I’m 2/3ds through Jimmy Breslin’s 2008 The Good Rat: A True Story. It’s essentially about Burton Kaplan, who dealt with various mobsters, with side stories flowing off the main narrative.
A curious shift takes place. The opening bid is that the Mafia is essentially dead kept alive only by journalistic and film stories about it. Breslin scorns mobsters as basically lazy high school drop outs without the wherewithal to do anything requiring discipline and brains. They’re all, so to say, members of “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” Breslin’s name for Crazy Joey Gallo’s crew.
But some mid way through the book, Breslin becomes Damon Runyon, glorying in these now colourful characters, how they confer genial liveliness in the saloons they hang out in and in the good company they provide over drinks or a meal.
Complementing this shift, at one point Breslin rails against how New York has changed with imprisonment depleting the mobsters’ numbers, how 9-5 dull saloons and the city itself have become owing to how boring and square regular folks are.
He at another point speaks warmly affectionately of Jimmy Burke, a stone killer who left dead bodies in his wake, the outrage over that nowhere to be seen due to a big favour Burke tried to do Breslin.
In this, Damon Runyon trumps the opening bid.
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