The Good Rat: A True Story

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 288 pages
• Published by: Ecco February 5, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0060856661
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0060856663
• Book Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 12 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Breslin, renowned journalist and author of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, revisits a familiar wise-guy milieu in this collection of stories and anecdotes about the mob. His writing, like the Mafia itself, breezily transitions from humorous to horrifying as he regales the reader with loosely connected tales of mistaken identity, crooked cops, snitches and murder. Unlike the Sopranos and the many other touchstones of the American love affair with organized crime, for Breslin, there's good and there's evil, with little in between. As always, however, nicknames are half the fun, as Sammy The Bull Gravano, Tony Café and Gaspipe Casso take the stage in the Mafia hotspots of the five boroughs, including Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, and Ozone Park, in Queens, as Breslin delights with stories from the Mafia's heyday. Breslin's storytelling is set to the sweet background music of one of the mob's biggest canaries, Burton Kaplan, as he sings to a grand jury. The author's vernacular precision contrasts sharply with the plodding sterility of Kaplan's grand jury testimony, and as we find out, good guys can often tell ugly stories more authentically than the terrible guys. The effect is tragicomic as Kaplan's testimony sounds the death knell for his associates. These stories unveil the strict code of conduct, often broken, of a dying breed. According to Kaplan, however, while illegal gambling and extortion may be waning industries, the myth of the American Mafia will never die. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Good Rule demythologizes the all-but-glamorous life of organized crime. While Breslin focuses on the trial of the “Mafia Cops,” a story also recounted in Guy Lawson and William Oldham’s The Brotherhoods (2006), Breslin, to critics’ delight, uses the case to delve deep inside the Mafia’s demise and the bloody, backstabbing stories within it. An unsentimental writer, Breslin sees the mob for what it isâ€"a group of cold-blooded sheep, to which his inclusion of trial-transcript excerpts attests. Yet reviewers couldn’t help but comment on the author’s somewhat regretful tone, a funeral hymn for an era. Chronological confusion may trip up some readers, but overall, “For true crime fans, The Good Rat is the next standard-bearer; for Breslin fans new and old, it’s a must” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Reader Reviews
This is a fine addition to anyone's true crime shelf. You're not going to see a romantic view of mob life here. Tony Soprano might be interesting to have as a neighbor, but the people in this book are such that you'd much prefer that they live in a different part of town, or better yet, a different town altogether. The book does present a rather one-dimensional view of the criminals involved: you will not be reading about the kind of family (personal, not mob) life that helped make Tony Soprano three-dimensional. The figures in the book may have been decent people at home, but that's not the point here. You'll get a view of current mob life--the violence, the paranoia, the omerta, and the breaking of omerta. Some things have changed from the heyday of Murder, Inc in the 1940s, but much is still the same: plus la change, plus la meme chose. Burton Kaplan today is little different from his counterparts of 50-70 years ago: surveillance and eavesdropping techinques are better, the FBI has discovered the Mafia, and witness protection programs have led to a partial decline in omerta. Where once a stand-up guy could do 5 years in prison, with RICO standing up for thirty years is less appealing. Kid Twist Reles' revelations in Murder, Inc were eye-opening back then: Burton Kaplan's testimony is fascinating, but he has lots of fellow canaries, so to speak. You'll get a very gritty tale here. These are not nice fellows at all. Some reviews may speak of the contrast between good and evil in the book, but that's not really true. NYC policemen as contract killers is a very unpleasant thought, but it's hardly new (see the book Satan's Circus). What is more interesting is how one of these cops, whose uncle was a well-known mobster, and who himself had a criminal record, was admitted to the police force and rose high in the ranks. His moonlighting for the mob did not come as a major surprise. His outing was unusual: you get the feeling that there seemed to be a lot of tolerance in law enforcement for his activities. The Feds brought him down--not the NYPD. What I would have liked to see here is perhaps some kind of map or chart, and a cast of characters (there's a very brief list, which mostly just mentions names). If you're thoroughly familiar with the greater NY mob scene, you shouldn't have a problem. But for most people, being able to check a cast that listed, say, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano along with his family, role in the family, etc, would have been helpful. There are interesting people who get brief mentions, such as Jimmy Burke (see GoodFellas) and the fearsome Roy DeMeo, whose murder crew made even John Gotti nervous (see Murder Machine). Unless you're a true crime fan, such names might not carry the nuances that they should. But Good Rat covers one slice of the scene in greater New York, and covers it very well. Comment | | (Report this)