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In the early hours of April 7, 1972, the renegade Brooklyn mobster Crazy Joe Gallo was killed at Umberto's Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy by a hitman who calmly pumped bullets into the fleeing Gallo's back.

Tom Folsom, the author of the thrilling new history, "The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld" (Weinstein Books, $25), argues that Gallo, a small-time hood and mob killer, broke ranks with Mafia tradition after he immersed himself in the 1960s revolutionary vibe of Greenwich Village.

Modeling himself on celluloid killers, the sociopathic Gallo and his two brothers threw their 25-man crew of killers against the 200-member Colombo crime family in a suicidal gang war in Brooklyn in the early 1960s. When Gallo was sent to prison for 10 years for shaking down a bar owner, he transformed himself into a revolutionary hipster. Gallo was released in 1971. He became a darling of the New York press and media elite, and then a posthumous American legend.

Folsom, 35, is the co-author of "Mr. Untouchable," Harlem godfather Nicky Barnes' autobiography. He met with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a Greenwich Village coffee shop, not far from Joey Gallo's old Manhattan haunts.

Q How did you become obsessed with Crazy Joe Gallo?

A. I interviewed the heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes in the witness protection program for a book I was working on. Both Joey Gallo and Barnes had been in prison together. Before he went to prison in 1961, Joey was hanging out in Greenwich Village. He pictured himself as this artist-revolutionary-philosopher, and was introduced to the holy trinity of Greenwich Village, which was jazz, sex and pot. He read the Beats and Norman Mailer, as well as Camus, Sartre and Kafka.

People come through the bridges and tunnels, and flock to Greenwich Village to escape tradition. Joey was not any different in that sense. He was immersed in tradition, being from an Italian family in Red Hook, where his father trained him to be a hoodlum and killer. The Mafia had a system, steeped in conformity. If you broke the rules, you got whacked. Joey was going to fight the system. In his world, the system is the Mafia.

Q How did you wade through the material on Joey Gallo?

A. There was not a lot of stuff on Joey Gallo that was substantial, but then I got 1,500 pages on Gallo from the FBI, material that hadn't been published before. It was a day-to-day record on what was going on on President Street in Red Hook. The Gallos were a treasure-trove. The FBI got a picture of the mob they had never had before.

Q Could you tell me a bit about the hype and the mythology of Joey Gallo?

A. Joey would have impromptu press conferences. He let Life magazine into his fortress during the gang war with the Colombos. Mario Puzo took a lot of the stuff in "The Godfather" from the Gallos because the Gallos were so public. Scenes from the novel and terms like "sleeping with the fishes" (for disposing of bodies) and "going to the mattresses" for a gang war were not old Sicilian terms. They were ripped off from the Gallos.

I hope this book will be able to reclaim what Joey's mythology was about. Bob Dylan's song, "Joey," came out 32 years ago. Dylan called it an outlaw ballad. Joey's story was one of the great 1960s stories that was not told as a 1960s story. America was going through turmoil then and so was the mob. The Che Guevara of that story was Joey Gallo.

Q After three intense years writing about Gallo, did you find him charming or disgusting?

A. I think both. He was a trainwreck, but it was hard not to watch the guy. He had great one liners and could come out and quote Camus, but Gallo would snap a guy's arm over the side of a desk if he owed him money. He was not a good guy.

Q How do you view the circumstances of Joey Gallo's shooting?

A. It's like the Kennedy conspiracy. The more you look into specific details, the more intriguing it becomes. There was a long list of people who were ready to kill the guy. In the end, it was the system that got him. That was the lesson of the 1960s -- you can't really fight the system.

By Dylan Foley

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer

"The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld" (Weinstein Books, 224 pages, $24.95), by Tom Folsom: Joey Gallo wrote poetry, argued about the meaning of life, dug jazz and read Camus. Also, he was handy with a chain whip, had a talent for extortion and bit the ear off a jailhouse enemy.

Part thug, part beatnik — Gallo lived in two worlds that really didn't overlap too well. Before he was rubbed out in 1972 at age 43, Gallo lived a colorful life that made for one of the strangest mob tales ever. His existential flirtations spice up an already good gangland yarn in Tom Folsom's "Mad Ones" about power, mayhem and dirty dealing. Gallo is a compelling character, a sort of thinking man's hoodlum, probably psychotic, but also fearless. "My life is one foot in the coffin and the other on a banana peel," he says. "But I don't care."

Joey and his brother Larry were mob muscle from Brooklyn. The Gallos are believed by many to have engineered the infamous hit on mobster Albert Anastasia as he sat in a barber chair in 1957. Things heated up for the brothers when they took on mob boss Joe Profaci, and Folsom does a good job detailing the so-called Profaci-Gallo wars, in which the Gallos and their motley crew were vastly outgunned. The coup attempt ends with predictable results.

The real fun of this book is the reader is never quite sure what's going to happen on the next page. Larry survives getting garroted. Joey takes up painting. A guy named Jelly gets sliced up into bits on a boat. Joey stares down Robert Kennedy; Joey has Sunday dinner with actor Jerry Orbach. You couldn't make this up — though Jimmy Breslin did write up a fictionalized Gallo story in "The Gang Couldn't Shoot Straight." Orbach played the character based on Joey.

The title "Mad Ones" comes from a Jack Kerouac quote about the Beats. And Folsom writes in a Beat-inspired rat-tat-tat prose that fits the material. The high-velocity writing does go off the rails sometimes. Hipster lingo is laid on so thick that it sometimes gets confusing who we're reading about, or whether a scene is in the Village or in Brooklyn.

