Angelo’s heart’s desire is to have Gabe follow in his footsteps and be the kind of model career criminal the code was invented to justify. Moreover, he owes a great deal to Angelo, who took him off the streets and gave him all he knows of home and family. From the time he began running numbers at age ten for racketeer kingpin Angus McQueen, Angelo has believed that the code would redeem him, that if he adhered to it his behavior (no matter how murderous) would be estimable in his peers’ eyes and self-affirming in his own. Granted, Angelo is a gangster, has always been a gangster, enjoys being a gangster, has grown rich being a gangster-nevertheless, Gabe insists, he is a principled gangster. That would be “the code.” Angelo’s unswerving commitment to its rigid, demanding precepts is, in Gabe’s view, downright chivalric. True, Gabe acknowledges, for most of his life Angelo has been something of a killing machine, but there’s an upside. Gabe venerates Angelo as a man of honor, and it’s through him that much of Vestieri’s story is told. As he grows older, Angelo takes Gabe, an abandoned boy, under his wing, and teaches him everything he knows.įinally, he will learn which is stronger - the love he has for the boy he cherishes, or the need to be a gangster and live by the savage rules he helped to create.Yet another of those tedious underworld novels in which Godfathers and Galahads tend to overlap, this time in early 20th-century New York.Īfter a long and sanguinary run, boss Angelo Vestieri lies dying, while a young man we know only as Gabe keeps a loving vigil by his bedside. Through his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss he deals in further betrayals - in his brutal business, in friendship and in love - while coming to understand loyalty and the virtues of relationships. Born in violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chose to flee both his Italian past and his father, and build a new life in early 20th century New York.
GANGSTER is an epic, compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate - and the narrative of a family, a city and a century. Now, in this huge story, he travels from the days of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. Ever since his best-selling SLEEPERS, Lorenzo Carcaterra has told tales of Italian-Americans. In GANGSTER, he surpasses even his bestselling SLEEPERS to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun.
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