The Mad Ones chronicles the rise and fall of the Gallo brothers, a trio of reckless young gangsters whose revolution against New York City's Mafia was inspired by Crazy Joe Gallo's forays into Greenwich Village counterculture.Crazy Joe, Kid Blast, and Larry Gallo are steeped in legend, from Bob Dylan's eleven-minute ballad "Joey" to fictionalizations central to The Godfather trilogy and Jimmy Breslin'sThe Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Called the toughest gang in the city by the NYPD, the Gallos hailed from the rough Red Hook neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront. As low-level Mafiosi, they were expected to serve their Don quietly, but the brothers stood apart from typical gangsters with their hip style, fierce ambition, and Crazy Joe's manic idealism.Joey aspired to be more than a common hood and immersed himself among the Beatniks and bohemians of the Village. Yearning to live the life of an artist, Joey wrote poetry, painted, and got his kicks devouring existential philosophy. Celebrated as the "king of the streets" by Dylan, Joey was embraced by the city's leading cultural figures as an antihero straight out of Camus.Here, for the first time, is the complete story of the Gallos' war against the powerful Cosa Nostra, an epic crime saga that culminates in Crazy Joe's murder on the streets of Little Italy, where he was gunned down mid-bite into a forkful of spaghetti in 1972. The Mad Ones is a wildly satisfying entertainment and a significant work of cultural history.Tom Folsom is the co-author of Mr. Untouchable: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Heroin's Teflon Don, written with its subject, drug kingpin Nicky Barnes. A director and producer of television documentaries, his work has appeared on A&E and Showtime. He lives in New York City.Photo by Mark Seliger PUBLICITY Katie Finch Weinstein Books 345 Hudson Street, 13th floor New York, NY 10014 Ph: 646-862-3807
AGENT Zoë Pagnamenta Zoë Pagnamenta Agency, LLC 30 Bond Street New York, NY 10012 Ph: (212) 253-1074"In vivid style--part Puzo, part Kerouac--Tom Folsom takes the reader back to a time when the underworld and the counterculture seemed to be on parallel tracks. Brutal and elegiac, the story of Crazy Joe and the Gallo brothers is one for the ages. The Mad Ones belongs on a shelf alongside the best of Breslin and Pileggi." --T.J. ENGLISH, bestselling author of Havana Nocturne and The WestiesKirkus Reviews: March 1, 2009Documentarian Folsom (co-author: Mr. Untouchable: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Heroin’s Teflon Don, 2007), grittily evokes the period (1950s and ’60s) and the place (New York City) in which the Gallo brothers—Brooklyn jukebox magnates and low-level hoods Joey, Larry and Kid Blast—struggled to rise to the top of the underworld. Jimmy Breslin titled his 1969 novel based on the same characters and events The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, but Folsom, who takes his title from Kerouac, is able to tease some heroism out of his protagonists’ antiheroic lives, particularly that of the poetically inclined Joey. Granted, he was a punk who could only plead the Fifth in answer to Bobby Kennedy’s questions during the 1960 Senate hearings on organized crime. He bragged about hitting Murder Inc.’s Albert Anastasia as he waited for a shave in a Midtown barbershop, and unsuccessfully took on the Profaci crime family in a brazen but poorly executed coup attempt, spending most of the ’60s behind bars on an extortion rap. So how did Joey become the toast of the town from the time of his release until his public 1972 execution at a spaghetti joint in Little Italy? Jerry Orbach, who played the character inspired by him in the film of Breslin’s novel, was among the New York players who treated Crazy Joe like the “King of the Streets,” as an epic song penned by Bob Dylan and dramatist Jacques Levy called him. In prose as tight and hard-boiled as any James Ellroy novel, Folsom focuses on the quirks that made Joey an unusual kind of gangster. He modeled himself after the giggling psychopath played by Richard Widmark in the film noir Kiss of Death; he was fascinated bebop, action painting and existential philosophy; he made alliances across racial lines, including one with Folsom’s previous subject and literary collaborator, Harlem drug dealer Leroy Barnes….Novelistic study of an iconoclastic criminal in revolutionary times…Riveting, richly atmospheric pulp nonfiction.“You really wanna know what my problems are? Time and place. That’s all. If I’d have been born at the right time and the right place, they’d have put my statue up in the streets.”
Stay tuned for upcoming events as The Mad Ones approaches its hardcover release on May 5, 2009.