I was picking up a package from my concierge when, to my surprise, he asked me to hold on for a moment as he looked to retrieve a second one. Momentary confusion gave way to curiosity. I don’t think I ordered anything else. I wonder what it could be, I thought to myself. After a few minutes, I was handed a smallish rectangular brown package. My eyes widened as I looked in horror that the package was addressed to ‘Mafia Book Reviews’ with my personal address written underneath. Great, now my concierge knows I’m a lame niche internet blogger. Of course, the scarier part was trying to remember who I had given my address to in personal correspondence. The wait for the elevator felt like an eternity. Finally, I stepped into my apartment, dropped everything, and proceeded to rip open the packaging. Is this a book? Who would send me a book? In a sight of relief and mild annoyance, I saw Gianni Russo’s shushing face greet me. Mafia Secrets, huh? The first secret I wanted to know was how he got my address. Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I review a Gianni Russo product, but it’s finally here. I got a free advanced copy, might as well make some use out of it.

I’m not sure what the purpose of this book is. In my brief review of Hollywood Godfather’s index (Gianni’s previous memoir), I noticed many of the same characters and events reappearing. It seems several of the so-called ‘Mafia Secrets’ haven’t been so since at least 2019… In any case, I must give credit where it is due; it is a fairly entertaining book. A short, light read, I read it during a flight to Colorado and back.  The cast of characters is notable, the events described seemed [almost] fantastical, and Russo is someone who can tell a fun story. The underlying rags to riches tale about a child suffering from a crippling illness achieving success in their chosen field is even somewhat inspiring. However way he made his supposed fortune, it seems he is spending it on admirable causes (even with the implied vanity of the Marlyn Monroe Museum project). This is the book equivalent of a mindless popcorn film. Readers are warned to turn off their brains. One ill-timed synapses firing a semblance of a thought will ruin the experience.

Mafia Secrets falls apart under any critical examination, and one doesn’t have to be a historian to figure out the glaring errors plaguing the book. Now my copy explicitly states, “typographical and layout errors will not be present in the final book available to consumers,” so I’m not exactly sure what mistakes are present in the final version. However, even beyond the simple mistakes, there are internal time inconsistencies, such as the one involving Joseph Colombo’s demise in relation to the making of The Godfather, logical oversights, and things that just straight up do not make any sense. Take, for instance, Russo’s supposed involvement with Moe Dalitz and the collection of unpaid gambling debts. In the past, apparently, it was forbidden for Nevada casinos to collect losses from gamblers once they crossed state lines. Seeing all these unpaid markers, Russo concocted the brilliant scheme of buying up the face value of the debt for pennies on the dollar and collecting it himself with some hired goons. And who was his target demographic? Doctors and lawyers… You know the ones that would be presumably aware of the law stating it was a crime for Russo to try and collect. The timeline of Howard Hughes’s involvement in Las Vegas was similarly all messed up and didn’t make sense within the story.  

What can be verified? A brief scan of the newspaper record confirms his minor celebrity status. Journalists covering the entertainment section took his words and stories at face value, so there was little in the way of serious fact-checking or pushback made on claims of fame and fortune. His meeting with Pablo Escobar warrants no discussion. That meeting, in turn, was facilitated by an alleged sit-down with John Gotti, the Gambino Boss. Yet, despite probably being the single most surveilled man on the planet at the time, no record of it exists. Kennedy conspiracies, the Vatican plot, and the Iranian revolution affair similarly strain credulity. His witnessing of the Spilotro brothers’ brutal demise is likewise unlikely to have occurred, given that he weirdly fingers Frank Cullotta at the scene. This is despite the fact that Cullotta cooperated years earlier (a fact that is acknowledged by the book and explained away in a laughable way) and has never mentioned it once in either his biography or numerous interviews. Maybe Cullotta just forgot to talk about it, alongside Nicholas Calabrese, when he testified in Operation Family Secret (having been one of the ones to actually carry out the murders).

To me, the story that stood the most potential of being interesting was Gianni Russo’s involvement in the development of the failed Renaissance Hotel-Casino near the Las Vegas strip, simply because it seemed plausible. The book describes Russo’s ambition of building a $54 million 650-room hotel featuring 18,000 square feet of playing space filled with 750 slot machines, twenty-one blackjack tables, a Big Six Wheel, baccarat, and keno. All this would be bankrolled by hardworking Americans courtesy of the Teamsters pension fund via a $30 million loan. To top it all off, Nick Civella, Kansas City’s mob boss, and Joe Agosto, head of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergere show, were caught discussing it all on tape! Gianni mentioned his previous relationship with Civella, giving him a million dollars to shylock, and Civella did have influence with the Teamsters. Unfortunately, there are a couple of issues. First, I looked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal archive, typed in a million different keyword combinations, and have not been able to locate the article with the transcript in question. Second, by November 1978, Civella had a hard time getting loans that he wanted approved by the Teamsters, and so it makes one question how Gianni supposedly secured his. Having recognized the problem of the complete capture of the Teamsters pension fund by racketeers, The Federal government forced the union to undergo structural reforms that took away the power to approve new investments from corrupt trustees to a third party. Thus, sadly, this promising story seems to be as real as all the rest.

I can’t blame Gianni Russo for this effort. He’s unapologetically a hustler through and through. Blurring fact and fiction is what all good storytellers do (to what extent is sensible is up to you to decide). However, the cover of the book states, “with Michael Benson,” and I hold him a bit more accountable. As one of the more prolific “Mafia authors” through his series of books with Frank DiMatteo, he should hold himself to a higher standard. As much as those books may lack in value and effort, they still strive to get to the truth. Of what value is the “Sources” section at the back of Mafia Secrets if you cannot verify anything besides the boilerplate biographies of random members and associates of organized crime that had nothing, if anything, to do with Russo that served to just pad out the page count (such as the Alan Dorfman bio). I’m not sure how you can put your name and stand behind a product you know is not true.

Mafia Secrets is akin to The Lion King 1 1/2. Like Timon and Pumbaa, Russo is present at every important event, witnessing history altering consequences, and yet playing no role in actually furthering them. As Tony Soprano aptly put it, “Did she ever exist?”