The Best American Crime Writing 2006 by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online

where I saw it start for De Niro. It was on a hot summer afternoon when the producer of a movie being made from a book I wrote, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, asked me to meet De Niro because he was replacing Pacino in a big part. Pacino was going into some movie called The Godfather. De Niro was looking for his first major movie role.
    We talked briefly in a bar, the old Johnny Joyce's on Second Avenue. De Niro looked like he was homeless. It was a Friday. On Sunday morning my wife came upstairs in our home in Queens and said one of the actors from the movie was downstairs. I flinched. Freak them. Downstairs, however, was De Niro. He was going to Italy on his own to catch the speech nuances of people in towns mentioned in the script. He was earning seven hundred and fifty dollars a week for the movie. I remember saying when he left, "Do not stand between this guy and whatever he wants."
    What he wanted first was to play Italians who were in the Mafia. The crime actors had been mostly Jewish: Edward G. Robinson, Alan King, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Paul Muni, Jerry Orbach. De Niro and Pacino took it over.They were the stars of an American industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, soundmen, location men, and casting agents who were all on the job and on the payroll because of the Mafia.
    Now the whole Mafia industry is slipping on a large patch of black ice. Soon it will be totally gone.
    "We had one wiseguy in the first season," Bill Clark, former executive producer of the now departed NYPD Blue, told me the other day. "That was all, because they just couldn't make it as characters for us.Their day was gone."
    Both of us remember when it wasn't.There was a hot late afternoon in July 1979 when Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno Mob at the time, was shot dead at a picnic lunch in the backyard of Joe and Mary's Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. Bill Clark, then a homicide detective, was the first detective on the scene. He looked at Galante and grabbed the phone and called my office at the New York Daily News.
    The great A.M., secretary, took the call. She was a Catholic schoolgirl who was a true daughter of the Mafia in the Bronx.
    "Tell Jimmy that Galante is down on Knickerbocker Avenue," Clark said. Then he hung up. Inspectors were barging in to grab the phone and have it for themselves the rest of the day. There was no such thing as a cell phone.
    Secretary A.M. sat on the call for one hour.
    "People shouldn't know about a thing like this," she said.
    Today, aside from grieving showmen, the only ones rooting for the mobsters to survive-or at least for keeping some of them around-are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase Mafia gangsters across the hard streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. The squads are numbered, such as C-16 for the Colombo squad. Each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one capo in the family. The work is surveillance and interviews. Agents will interview a cabdriver or a mobster's sister. It doesn't matter. Just do the interview.Then they get to their desk and fill out FD-302 forms that get piled up in the office.They must do it in order to keep the FBI way of life in New York.They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, and do no real heavy lifting on the job. After a five-hour day they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents, and they always talk about what jobs they want when they retire. If, after interviewing, surveilling, and paying stool pigeons, they do not come in with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face doing true work for their country: antiterror-ism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or tent living in Afghanistan.
     
    "What do you want?" Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue, in front of the great De Robertis espresso shop.
    "We just want to talk to you" one of the two FBI agents said.
    "You'll have to wait here