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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1092
EAN num: 9780061429842
ISBN number: 0061429848
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: July 01, 2008
Publishing house: William Morrow
Release Date: July 01, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 6968
Studio: William Morrow
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Product Description:
Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso is currently serving thirteen consecutive life sentences plus 455 years at a federal prison in Colorado. Now, for the very first time, the head of a mob family has granted complete and total acess to a journalist. Casso has given New York Times bestselling author Philip Carlo the most intimate, personal look into the world of La Cosa Nostra ever seen. This is his shocking story.
From birth, Anthony Casso's mob life was preordained. Michael Casso introduced his young son around South Brooklyn's social clubs, where 'men of honor' did business by shaking pinkie-ringed hands—hands equally at home pilfering stolen goods from the Brooklyn docks or gripping the cold steel of a silenced pistol. Young Anthony watched and listened and decided that he would devote his life to crime.
Casso would prove his talent for 'earning,' concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring into New York vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Casso also had an uncanny ability to work with the other Mafia families, and he forged unusually strong ties with the Russian mob. By the time Casso took the reins of the Lucchese family, he was a seasoned boss, a very dangerous man.
It was a great life—Casso and his beautiful wife, Lillian, had money to burn; Casso and his crew brought in so much cash that he had dozens of large safe-deposit boxes filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. But the law finally caught up with him in his New Jersey safe house in 1994. Rather than stoically face the music like the old-time mafiosi he revered, Casso became the thing he most hated—a rat. It broke his family's heart and made the once feared and revered mobster an object of scorn and disgust among his former friends. For it turned out that a lifetime of street smarts completely failed him in dealing with a group even more cunning and ruthless than the Mafia—the U.S. government.
Detailing Casso's feud with John Gotti and their attempts to kill each other, the 'Windows Case' that led to the beginning of the end for the mob in New York, and Casso's dealings with decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—the 'Mafia cops'—Gaspipe is the inside story of one man's rise and fall, mirroring the rise and fall of a way of life, a roller-coaster ride into a netherworld few outsiders have ever dared to enter.
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Rated by buyers -
CARLO SPEAKS WRITES ABOUT A STAND UP GUY WHO IN THE END RATTED OUT HIS OWN DOG IN HOPES OF GETTING OUT OF JAIL.
Rated by buyers 
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i'm disaapointed by this book, I got half way reading it but got bored. Nothing I have not read already in the papers. I give it 1/2 star.
Rated by buyers 
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Great Novel-like read...Altho author biases towards Casso, he truly makes a hero out of him in reader's eyes. Paints vivid pictures of every crime and non-crime-related tale and leaves reader waning more and more after each chapter, not only about Casso but every Made Man mentioned.
Rated by buyers -
Man, I sure hated all those mafia books on the shelves taking up space in my bookstores! I thought, who cares about these cretins? Not me!! Even though I have a couple thousand true crime books, none deal with Cosa Nostra, I've never seen The Sopranos, and have only seen Godfather I. The topic was of zero interest to me.
However, having loved Mr. Carlo's '96 Night Stalker, I admired his writing stle enough to pick up Ice Man.That book just blew me away because of the way Mr. Carlo was able to actually humanize a monster like Richard Kuklinski (not glamorize!). There were no holds barred when it came to his reporting of the atrocities committed, but Mr. Carlo's use of backstory and tell-it-like-it-is views from Kuklinski's family had me hooked from the beginning to end. And for the very first time, I bought several copies and mailed to friends in Texas that couldn't care less about such things. Now THEY are buying Mr. Carlo's books, too.
This leads me to his book Gaspipe. I didn't even hesitate to buy it because it was written by Philip Carlo; that's good enough for me! It's extremely rare to find a book where the author and family live subsequent door to the book's subject, grew up in Bensonhurst where so many made guys lived, and understands "the life". If Mr. Carlo can turn my taste in non-fiction around with just two books, then I consider that a writer with a truly great gift.
While he never sugar-coated the horrific crimes Anthony Gaspipe Casso did, just as in Ice Man, Mr. Carlo makes you see the whole man, especially his deep love for his parents, wife and kids. (Yes, I know Hitler adored his mother!) And NO WAY would I ever have had sympathy for a mudering goon like Casso, but it really hacked me off about the FBI's actions in picking and choosing the evidence to come out in court. It's also an OUTRAGE that the government didn't honor their commitment to Casso's 6-1/2 years sentence like they did for other informants.
I am a huge fan of Mr. Carlo, and have ordered his other books. i wish him many happy years of writing and continuing his meticulous research.
Rated by buyers -
Both my husband and me thoroughly enjoyed Gaspipe. Both of us come from Dyker Heights and thought Carlo's portrayal of the Mafia culture was eerie and uncanny. We note with dismay the posting here of R.J. Rios. I can only say that this fellow's sources of information are the three hundred books he says he read. That's woefully inadequate. The Mafia is all about secrecy. The Mafia is clandestine by its very nature. Having said that, it seems ludicrous that any one person, based on the reading of books, would set himself up as an authority. I am sure there are people in law enforcement who knew nothing about what Carlo wrote so insightfully and simply in Gaspipe. We note, too, that Carlo has publicly said -- we recently heard him on a radio show -- that Richard Kuklinski, aka the Iceman, did lie about certain crimes. When most of the participants in any given crime, murder, are dead, it's very hard for an author to verify one way or another what exactly happened. No author in any one book could tell all the tales, trials and tribulations of a character like Anthony Casso. To do such a thing, the book would have to be thousands of pages. A compelling book has to be a condensed version of all that happened. The days of Tolstoy and Joyce are long gone and forgotten. We think Carlo wrote the most insightful, in-depth tale of a Mafia boss ever put on paper. It's a very first class job from a very first class writer. Highly, highly recommended.
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