First Mob Boss Since Bonanno to Write Memoir
Lost Lives and Forgotten Vows, which Thomas Dunne Books is slated to publish, is due to hit bookstores in the fall of 2016. Natale will work on his tome with producer Dan Pearson (of "I Married a Mobster") and New York Daily News reporter Larry McShane,
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| Former Philly boss who flipped inked deal to write book. |
The book claims it will offer “a behind-the-scenes master’s class on organized crime.”
We may argue with the use of the term "master's."
The Natale story is not, after all, one about the mob's golden age.
Natale was an arsonist and drug dealer who told a federal informant everything -- literally every thing.
He was said to be Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino's puppet -- the guy put on the street for the Feds and cops to focus on while Merlino and his tight-knit crew worked behind his back.
Natale attained power when he emerged from prison in 1994. He sought to run the notoriously disorganized Philly Mafia with the discipline of a Prussian general administering to his soldiers. (Prussia is the proverbial “army in search of a nation," while the Philly mob more closely resembled the Keystone Cops than, say, the Genovese family.)
Natale's army was brimming with mooks, killers, traitors, braggarts and bumbling fools -- an underworld turned upside down following decades of unrelenting bloodshed following the "illegal" 1980 shotgun murder of respected Mafia Don Angelo Bruno, a Sicilian-American mobster who had close ties to Carlo Gambino and who ran the Philadelphia crime family, peacefully and prosperously, for two decades.
Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi is widely credited for being such a shrewd Mafia boss precisely because he was able to successfully clean up what in part can be termed Natale's mess.
Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, who pulled a "John Gotti" years before even John Gotti, seemed more interested in murder than money.
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| Murder or money? Who really cares.... |
Natale's reign lasted until a 1998 indictment was poised to send the then-69-year-old away to prison forever (for wisely dealing junk).
Natale "got religion" and struck a deal with federal agents, earning himself the title of "the first American Mafia boss to turn on his own family."
A U.S. attorney general said Natale's cooperation against Skinny Joey (then touted in the press as reminiscent of the Sammy the Bull and John Gotti case) "represent[ed] the complete collapse" of the Philadelphia mob.
Yeah, right.
From THR: “Ralph Natale, has out killed, out smarted and outlived his adversaries. Now he gets to tell history in his own words not just mafia history but American history,” said Pearson in a statement announcing the deal. “Lost Lives and Forgotten Vows will take the reader on a trip into the epicenter of Americana in the mid-to-late 20th Century where pop culture and politics frequently intersected with the underworld, and where Ralph Natale was the man charged with greasing the wheels so the multiple relationships between those entities could run at full speed.”