The Good Guys

The authors provide an inside look at both a Mafia crime family and the FBI. Both end up looking for a Russian literature professor who has disappeared from Columbia University. When the Mafia "soldiers" and FBI agents cross paths, well, everything is fair in war. Bonanno, a former member of the Bonanno crime family, and Joe Pistone, a former FBI agent, team up to both write and read this story of investigation and intrigue. Each reads his part with stiff phrasing--as though he has never read out loud before, or even seen his own writing. The language is crude and the adventures are rough, but that's crime for you. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

December 6, 2004
Despite the impressive credentials of coauthors Bonanno, billed as "the former head of the Bonanno crime family," and Pistone (aka Donnie Brasco), whose undercover work inside that Mafia organization while an FBI agent laid the groundwork for the historic federal organized crime prosecutions that decimated New York's five families, the collaborators have produced a routine FBI vs. the mob novel. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the story uses alternate chapters to focus on two FBI agents, Connor O'Brien and Laura Russo, and on Bobby Hats, a brutal thug aiming to become a made man. Their paths cross after the disappearance of a Columbia University Russian language professor, Peter Gradinsky, who may be connected with a rising Russian mafia syndicate working a fuel-oil scam. Fans of Pistone's recent nonfiction debunking of popular mob myths, The Way of the Wiseguy
, may be disappointed by the romantic stereotypes about La Cosa Nostra (Bobby observes that his Mafia cronies provided "a level of friendship and trust, honor and pride, that he had never experienced before in his life"). Still, the pairing of two high-profile opponents in the New York crime wars of yore can't help generating media attention, which should translate into healthy sales. Agent, Frank Weimann.

Stephen Hoye has the stereotypical voice of the Mafia capo down pat. He's so good at it that when he shouts threateningly, you start to duck. You don't even mind that the title here sounds like a rip-off of GOODFELLAS. The coauthors, the son of a Mafia don and a former undercover agent once known as Donnie Braskow, have put together another story of the underworld of crime. The book's structure is interesting. In one chapter you get the Mob version of certain plans and events, and in paired chapters you get the FBI's take as they listen in with their bugging devices. When a university professor goes missing and the Mafia wants to find him, the agents want to know why. What they cook up makes for an intense and amusing plot. Hoye's portrayals of the FBI agents are as believable as those of his Mobsters. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine