May 10 2007
Gambino Genes
All the attention is gratifying, but people ask him stupid questions. “‘Did you ever kill anybody?’ Come on. ‘Do you know John Gotti?’ I won’t even talk about him.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Giurleo offers, taking on a serious, measured tone like Marlon Brando doing Don Vito Corleone. “Our lives are not all they’re cracked up to be. People read about the glamour and glitz, but you’re either in it for good — or you die.”
The boxing gets under way. Gambino’s crew hollers and cheers; they’re sitting so close, they get sprinkled with sweat from the athletes. After a couple of amateur rounds, Gambino has still not been called up to the ring. But he has to split and get to Miami, where his wife is preparing for a big fashion show tomorrow. Before leaving, he sets up a table near the convention hall entrance and autographs a few books.
It’s true — everyone wants to know a Gambino. In just a few minutes, he is approached by a stream of models, one of the aspiring boxers, and even a uniformed cop, all eager to be photographed with Gambino.
“Oh, man,” Gambino says after being snapped shaking the officer’s hand. “I bet you never thought you’d see that!” His friends can’t stop laughing.
Does the cop even realize who he’s talking to?
“Yeah, he’s a Gambino,” the cop says. “He has a book out or something? Aw, come on, he’s good now; he’s clean. Hey, can you e-mail me that picture?”
In 1997, Gambino self-published a novel called My Only Son. It’s the story of a character named Vinny Denucci whose father is Mafia boss Sonny Denucci. As much a coming-of-age novel as it is a thriller, the story follows Vinny from age 13, when he first starts to comprehend that his father is involved in criminal activity, to his mid-20s, when he’s a bona fide killer and has taken over the Mafia syndicate. Throughout the book, Vinny struggles to reconcile his own morality with his father’s violent expectations.
The book contains a standard disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction… Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, locales, or actual incidents, is entirely coincidental.” But a MySpace page for My Only Son says, “He who has traveled could only have created a compelling style story of this genre.” And the dedication page of the book reads, “This is dedicated to the memories of the past: however painful, they did serve a purpose.”
Although the book is written primarily in the third person, it sometimes curiously slips into first. Gambino admits that he wrote the book using I and we and, during editing, changed the I’s to “Vinny” and the we’s to “Vinny and Sonny.” Apparently, he missed a few.
“I know Vinny like the back of my hand,” Gambino says expansively, hinting that he modeled the character on himself. The character of Sonny appears to be a composite of his father — who died when Chris was 13 — and the uncle who raised him after his father’s death. But who those men are exactly and how they might have inside knowledge of the Mafia, he says he can’t divulge. When pressed, he says he drew inspiration from an uncle named Joe who served time. Later, Gambino says the character might be based on a person who in real life is called Sonny.
No mainstream publication has reviewed My Only Son, but Gambino deserves if not a literary award at least some props. Like its characters, the book has few pretensions and moves along at a breezy clip. The plot includes enough murderous scenes and backstabbing mobsters to keep pages flipping. Although some of the scenes are melodramatic (on the day he gets out of prison, Vinny holds back tears when he looks at a photo of his mother) and some of the dialogue forced (”Well, that settles it. We are going whoring tonight”), readers willing to suspend their disbelief (and forgive grammatical errors) should be impressed by the author’s earnestness. Writing a book requires discipline from anyone, never mind a first-time author with no college degree.
Vinny’s emotions give the story its verisimilitude. Through him, we learn that the wiseguy can be vulnerable, scared, sympathetic. For example, in a scene in which his father forces him to shoot a deer, there’s a convincing ruthlessness to Sonny’s rough guidance of his son. “I wanted you to see how living things bleed to death,” Sonny tells Vinny. “I wanted you to see how flesh splatters when it is shot. This is a lesson for you to remember and remember well.”
