Steve Lewis Interviews ‘The Mad Ones’ Author Tom Folsom

I wasn’t aware of the fast lane as a boy hitting rubber balls with sticks in middle-class Queens, but as I grew up, I heard about the crazy Joe Gallo. I heard that he stood up and questioned the status quo. That’s what was going on: America was growing out of the Ozzie and Harriet 50s and embracing a new sexuality, new politics, and minority and women’s rights. For the first time since the Civil War, masses took to the streets to protest a war. Joey was the rogue gangster who asked why his world had to be this way, and they called him crazy. Then they whacked them. Reading Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld took me back to a bygone era. The book presents a believable image of a man trying to change thousands of years of mob tradition. I talked to Folsom about his new must-read on a warm, sunny afternoon in Little Italy, outside of what used to be the Ravenite Social Club and John Gotti’s headquarters.

You wrote The Mad Ones about Joe Gallo, a legendary, almost Warhol-esque crime figure. He lived hard long before John Gotti, Al Pacino, and Tony Soprano romanticized gangsters. Joe was the original marquee mobster.
Yeah, he comes from that tradition of the kind of guys that bridged Hollywood and the mob, like Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone. He liked to be in the papers a lot, he liked to get his face in the tabloids; Joe is definitely one of these guys, he modeled himself after B-movie psycho killers and film lords in classics like Kiss of Death.

For Joe, it felt good to be gangster, so it was as much in the act and the look and the attitude as it was in actually doing the gangster things, right?
The funny thing is that the other guys who aren’t mentioned were real top-of-the-line guys; they were really the bosses. Joe wasn’t really quite the boss. He was down at the bottom—they called him a button man, but he had a lot of ambition, and he wanted to go out on his own.

People like James Caan’s character in The Godfather, John Gotti, and Tony Soprano have been romanticized. How much do you think Joe Gallo was aware of the romanticism of the gangster life?
Oh, I think he definitely played into it. He knew what he was doing. He was hitting the Upper East Side and going to cocktail parties with guys like Jerry Orbach, who he became friends with. And this is in his gangster-chic days; I think he really liked the idea of being a fashionable mobster. The Godfather was coming out right at this time, so I think anybody who was anybody wanted to meet a real-life gangster—so that was really Joey’s chance to play up the hill.

There’s a scene in The Godfather Part II where Joey Pentangeli is attacked inside the bar, and he’s saved by a wayward policeman who just happened to wander in as they were strangling him. Is that all based on Joe Gallo?
Down to the dialogue. They recreated that scene exactly as sources say it happened.

He wasn’t a looker in the movie, he wasn’t charismatic, he wasn’t a ladies man, but Joey was a ladies man.
Joey was a ladies man. It was his brother Larry who tried to get the job done on him. Larry was the brains of the operation—they called him “Larry the Boss.” Joey was the spark plug in the Gallo gang, but Larry was the real brains. One detective told me, “Larry is a genius; he can take your watch apart and put it back together.”

In some films, Joey Gallo is painted as a renaissance man. In your mind, is Joey Gallo really a renaissance man who was born a gangster and evolved out of that street persona, or did he become a renaissance man later in life?
Well, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and I’m not sure whether or not that’s true, but I think he had two forces going on in his brain. On one end he’s raised in this world ... I think there’s one FBI report that said his father trained the boys to be killers; they were born and raised to work for the syndicate. And on the other end, you have Joey, like a lot of other guys living in Greenwich Village in the 1960s—he liked Bob Dylan, got involved in the artistic and literary scene. He wanted to paint, he wanted to write, I even heard he took acting classes. So he’s got this real thirst for what a lot of people are looking for in the Village; that’s why I named the book The Mad Ones. I think that Joey had these two worlds that did not belong with each other; it’s really hard to be the gangster and artist. I think these two fortunes were quiet with each other until they kind of tear him apart at the end.

If you ask 15 guys in this neighborhood “Who is Joe Gallo?” you’ll probably get 15 different answers. So what are the universals?
The universal is that he was a gangster. The universal is that he dressed the part, he had the whole gangster suit look down—the skinny black tie, a white shirt, tight-fitting black suit. He was incredibly charismatic, really well read, incredibly smart, and I think he was a really scary guy as well.

When I read the book, I was impressed by the way you set the tone with a song that was coming out that week, or a movie, or events that we all knew were happening. You must have really done your research.
I went underground for a year to write this book. I gave myself Joey’s own reading list in prison; if you look at the thing it reads like a philosophy course—Sartre, Machiavelli, he was even reading the Greeks. It’s a really extensive reading list, but I thought, I’ve got to read what this guy read to get the best chance of what’s going on inside of his brain, and I almost kind of went nuts doing it. And I spoke to the cops who would hang around President Street, at Gallo headquarters 24/7. They were assigned to watch these guys, they were on detail for a few years watching the Gallos, so at some point these detectives would sit down and have dinner with the Gallo gang. You get a real sense of what it was like spending time with the Gallos from those guys.

