The Good Guys

Chain-smoking Mickey Fists isn't sure if he's an "addict" or an "attic."

The Freemont Avenue Social Club is on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. So are the best wiretaps FBI money can buy.

Skinny Al weighed 320 pounds and lived life to the fullest...until someone burned out his eardrums and shot his body full of holes. Hundreds of writers have tried to capture life inside the mob, but no one has ever had the inside access to write a book like this one. Drawing on the firsthand experience of former undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone-aka Donnie Brasco-as well as former Mafia prince Bill Bonanno, The Good Guys straddles both sides of the law, races relentlessly through the New York City underworld, and crackles with characters and moments so vivid they will never let you go. At Columbia University, a professor of Russian literature has gone missing. A few miles and light-years away, Little Eddie LaRocca and Bobby San Filippo are on the move-dealing in everything from hot-sheet hotels to bootleg Fuji film. When the hoods are sent to find the professor, they find out that someone else is looking, too. Beautiful FBI agent Laura Russo is making her preppy partner's head spin. She knows the missing man is important-and somehow connected to a recent mob hit. While Eddie and Bobby are fighting their way through ugly deeds and pretty coeds, these feds will cook up some business of their own, turning a little disagreement among criminals into an all-out war... Capturing the organized crime world of the go-go '80s, Pistone and Bonanno's one-of-a-kind collaboration is bad to the bone-and as marvelously authentic as it gets.

Despite the impressive credentials of coauthors Bonanno, billed as "the former head of the Bonanno crime family," and Pistone (aka Donnie Brasco), whose undercover work inside that Mafia organization while an FBI agent laid the groundwork for the historic federal organized crime prosecutions that decimated New York's five families, the collaborators have produced a routine FBI vs. the mob novel. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the story uses alternate chapters to focus on two FBI agents, Connor O'Brien and Laura Russo, and on Bobby Hats, a brutal thug aiming to become a made man. Their paths cross after the disappearance of a Columbia University Russian language professor, Peter Gradinsky, who may be connected with a rising Russian mafia syndicate working a fuel-oil scam. Fans of Pistone's recent nonfiction debunking of popular mob myths, The Way of the Wiseguy, may be disappointed by the romantic stereotypes about La Cosa Nostra (Bobby observes that his Mafia cronies provided "a level of friendship and trust, honor and pride, that he had never experienced before in his life"). Still, the pairing of two high-profile opponents in the New York crime wars of yore can't help generating media attention, which should translate into healthy sales.
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