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Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Carlo
Publisher: William Morrow
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $14.81
You Save: $11.14 (43%)
New (42) Used (13) Collectible (1) from $14.81
Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 21913
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.7
ISBN: 0061429848
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1092
EAN: 9780061429842
ASIN: 0061429848
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081119222050T
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Philip Carlo does it again July 2, 2008
J. Loren (New York, NY)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I got this book July 1st AM (the day it was released) and once I started reading it I couldnt put the book down.
What I like about the authors style is he never sits on one subject too long and there isnt a moment that I feel like saying "oh this is getting boring".
Being from Brooklyn NY and reading the local newspapers all the time I thought I knew everything there is to know about gaspipe but this book really blew my mind, real stories real crimes that happened not too long ago and the author is very strict about giveng details like street names and other data bringing the book to life even more.
Gaspipe Rocks August 15, 2008
Doreen Mannanice (Brooklyn, NY)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
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 of books, would set himself up as an authority. I am sure there are people in law enforcement who knew nothing about what Carlo wrote so insightfully and simply in Gaspipe. We note, too, that Carlo has publicly said -- we recently heard him on a radio show -- that Richard Kuklinski, aka the Iceman, did lie about certain crimes. When most of the participants in any given crime, murder, are dead, it's very hard for an author to verify one way or another what exactly happened. No author in any one book could tell all the tales, trials and tribulations of a character like Anthony Casso. To do such a thing, the book would have to be thousands of pages. A compelling book has to be a condensed version of all that happened. The days of Tolstoy and Joyce are long gone and forgotten. We think Carlo wrote the most insightful, in-depth tale of a Mafia boss ever put on paper. It's a first class job from a first class writer. Highly, highly recommended.
Ugly Things Written Beautifully August 18, 2008
Ann Cloud (Pasadena, TX)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 was able to actually humanize a monster like Richard Kuklinski (not glamorize!). There were no holds barred when it came to his reporting of the atrocities committed, but Mr. Carlo's use of backstory and tell-it-like-it-is views from Kuklinski's family had me hooked from the beginning to end. And for the first time, I bought several copies and mailed to friends in Texas that couldn't care less about such things. Now THEY are buying Mr. Carlo's books, too.
This leads me to his book Gaspipe. I didn't even hesitate to buy it because it was written by Philip Carlo; that's good enough for me! It's extremely rare to find a book where the author and family live next door to the book's subject, grew up in Bensonhurst where so many made guys lived, and understands "the life". If Mr. Carlo can turn my taste in non-fiction around with just two books, then I consider that a writer with a truly great gift.
While he never sugar-coated the horrific crimes Anthony Gaspipe Casso did, just as in Ice Man, Mr. Carlo makes you see the whole man, especially his deep love for his parents, wife and kids. (Yes, I know Hitler adored his mother!) And NO WAY would I ever have had sympathy for a mudering goon like Casso, but it really hacked me off about the FBI's actions in picking and choosing the evidence to come out in court. It's also an OUTRAGE that the government didn't honor their commitment to Casso's 6-1/2 years sentence like they did for other informants.
I am a huge fan of Mr. Carlo, and have ordered his other books. i wish him many happy years of writing and continuing his meticulous research.
a very compelling read... July 25, 2008
LG (NYC)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I first must address the review posted here by Uncle Paul. In my mind, he didn't read the same book I read. Throughout the book, Anthony Casso beared his soul to Carlo. He told Carlo about the relationship with his wife and her untimely death in great detail; he told Carlo about his first murder, when he made his bones; he told Carlo about his breaking and entering crew in amazing, colorful detail; he told Carlo too about the death of his father with such personal intimacy that I cried; he told Carlo in amazing candor about his drug-dealing operation, the shrimp boats he owned that brought tons of marijuana from South America to Brooklyn's great Jamaica Bay, about the jet he bought which reularly brought huge amounts of cocaine from Colombia to South Florida; he also told Carlo about why he betrayed his oath of Omerta and why the government ended up betraying him. I read FIVE FAMILIES and what Carlo garnered from Casso is far more detailed, far more in-depth. Also, throughout Carlo's book, Anthony Casso is constantly quoted. At the back of Carlo's book, there are several pages, in Casso's own words, about why he became an informer.... why he feels LCN is dying. In short, this book gave me a fly-on-the-wall perspective of not only Casso's life in La Cosa Nostra, but the whole world that he was such an intricate, important part of. Carlo writes with authority, simplicity, with a razor sharp edge that, at times, left me breathless.
La Cosa Nostra extraordinaire July 25, 2008
Kelsey Osgood (New York, NY United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am an avid reader of both true crime and fiction. I found Carlo's book on Gaspipe riveting. For the first time, I got a handle on the true inner workings of not only a mob family -- the Luccheses -- but on how a young boy from South Brooklyn was inducted and became part of the criminal enterprise we have come to know as the Mafia. Somehow, Carlo managed to not only give us the heart and soul of Anthony Casso, but he puts in our hands the inner workings of the mob; what drives it, how its motor, pulleys and pistons work. I noted, with dismay, reviewers here attack Carlo -- say that there were no confessions in this book. This really shocked me for the book is replete with direct quotes from Casso and the death of his wife, all the different scams and murders he was involved in are here in living color. His working with the so-called Mafia Cops is here. His being given a contract to kill John Gotti is here...how and when and where and why the contract was issued. I highly, highly recommend this book. Salud, Philip Carlo.
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