Maybe Jimmy Breslin’s books just aren’t for me after all.
I had originally planned on covering his 1969 parody of the Gallo War, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, but didn’t get far before I lost interest and decided to have a look at his second Mafia novel: 2001’s I Don’t Want To Go To Jail, strongly inspired by the story of Genovese boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante.
I saw a remarkable improvement in my first impressions. First, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight’s prose can get very clunky and cut and dry at times. This creates an amusing contrast with the absurdities this text describes, but it’s not objectively good. Thirty years later Breslin’s fiction writing flows better.
Second, while both books can get very exposition heavy as Breslin describes the culture of the Mafia, I Don’t Want To Go To Jail’s introduction doesn’t front load it as badly as the first chapter of the ‘69 novel.
Finally, the language regarding race in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight hasn’t aged especially well, even if the most clear cut outright offensive parts are securely in the thoughts and words of characters you’re not supposed to sympathize with anyway. That’s absent from I Don’t Want To Go To Jail, saving me the burden of making a judgment call for my audience. And so I continued through I Don’t Want To Go To Jail with high hopes. Which weren’t met.
I Don’t Want To Go To Jail is set in New York during a vaguely-defined period coinciding with the career of Vincent Gigante. Two of our three main characters go by the name Fausti Dellacava - one a Mafia boss and the other his nephew; for the reader’s convenience the elder Fausti is consistently referred to by his nickname “The Fist.”
Fist is basically Vincent Gigante under a different name. He’s an ex-boxer who famously botched a hit by missing his target at point-blank range and still beat the rap. He’s not extravagant. He forbids anyone from using his name and when the going gets tough he begins feigning insanity to avoid trial. Breslin’s dramatic liberties go in the obvious direction, painting Fist as genuinely losing touch with reality through his deteriorating lifestyle and thorazine usage. And because this is Jimmy Breslin writing one symptom of this is he starts hearing animals telling him to go through with Mafia hits.
The nephew Fausti Dellacava - the one who uses the name - is the son of Fist’s mobbed-up brother, and the one who’s character arc is not constrained by the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ approach Breslin took for this book. We follow him from his childhood when he feels the perks of being in a Mafia family to adulthood, when his name and connections hold him back in the legitimate world. His dilemma is the original one in the story as he flirts with exploiting his mob ties while also being one of the characters to give us a title drop.
As I read through the book I was expecting to name Fausti’s girlfriend Con as the last main character, but she didn’t quite meet the threshold in my eyes. Instead, I give that distinction to Father Phil Napolitano. Breslin’s reinterpretation of Father Louis Gigante, Vincent’s only legitimate brother, is a bit of a latecomer to the story but makes up for lost time after being invited down from Buffalo after handling the baptisms for a mobster’s secret second family. Unlike his inspiration Father Phil is only a distant relative to Fist, and it immediately becomes obvious why Breslin would want to keep his character a little less recognizable. Father Phil scoffs at the Catholic Church’s rules of celibacy as a cynical medieval ploy to prevent priests from passing down their estates to their families - something which apparently has some basis in reality - and acts accordingly. He positions himself as an in-house chaplain for the mob - delivering a heavy-handed anti-informant sermon during a “Mafia day” mass - and acts like a gangster in his own right. He’s easily my favorite character.
While Breslin borrowed heavily from the Mafia’s actual antics, and doesn’t even change the names of some of the major historical players, he also takes things to extremes that ensure a general audience will get a kick out of its surrealism. One of the facets of Gigante’s life that Breslin carried over was his establishing a secret second personal family with a girlfriend who had the same name as his wife. The author combines this with the Mafia’s culture of infidelity to have all of his underlings emulate him by starting second families as a sign of respect to the boss. The ghoulish portraits of mobsters on the book’s cover is actually an illustration of another major plotline. While Fausti is trying to figure out what to do with his life he and a candy store owner hit on the idea of making mobster trading cards, which doesn’t resolve Fausti’s story arc but is a success nonetheless. The first purpose of this arc is to parody the public’s fascination with the mob, though today it’s looking like less of a caricature than ever. The second is to show the pitfalls of mobsters seeking the limelight as they react to their cards being issued.
Now both of these stories do affect the overall plot, but they don’t actually do much to drive it forward. This leads me to the first of my three strikes against this book. The edition of I Don’t Want To Go To Jail I read was 360 pages, and we don’t actually see any significant plot developments until about the halfway point when the heat on Fist starts to rise and Fausti and Con build their relationship. Around the 100 page marker my hopes were raised when Fausti, working as a lifeguard, falls under suspicion after the apparent drowning of a made man, but this ends up as a fakeout with a contained resolution.
The first half of the book is padded with Breslin’s illustration of the operations and lifestyle of Cosa Nostra. This should keep someone unfamiliar with the Mafia entertained but today the only people who would likely be interested in this book are mob buffs like myself. And my strike two comes from the aforementioned ripped-from-the-headlines style; a lot of what’s written was just old hat to me. Breslin including real life mobsters didn’t help; when I see John Gotti, Tony Bananas Caponigro, Fat Tony Salerno and even the obscure Tony Rampino namedropped the book starts feeling like some kind of bizarre mob fanfiction rather than a professional work.
Third and finally, without giving too much away, the ending is anticlimactic.
I came up short in my research on what exactly made Breslin want to take on the Vincent Gigante story. A Charlie Rose interview focuses on the matter of Chin’s second family, but the books original storyline of the younger Fausti invites attention to a different anecdote that made its way into Fist’s story as well; during a Commission meeting John Gotti bragged to Gigante that he had inducted his son into the Mafia, and the response of Chin and Fist was “I’m sorry to hear that.”
The story comes to us from Gotti’s then-consig Sammy Gravano who, after the initial shock, treated Gigante’s apparent refusal to involve his children in the Mafia as a sound judgment which he too followed. As he told biographer Peter Maas for 1997’s Underboss “So here was Chin, who’s supposed to be crazy, saying who in their right mind wanted their son to be made? And there was John boasting about it. Who was really crazy?”
By the time I Don’t Want To Go To Jail was out we’d already seen Sammy Gravano fail to live up to this idea when he got his whole family arrested for distributing X in Arizona. And a year later it turned out Gigante failed as well; in 2002 he got one of his sons indicted for passing messages to his crime family from prison. If Breslin had waited a few more years to finish his book he would’ve had a more conclusive ending for Fist’s story, when Gigante finally admitted to feigning insanity as part of a 2003 obstruction of justice plea deal. He couldn’t completely get his son out of trouble but, noted Selwyn Raab’s Mafia history Five Families, the deal immunized relatives of Gigante who knew it was all an act from prosecution. Vincent Gigante died in prison in 2005.
On a decidedly less satisfying note, Louis Gigante was facing accusations of child sex abuse when he died last year.
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