You painted a great picture. I was transported back in time to that barber shop, or in that store, or on that street corner, and I assume you had to chat up these wise guys and the people who were there. Did you talk to wise guys about this?
I try to keep some sort of professional distance from it, but I did talk to Nicky Barnes for instance, who was with Joey in the joint. Nicky Barnes was a big drug dealer from Harlem who was popularized in the movie American Gangster, with Denzel Washington.

You alluded to Kiss of Death, and in the movie, Victor Mature plays Nick Bianco, who wants to go good because he falls in love with a girl named Neddy. The great love of Joey’s life is called Jeffie, very similar to Neddy. Was that the plan? To go straight to marriage and settle down as an artist or intellectual?
Yeah, he married her twice, but she was a real beatnik. To me, I think she kind of cut through the bullshit of what the beatniks were about. Even a guy like Lenny Bruce openly admitted that he ripped off the underworld lingo, and you’ve got guys like Jack Kerouac who’d be hanging out with hustlers in Times Square. These guys were really attracted to the underworld, so I think Jeffie’s thought was just, well, I’m gonna cut out the middleman and just date the guys in the underworld, because this is what these guys are trying to be like anyway. That’s my theory.

He was killed at Umberto’s Clam House having dinner with his family and new wife, Cena, but it seems like he might have been trying to live the happily ever after like the Nick Bianco life.
He might have, but then at the same time, I think all these guys think they’re going to get out of the life at some point, and they never do. I think that Joe was also really attracted to what being a gangster gave him—the kind of respect he commanded. I think it’s hard to give that up, and its also hard after that’s been your whole life. I mean, what was he going to do with his life after that?

He could have been an artist, right?
He could have been, but that takes discipline. He was a good painter, and he might’ve even broken through—I was just talking to the lawyer that arranged Joey’s book deal today (Joey was going to get a book deal, it was all in the works), so it could’ve worked out, you never know what would’ve happened if he didn’t get whacked that night. But at the same time, I think he courted it; he was at the Copacabana that night, he was insulting mob bosses, he was making a spectacle of himself, it was his 43rd birthday, and I think he got the ending that he wanted. The ending of Kiss of Death, when Tommy gets done outside of Luigi’s Clam House.

The best man at his wedding was David Steinberg, who directs Curb Your Enthusiasm to this day, so he was traveling in Hollywood circles. I think Joe Gallo could’ve gotten out.
But again, I think it’s these two forces that are coming out. As much as he wants to be the artist and celebrity, I think he also equally really wants to be a gangster, and I think at the end that tore him apart. He’s playing a gangster at the Copacabana, and then he’s being a family man at Umberto’s Clam House. Even his wedding, he put it in the New York Post, and then the night he’s at the Copa talking to Carl M. Wilson—you’re not supposed to do that if you’re a part of the syndicate.

Could there could be another Joey Gallo, and would he be Italian?
That’s a good question, and that’s tough to say. I think the 60s were a time when you could get away with a lot more. Everything seems so much more regulated now; I don’t think you could have someone that wild. But who knows, because you look at some of the other underworld characters, and I’m always thinking an Italian guy, but it could be someone else.

He could be a Cuban gangster like Tony Montana. We were looking at gangsters traditionally as Italians or Irish or Jewish, but Scarface showed us a new incarnation.
Yeah, all these guys love to see the image of themselves in movies, like “Oh yeah, I wanna be that gangster.” So who knows, the cycle is probably repeating itself somewhere.

If Joe Gallo was a Sopranos character, which one would he be?
I think the Christopher Melloni character because he wants to be an actor, he’s got the mole, and he wants to write a script. I think that character gets close to what Joey was.

Joey went to prison to do a ten-year bid, and in the joint he became friends with black guys, Spanish guys, and so on, and when he got out he recruited blacks and other ethnicities into his gang.
It was a smart move. It hadn’t been done, and it sort of ostracized them, but it was a real smart move.

Tom, you’re from Georgia. Why are you writing a book about the Italian mob? How the hell does that happen?
I think it just transcends a simple mob story; this is a great New York story, and in a way his story encapsulates the myths that I always thought of when I came to New York. I remember the first time I walked by Umberto’s Clam House, I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s where that guy got whacked.” Joe was a largely New York City character, and to me, in his own way, he embodied the 60s, which is a fascinating period with Kerouac and all that. I’ve been figuring out the power alliances, the mafia stuff, just trying to figure out that whole world. So it’s a great New York story and a good mob tale