The Mad Ones - Tom Folsom

If one thing can be gleaned from Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, it’s that they certainly didn’t call Joe Gallo “Crazy Joe” for nothing. In many ways, he was a textbook example of a juvenile delinquent turned complete sociopath. Crazy Joe robbed, killed, extorted, and racketeered; however, he and his brothers, Larry and Albert “Kid Blast”, were more than just average gangsters. In Red Hook, Brooklyn— their small swath of the world—the Gallo’s were both heroes and celebrities. Still, the Gallo brothers weren’t content to keep doing the dirty work of La Cosa Nostra only to remain stuck at the bottom rung of the crime world’s social ladder. By the time he was killed in the early hours of the morning at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy, Crazy Joe had battled everyone from Bobby Kennedy, to Joe Profaci and his eventual successor Joe Colombo.

From the beginning, Crazy Joe and his brothers were on the outside looking in on the New York City underworld. Growing up in Red Hook, on the South shore of Brooklyn, they were already geographically on the fringe of the mob. Nonetheless, he and his brothers were determined to become “Made Men” and, following the ruthless tutelage of their father Umberto, a failed bootlegger, they began their fight to ascend to the top of the organized crime syndicate. Larry Gallo was the first to be brought in, after he was recruited to help run numbers in South Brooklyn, and not far behind him were his younger brothers Crazy Joe and Kid Blast.The brothers figured that doing the dirty work of the mob was the easiest way to rise to the top, so that’s precisely what they set out to do, and they did it well. They eventually formed a hit squad that emulated their famous predecessors Murder, Inc. The brothers were good at their work, but after being scorned by notorious crime boss Giuseppe “Joe” Profaci (founder and leader of what is now known as the Colombo crime family) Crazy Joe became disillusioned with the hierarchical system of the mafia and began what would turn out to be an all-out gang war on the streets of Brooklyn. After a failed coup attempt, Crazy Joe and his gang holed up in their headquarters on President Street and spent the next several years at war with their mob rivals. In the process, the brothers—specifically Crazy Joe—became pop-culture sensations and regularly made headlines in the city’s tabloid newspapers, even landing a cover story in LIFE Magazine. As big as Crazy Joe was in Brooklyn, though, it wasn’t long before he became a celebrity throughout all of New York City and the rest of the country too. However, even his newfound celebrity couldn’t save Crazy Joe from prison eventually.

After being convicted on extortion charges Crazy Joe was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison where he befriended future Harlem kingpin and druglord Nicky Barnes. Upon his release, Crazy Joe, who spent much of his time in prison reading and studying, befriended actor Jerry Orbach who played a character based on Gallo in the famous mob spoof The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. In fact, many of the fictionalized characters and events in The Godfather were also based on the Gallo brothers. By virtue of his new friendship with the Orbach’s, though, the former inmate quickly became one of the most popular members of New York City’s elite social circles.

Folsom does a tremendous job of rendering the fascinating complexities and contradictions of Crazy Joe Gallo’s character amidst the fast-paced and riveting backdrop of the violent New York City underworld. He manages to illuminate the many contradictions in Gallo’s character in such a way that the reader, much like the residents of Brooklyn’s Little Italy, cannot help but empathize with him. Folsom is able to paint the picture of a man that is a walking juxtaposition; he’s a violent criminal and killer but he is not without morals, he’s a thug and a hoodlum but he is an avid reader that paints and writes poetry, he’s a mafia hit man but is completely swept up by the revolutionary beat scene in Greenwich Village. Even with these contradictions, however; there’s no doubt that Crazy Joe was a troubled man capable of terrible violence without a second thought. For instance, at one point in the book Folsom provides a passage of Gallo calmly explaining an incident with a fellow prisoner in the Attica Correctional Facility:

“The guy’s screaming,” said Joey, telling the story of how he got jumped with a shiv. “The guards think it’s me, so nobody shows up for some time. Meanwhile, I’m back in my cell with the door closed and his ear in my mouth. Finally, one of the guards comes, and he hears them talking outside. Then one of them comes in and says, ‘Okay, Gallo. Where’s the ear?’” In Joey’s version, he spit the ear into the toilet and flushed.

But on the other hand, none other than folksinger and village legend Bob Dylan said of Gallo, “I never considered him a gangster, I always thought of him as some kind of hero in some kind of way. An underdog fighting against the elements” and even wrote the popular ballad Joey about his death. Even village literati Susan Sontag lamented “I wish I’d had the chance to talk to Joe Gallo before he died.”

The Crazy Joe Gallo revealed in the spellbinding narrative of The Mad Ones cannot be absolutely defined as either a gangster or a budding intellectual. Instead, upon reading his story one discovers a man that is truly an anti-hero caught on the fringe of mob culture while, ironically, attempting to break into a then-fringe cultural movement that appeals to the other side of his personality. Crazy Joe is constantly torn between the new life in the beat scene that he so desperately wants, and the mafia life that he can’t seem to escape no matter how desperately he tries.

At times the reader may become confused by Gallo’s unpredictable and seemingly unexplainable actions, but he can also take solace in realizing that Gallo was often just as confused himself. Sometimes during the narrative it looks as though Crazy Joe is finally going to escape the madness of his life in the mafia and move on to a life of art and writing, but over and over again the gravity of the life he was born into just proves to be too great. In fact, Crazy Joe once said, “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.” Kid Blast agreed, echoing Joey’s sentiments during his brother’s funeral procession, he explains, “If that [bootlegging] boat had landed, my father could have been another Joe Kennedy, and who knows what might have happened to us boys then?” In a different time and place the Gallo brothers might’ve made powerful allies to the Kennedy’s rather than formidable opponents.

Folsom, through painstaking research and narrative reconstruction, deftly captures the story of the Gallo brothers and their revolt against the hierarchy of the mafia. Even more remarkably, he manages to do so without falling into the trap so many other non-fiction writers often fall into, the trap of masquerading dull and trivial facts uncovered in their research as their work’s central narrative. Instead of hindering his reader with a barrage of excessive research, Folsom showcases his storytelling ability by seamlessly weaving together his own words with archival records and the words of the real characters involved in the Gallo story. His research acts as a supplement highlighting, contextualizing, and supporting the tragic story that he uncovers, that of a man trapped by the immense gravity of his own destiny, instead of slowing it down and holding it back. Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones is the real-life story of an American tragedy and it certainly does not disappoint.