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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 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 .
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 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 .
400 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2000
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March 27, 2012
This is perhaps one of my favorite books ever. I discovered it years ago when I was researching the Mob for a story I was writing. I fell in love with the no-holds-barred style paired with the tongue-in-cheek narrator who was inflicted with what is probably the worst Witsec since the beginning of the program.
I am not normally one for non-fiction. I find that all too often, they have sapped all the life out of it. But this book had me turning pages. Everything was touched on from the myth to the reality, from the every day to the little known. For any Mafia buff, I would recommend this book, it is a bald-faced look at what is perhaps the most romanticized sect of american society. A society that he shows is just as prone to pettyness and infighting as anything else. And the conclusions he comes to at the end of the book are frightening in their implication.
I am not normally one for non-fiction. I find that all too often, they have sapped all the life out of it. But this book had me turning pages. Everything was touched on from the myth to the reality, from the every day to the little known. For any Mafia buff, I would recommend this book, it is a bald-faced look at what is perhaps the most romanticized sect of american society. A society that he shows is just as prone to pettyness and infighting as anything else. And the conclusions he comes to at the end of the book are frightening in their implication.
Displaying 1 of 1 review