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The Way of the Wiseguy
By Joseph D. Pistone
Running Press
Reviewed by: Rob Holden
So you're thinking "Who the hell is Joseph D. Pistone? I've never heard of him." Well, sure you have. Pistone is better known as Donnie Brasco -- the undercover FBI Special Agent who infiltrated the New York Mafia for six years. He's the guy Johnny Depp played in the movie, opposite Al Pacino. Now retired from law enforcement (or so we assume -- I mean, if he was still undercover he wouldn't tell us about it, right?) Pistone has become an author, following up his New York Times bestselling Donnie Brasco with this new non-fiction look into the Mafia.
In The Way of the Wiseguy, Pistone draws on his experiences as a "member" of the Bonanno crime family to give readers an inside look at what it is really like to live the life of a Mafia wiseguy. Some of the chapters in the book include: "Why Wiseguys Will Kill You," "Wiseguys Don't Make Reservations," "What Wiseguys Say and What They Mean," and my personal favorite "Wiseguys Aren't Great Shots." Virtually everything you want to know about what these guys do, how they think and what makes them tick seems to be included in this slim 223-page volume.
The Mafia has been hot for years in popular entertainment -- starting with The Godfather and moving all the way through the currently successful HBO series The Sopranos -- and the people who populate the organized crime world have been presented in a lot of different ways. My advice when reading this book is to take everything you think you know about the underworld and "fagetaboutit." Though riddled with at times laugh out loud funny prose, The Way of the Wiseguy is nonetheless a chilling portrayal of an almost completely amoral world in which friendship has no meaning, matters of right and wrong are determined by their cash value, and life is lived looking over your shoulder 24/7/365. Anyone -- from the lowest Soldier to the highest Boss -- knows that he can be killed at any moment, usually by a "friend." It is a world that revolves completely around money, and Pistone makes his point that everything in the world of the wiseguy comes second to the cash bottom line with his compellingly written accounts of actual events.
What really hooked me about this book, however, was Mr. Pistone himself. A lot of what he did while undercover that was not shown in the movie Donnie Brasco is presented in this book -- both while he was Donnie Brasco, and undercover operations he was involved with after that. Pistone writes candidly about some of the things he was forced to do to stay alive and manages to impart a least some of what it must have been like to live under that kind of pressure to his readers. Rather than portraying himself as a good guy in a bad world, Pistone simply tells his stories unapologetically. From almost the first page, this author is telling his readers: "This is how it was -- if you don't like it, stop reading." Well, I didn't like how it "was," but there was no way I could stop reading.
One thing that most certainly does come through these pages is Pistone's own personal courage -- this guy has a set of cojones on him the size of New Jersey -- and if the book itself isn't enough to convince you of that, there is an audio CD included with over 40 minutes of taped telephone conversations between Pistone in his character of Donnie Brasco and "Lefty" -- the character played by Al Pacino in the movie (a transcript of these conversations is included at the end of the book as well). These conversations are a perfect addendum to the body of the book in that when you have finished listening to them, any doubts you might have had about the accuracy of Pistone's presenting how things were in the book will instantly vanish.
The Way of the Wiseguy takes us into a world that is completely alien to most of us, and presents with brutal honestly what the underbelly of society is really like. This book is a must read for any true crime fan.
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