Good Guys and Otherwise

The Good Guys is a grittily unusual thriller in two voices, written from both sides of the criminal street—the Mob and the FBI. Starting with the story of a Columbia professor who gets in over his head, the narrative alternates by chapter between a veteran of the New York mobster underworld very much like Bill Bonanno and the voice of a Pistoneish undercover agent on assignment at an FBI "listening post." As they pass the narrative between them like a baton, the experiences of the two storytellers are less distinct than you might expect, the world of the men inside the Freemont Avenue Social Club overlapping murkily with that of the agents staking it out.

Son of Joseph Bonanno, longtime head of the Bonanno crime family, Bonanno left the New York mobster life with his father for Arizona. In addition to his own recent books (Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story), he was the subject of Gay Talese's wonderful 1971 chronicle Honor Thy Father. Pistone's undercover investigations in the late 1970s as Donnie Brasco led to dozens of convictions as well as a best-selling book and a movie. Yet it turned out that their experiences on both sides of the law intersect enough to hang a narrative thread on.

Writer Fisher (coauthor, Leslie Nielsen: The Naked Truth) first got the idea one afternoon to "put two people on opposite ends of this spectrum together and create a novel from both points of view. Both Joe and Bill got the concept immediately," Fisher told LJ by email, "although, since we had no basis for comparison, I don't think they were quite sure how it would work." How could someone with Bonanno's background team up with a famous FBI Special Agent? "I did get some good-natured kidding from people in my world and from some media friends," Bonanno admits. (Pistone was not available at press time.)

When Bonanno first heard Fisher's unique idea from his agent, Mickey Freiberg, "I thought Mickey was pulling my leg," he recalls. Convinced that there was interest in the project, Bonanno and Pistone arranged a meeting in spring 2003 in New York. "We met in a conference room with our respective entourages seated on each side of a long conference table," says Bonanno, "with Joe on one end and me at the other. After about a half hour of small talk and Joe and I each sizing up the other we concluded it would be possible for us to work together." With the star collaborators and middleman Fisher in place, all the book needed was a storyline.

"We did not have a plot when we met initially," Fisher explains, "although we did have some elements that we wanted to weave into our story. We knew we did not want our characters to be clichés. We want our readers to wonder if, in fact, we're telling a true story that for reasons that will become obvious as they read could not be told." Fisher shuttled between his coauthors, separately discussing plot elements with both men, "although after their first meeting they did not discuss it with each other. That was by choice; I wanted them to be true to their characters." Soon a book was growing around a cast of recognizable characters like Special Agent Connor O'Brien on one side and Mickey Fists and Bobby Blue Eyes on the other. As Bonanno explains, "Everything related is either true or could have been true—the social club, the FBI stakeouts, the Russians." The novel's two main sources make everything in it seem more likely.

When Bill Bonanno was born in Brooklyn in 1932, his father, Joseph Bonanno, was already a don. During New York's so-called Mob Banana Wars (1964–69), two attempts were made on Bill Bonanno's life, and his father was finally forced to relinquish control. Bill sums up his relation to the current underworld this way: "My father and I left New York, after consultation with other leaders in our world, in April 1968. From that date on the Bonanno [Crime] Family ceased to exist." Of the Bonanno "family" that Pistone cracked in the 1970s, Bonanno claims, "The FBI never infiltrated the Bonanno family because it didn't exist after 1968; the FBI was able to infiltrate what passed itself off as the Bonanno family."

Bonanno is skeptical of most of the bloody folklore that fills the shelves of Mafia literature, a genre that for the most part gives the public the "hits" it wants and stops there. "However," he adds, "any book written with the caveat that the writer has lived the facts within the book and explains his part in the facts contained therein and the degree his activities affected national or international situations and that he isn't in the Witness Protection Program must be given serious consideration." When asked if he or Pistone is available for author appearances, Bonanno answers, "The only time I've ever been in seclusion, or more accurately stated not readily available, was during the Banana Wars or when I was hiding from subpoena servers."

Will the two main authors colloborate on future novels? Fisher is hopeful: "What we would really like to do is give each set of characters at least one book of their own, then have them come back together again in another book." Bonanno

is game for more. "The Good Guys represents insights into a world that has titillated society's psyche for most of the 20th century," he says. "As the resulting book demonstrates, it is possible for two people from two different worlds, backgrounds, and sensibilities to collaborate to produce something positive without either violating his traditions or his intellectual and aesthetic distinctions."

Nathan Ward is social sciences editor, LJ Book Review