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by: Philip Carlo
List Price: $25.95Amazon.com's Price: $17.13 You Save: $8.82 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1092
EAN: 9780061429842
ISBN: 0061429848
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: July 01, 2008
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: July 01, 2008
Sales Rank: 9975
Studio: William Morrow
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso is currently serving thirteen consecutive life sentences plus 455 years at a federal prison in Colorado. Now, for the first time, the head of a mob family has granted complete and total access to a journalist. Casso has given New York Times bestselling author Philip Carlo the most intimate, personal look into the world of La Cosa Nostra ever seen. This is his shocking story.
From birth, Anthony Casso's mob life was preordained. Michael Casso introduced his young son around South Brooklyn's social clubs, where 'men of honor' did business by shaking pinkie-ringed hands—hands equally at home pilfering stolen goods from the Brooklyn docks or gripping the cold steel of a silenced pistol. Young Anthony watched and listened and decided that he would devote his life to crime.
Casso would prove his talent for 'earning,' concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring into New York vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Casso also had an uncanny ability to work with the other Mafia families, and he forged unusually strong ties with the Russian mob. By the time Casso took the reins of the Lucchese family, he was a seasoned boss, a very dangerous man.
It was a great life—Casso and his beautiful wife, Lillian, had money to burn; Casso and his crew brought in so much cash that he had dozens of large safe-deposit boxes filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. But the law finally caught up with him in his New Jersey safe house in 1994. Rather than stoically face the music like the old-time mafiosi he revered, Casso became the thing he most hated—a rat. It broke his family's heart and made the once feared and revered mobster an object of scorn and disgust among his former friends. For it turned out that a lifetime of street smarts completely failed him in dealing with a group even more cunning and ruthless than the Mafia—the U.S. government.
Detailing Casso's feud with John Gotti and their attempts to kill each other, the 'Windows Case' that led to the beginning of the end for the mob in New York, and Casso's dealings with decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—the 'Mafia cops'—Gaspipe is the inside story of one man's rise and fall, mirroring the rise and fall of a way of life, a roller-coaster ride into a netherworld few outsiders have ever dared to enter.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A GOOD GANGSTER
CARLO SPEAKS WRITES ABOUT A STAND UP GUY WHO IN THE END RATTED OUT HIS OWN DOG IN HOPES OF GETTING OUT OF JAIL.
Rating:  - confessions of a mafia boss
i'm disaapointed by this book, I got half way reading it but got bored. Nothing I have not read already in the papers. I give it 1/2 star.
Rating:  - novel-like work
Great Novel-like read...Altho author biases towards Casso, he truly makes a hero out of him in reader's eyes. Paints vivid pictures of every crime and non-crime-related tale and leaves reader waning more and more after each chapter, not only about Casso but every Made Man mentioned.
Rating: - Ugly Things Written Beautifully
Man, I sure hated all those mafia books on the shelves taking up space in my bookstores! I thought, who cares about these cretins? Not me!! Even though I have a couple thousand true crime books, none deal with Cosa Nostra, I've never seen The Sopranos, and have only seen Godfather I. The topic was of zero interest to me.
However, having loved Mr. Carlo's '96 Night Stalker, I admired his writing stle enough to pick up Ice Man.That book just blew me away because of the way Mr. Carlo ... Read More
Rating: - Gaspipe Rocks
Both my husband and me thoroughly enjoyed Gaspipe. Both of us come from Dyker Heights and thought Carlo's portrayal of the Mafia culture was eerie and uncanny. We note with dismay the posting here of R.J. Rios. I can only say that this fellow's sources of information are the three hundred books he says he read. That's woefully inadequate. The Mafia is all about secrecy. The Mafia is clandestine by its very nature. Having said that, it seems ludicrous that any one person, based on the reading ... Read More
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