruel and merciless anything new. What readers will find informative is the depiction here of interbureau rivalry among the FBI, the DEA and Customs, bureaucratic infighting which does not augur well for the drug war, note the authors. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

US Customs special agent Gately (aided by freelancer Fernandez) describes a sting operation that brought down two Mafia operatives and transformed them into useful turncoats for the federal Protected Witness Program. Leo Fraley and Joe Cuffaro were not hardened mob insiders but victims of their environment. Fraley was the son of an honest teamster truck driver who drifted into the fringes of the mob while stoning ``scabs'' at steel mills during strikes and beating them for cash. He was eventually taken in by Dominic ``Mad Bomb'' Denobis, one of the original members of Murder, Inc., who made Fraley a liaison between the American mob and the Medellin concern in Colombia. The book's first chapter shows him being canoed through the rain forest in the magisterial company of an English- accented drug lord named Velasco en route to a cocaine rendezvous; the surreal trip is made amusing by the wary discomfort of the tough Yankee urban mobster forced by ``business'' into an exotic environment, and the picture of a jungle drug factory is fascinating. Cuffaro's is a different story. He came to the US at the age of 17 after his father, a marble wholesaler from Palermo, was bombed out of business by the Mafia. In a bitterly ironic twist, the Gambino family in New York made the wholesaler proprietor of one of their groceries and trained Joe as a master meat-cutter at one of their dubious meat market ventures in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Perhaps Cuffaro retained some bitterness over this humiliation of his father. In any case, after the successful sting and the incarceration of Cuffaro and Fraley, both men seemed to take a perverse delight in mocking their fellow mobsters locked up with them. An entertaining and well-researched book, carefully put together and structured. Its evocation of working-class ``wiseguy'' life is unfailingly and depressingly authentic. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.