The story slows a little after Larry dies (cancer) and Joey does a stint in prison. Joey was released after a decade to a different city — a pleated pants and Bing Crosby kind of guy in a Jimi Hendrix world. With his brother dead and his old gang either hunted down or gone turncoat, it was essentially over for Crazy Joe even before he ate his last meal at Umberto's Clam House. Like his cohorts in the Beat Generation, Crazy Joe never found what he was looking for.

Crazy Joe Gallo and his gangster brothers inspired everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Bob Dylan, and when Joe was gunned down in 1972, New York's cultural elite mourned the loss of one of their own. Though this print-the-legent biography was clearly written with a movie deal in mind, that doesn't make it any less entertaining.

Guns blaze and bodies fall in 1960s New York City as the Gallo gang hits the mattresses for a bloody mob war in Tom Folsom's The Mad Ones . It's a precarious period for the Mafia as new generations of gangsters rise up to challenge the Cosa Nostra order in an all-out war just as a cultural revolution ignites across America. Folsom draws from his extensive experience with New York's dark underbelly -- he previously co-authored Mr. Untouchable (2007) about legendary Harlem drug kingpin Leroy "Nicky" Barnes -- to depict an even more enigmatic gangster, Joe Gallo, the goodfella philosopher who became the epitome of gangster chic. As a real-life antihero, Crazy Joe fought on all fronts as a mobster, intellectualist and counterculture rebel. He wasn't just some thick-necked hired gun, he was an existential warrior -- extortion and murder on night, anisette over Camus at Copacabana the next, like somebody straight out of the movies. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him, and Jerry Orbach invited him to dinner. Nearly 40 years after been gunned down midbite in Little Italy, the juxtaposition still intrigues -- cold-blooded murder in high society, only in New York. "It was a spectacular ending, upstaging The Godfather, says Folsom. With a movie version of The Mad Ones produced by the Weinsteins on the way, Folsom's book may soon prove his point. " The Godfather stands its grounds," he says. "But it's time to reclaim the original material the fueled it."

Readers love the gore and unnerving realism of true crime, and have clamored for the sub-genre for decades, in hopes of glimpsing a gruesome world just beyond their own. True crime promises to shock with its sensationalism, but it also offers a credible account of the risqué, the appalling, and the distressing. In this regard, The Mad Ones never fails to satisfy.

A startling read from author Tom Folsom, The Mad Ones offers a colorful treatment of the infamous rise and fall of the Gallo brothers. Folsom writes with the authority, swagger, and flavor of a true insider—or at the very least, a low-level Mafioso—in this enthralling tale of power, blood, and glory.

Crazy Joe, Kid Blast, and Larry Gallo are painted in vivid fashion with all of the fierceness, quirkiness, and utter contradictions of the three. The book opens with the captivating funeral of Joe Gallo, and is laced with news articles that function as snapshots in time. It is a bona fide treat with its depictions of beat downs, takeovers, and mob hits. It is replete with all the flourish and colorful language of a narrator who was there for it all.

Though the story is a familiar one, Folsom gives the topic a fresh treatment. Forever committed to legendary status by Bob Dylan’s “Joey” and The Godfather trilogy, the Gallo brothers are chronicled in style. From the humble beginnings of bottom-rung Mafioso, to Crazy Joe’s rise as an anti-hero of legendary proportions, and up to and following Joey’s inevitable murder, The Mad Ones brims with dialogue and imagery. Everything from off-the-rack zoot suits and Mafia-style reasoning to Jimmy Hoffa and ice cream malts conjures a time, place, and style that fit the legend. Folsom’s portrayal of the Gallo brothers promises to be a definitive source and starting place for future depictions of this still stunning true crime story.

THE MAD ONES: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld
by Tom Folsom

Novelistic study of an iconoclastic criminal in revolutionary times.

Documentarian Folsom (co-author: Mr. Untouchable: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Heroin’s Teflon Don, 2007), grittily evokes the period (1950s and ’60s) and the place (New York City) in which the Gallo brothers—Brooklyn jukebox magnates and low-level hoods Joey, Larry and Kid Blast—struggled to rise to the top of the underworld. Jimmy Breslin titled his 1969 novel based on the same characters and events The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, but Folsom, who takes his title from Kerouac, is able to tease some heroism out of his protagonists’ antiheroic lives, particularly that of the poetically inclined Joey. Granted, he was a punk who could only plead the Fifth in answer to Bobby Kennedy’s questions during the 1960 Senate hearings on organized crime. He bragged about hitting Murder Inc.’s Albert Anastasia as he waited for a shave in a Midtown barbershop, and unsuccessfully took on the Profaci crime family in a brazen but poorly executed coup attempt, spending most of the ’60s behind bars on an extortion rap. So how did Joey become the toast of the town from the time of his release until his public 1972 execution at a spaghetti joint in Little Italy? Jerry Orbach, who played the character inspired by him in the film of Breslin’s novel, was among the New York players who treated Crazy Joe like the “King of the Streets,” as an epic song penned by Bob Dylan and dramatist Jacques Levy called him. In prose as tight and hard-boiled as any James Ellroy novel, Folsom focuses on the quirks that made Joey an unusual kind of gangster. He modeled himself after the giggling psychopath played by Richard Widmark in the film noir Kiss of Death; he was fascinated bebop, action painting and existential philosophy; he made alliances across racial lines, including one with Folsom’s previous subject and literary collaborator, Harlem drug dealer Leroy Barnes.

Riveting, richly atmospheric pulp nonfiction.