Free The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin Page A

home, Big Mama said to him, “Larry, what’s the matter? You no can shoot straight?”
     
    Some nights later I am at the bar of Gallagher’s on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan with Dick Dougherty, who was the deputy police commissioner at the time, and Abe Rosenthal of the Times newspaper, and I said, “I don’t have to worry anymore about day labor with these columns. I have the way out. I’m going to write a book called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. ”
    Both of them thought it was a great title. Now all I had to do was make up a book. I go home to Forest Hills and begin typing. Soon I look out the window, and I see gangster Mike Marino’s big brick fortress on the next block. It had a driveway on the side onto which the kitchen door opened. Frequently I would see his wife come outside in a fur coat covering her nightgown to start the car. Marino was inside his brick house, his arms folded over his head, holding his breath. When the car did not explode from dynamite in the starter, Marino came out and the wife slipped out of the car. He kissed her, she went back to the kitchen,and Marino got in the car and drove off to his day’s business, which was stealing.
    Late at night I am watching Bobby De Niro in some mobster comedy on TV, and I feel sorry for him because these Mafia parts, at which he is so superb and which he could do for the next thirty years, will soon no longer exist. Al Pacino, too. Which is marvelous, because both are American treasures and should be remembered for great roles, not for playing cheap, unworthy punks. I much prefer De Niro or Pacino to Olivier in anything.
    Now, watching this movie, I remember a hot summer afternoon when the producer of a movie they were making of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight asked me to meet this young actor, Bobby De Niro, because he was replacing Al Pacino in a big role. Pacino was leaving our film to be in another movie, called The Godfather. De Niro was taking over his first big movie part.
    We talked briefly in a bar, the old Johnny Joyce’s on Second Avenue. De Niro looked like he was homeless. It was on a Friday. On Sunday morning I saw him again. He was going to Italy to learn the speech nuances of people in towns mentioned in the script. He was going there on his own. He was earning $750 a week for the movie. When he left, I remember thinking, Do not stand between this guy and whatever he wants.
    What he wanted first was to play gangsters well. Second, he wanted the world. I think he got both. He camealong at the end, give or take a show, of the Mafia. “We had one wiseguy role in the first season,” Bill Clark, the old homicide detective who became executive producer of NYPD Blue, was saying the other day. “That was all because they just couldn’t make it as characters for us. Their day was gone.”
    Today, aside from needy showmen, the only ones rooting for the mob to survive are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase gangsters across the streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. They have numbers—such as C-16, for the Colombo squad—and each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one captain in the family. Their work is surveillance and interviews. They will watch a numbers runner for a month, then interview a cabdriver or a mobster’s sister. It doesn’t matter. Just do the interview. A full-time occupation is obtaining court orders for wiretaps. “We get promoted by the number of wiretaps we get signed,” an agent admitted.
    FBI agents in New York fill out FD-302 forms that pile up in an office. They must do this in order to maintain their way of life. They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, perform no heavy lifting. After a day at work, they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents and talk about the jobs they want when they retire. If, after so much interviewing, spying, and paying of stool pigeons, they still do not come up