Louis Ferrante: Mafia muscle turned author.

About Louis

From former Mafia insider and federal prison inmate Louis Ferrante comes a remarkable and moving memoir about the author’s journey from a life of crime to that of a professional writer.

As a teenager, Ferrante made his reputation as a gang leader.  Later, he hooked up with the Gambino crime family. During his time with the mob, Ferrante committed some of the most lucrative robberies in US history.
Eventually, the law caught up with him and Louis found himself behind bars. In jail, Louis read his first book and suddenly, a whole new world opened up to him. During his 8 1/2 years in prison he read everything from Caesar’s GALLIC WARS to classic 19th century fiction.

A self-educated man, Ferrante successfully appealed his own conviction, a case that is cited in courtrooms across the country. In addition to law, he studied the three major faiths, including Buddhism, and eventually chose to become an Orthodox Jew.

Now out of prison, Ferrante tells the story of his meteoric rise in the Mafia, his time in prison, and the astonishing turn around his life has made. Louis Ferrante has reinvented himself as a writer.

Louis the Mobster

Hannaford locked the door behind him, then stood under a lamppost at the curb, facing the apartments. He reached into his pockets and pulled out a cigarette, cupping his hands around it, burned it, took a drag. He exhaled a days worth of stress.

I imagined a man who touched so much money would be wearing a hand-tailored suit. Hannaford dressed like a dirt bag, faded leather jacket and worn jeans. His hair needed to be combed and cut.

He was alone. No security. No off-duty cops. No hired henchmen

I thought about how the job should go down. If Hannaford had spent a minute warming up his car, I might’ve considered taking him in the drivers seat.

I considered flattening a tire then offering him help, shoving him into his trunk as he reached for the spare. I ruled this out, though my reasoning was ridiculous.

Ever since I started driving, I helped people out on the road.

I once was stuck in a traffic jam on the Southern State Parkway. I finally drove up alongside the cause: everybody was rubbernecking, starring at an old man with one f***ing arm trying to fix a flat. Not one selfish b**tard pulled over to help – except me, a criminal.

The old man was struggling with a tire iron, trying to loosen a lug nut with one hand, when I walked up behind him. After I fixed his flat he fumbled with his wallet, tried to give me money.
“Put that away.” I patted him on the back.

No one would even let me merge onto the Parkway as I pulled away. I finally cut in front of someone, who honked and gave me the finger.

Another time I’m passing an elderly black couple on the Van Wyck Expressway, staring at a flat. I was sure their colour hand to do with nobody stopping; how many men would pull over for a couple of blondes? I pulled off the road to help. It was winter. It was cold. I made them wait in my car with the heat on while I changed their flat.

I’m planning to stuff some overworked mamaluke into his trunk so I can clean out his joint, but I couldn’t use the flat tire as a ploy, thinking it would wipe out all the good I’d done helping stranded drivers. Certified f***ing lunatic, the only way to explain this.  

Sammy The Bull (S***tter)

I was at Little Paulie’s house watching TV and eating pizza when the front door opened and Big Paulie drifted in with a vacant look on his face.
“Who’s dead?” I expected to hear a friend got whacked.
“My brother,” he slurred, "I jus’ lef’ the lawyers office. Sammy went bad.”
He dragged himself up the steps.

Less than a year before, federal agents pulled John Gotti and our underboss, Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, off the street. Since then, the two were housed in a high rise federal lockup in downtown Manhattan.
Sammy was a tough guy, hard as steel. I couldn’t believe he was begging prosecutors to let him off the hook, blowing them for leniency.
“No way,” I said to Paulie, “Sammy’s gonna do the ‘Frankie Five Angels,’ guaranteed!”
When we played cards in the social clubs, we’d often mimic scenes from The Godfather.
In the movie The Godfather II, Frankie Five Angels is about to testify against mafia boss Michael Corleone, when he recants his earlier testimony. He plays dumb, claims the government made him lie. Because of this, Corleone is free to go.

I mixed movie reels with reality. Thought Sammy planned to snitch then double-cross the government so John could walk.
“Sammy knows he’s finished, why not save John?” I said to Little Paulie. “He’ll go out like a champ. I’d do it.”

My mind was so mobbed up, I couldn’t accept that the number two man in our family went sour. What’s it all for, if our underboss is a punk? We were tough guys, more honourable than everyone else. So we thought.

That night marked the beginning of the end for the Mafia. After Sammy flipped, other big shot mobsters thought it was okay. I came to the conclusion that many mobsters would never have imagined their own treachery had they never been arrested.

So I cleaned out my house.

My first run, I left with more weapons than Rambo used in three movies.

Next, I got rid of a pile of bullet-riddled telephone books  lying around the basement. The mob doesn’t operate a shooting range. After we’d bought guns, we’d go down to the cellar, stack phone books against the wall, and fire rounds into them, testing the guns to make sure they worked. A small-caliber handgun would drive a round deep into the Queens Pages. The blast from a big gun would send it’s bullet straight through the Queens Pages and more than halfway through the Yellow Pages, the bullet lodged somewhere between Plumbing and Real Estate.

There were scraps of paper all over my bedroom:

“Tues Thurs safe sixty grand.”
“Teller #4 Mon Fri 10-6.”
“Fogarty Trucking JFK loading dock 8.”

Sneaker Pete said, “Don’t throw away papers, burn ‘em. I heard feds go through your garbage.”

 I stuffed all my papers into a shopping bag and drove underneath the Van Wyck Expressway, where it rises over Flushing Meadow – Corona Park. Trucks rumbled above. I dumped a pile of small papers into a dented hubcap, lit it, and watched them burn. I was burying a thousand felonies in a small fire.

Insurance jobs, tag jobs, stolen cars, chop shops, trucks, vaults, banks, credit cards, gambling, extortion, loan-sharking.

I wondered how much the feds knew, and how far they went back.