Goodfellas and Party Monsters:
Reporting from Inside the Outside
Lee Horsley
Pileggi, Goodfellas Spinale, G-Men and Gangsters St James, Party Monster
Owen, Clubland Confidential
"As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster." ~ Henry Hill, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1955
Why is the best-known tagline for Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas so compelling? One answer is clearly that it offers us, the audience, a chance to enter the mind of someone whose all-American drive towards status and upward mobility has, from boyhood to manhood, centred on the underworld. The folksy, nostalgic 'As far back as I can remember…' promises a reminiscence that will give a time, a place, an actual historical identity to the semi-mythic figure of the gangster anti-hero; it promises to initiate us into the thoughts and language of a contemporary rogue who, like the larger-then-life outlaws of earlier centuries, has a story to tell that will give us a temporary, vicarious membership of the 'intimate fraternity' of social deviants and transgressors.
There has been a proliferation of true crime stories, which become even more marketable if their 'shocking revelations' are based on the experience of someone who has been on the inside. Particularly if the writer or informant has had privileged access to either clubland or gangland, the chances are that he (or, less often, she) has a fascinating story to tell. As Anita Biressi points out in her excellent study, Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories (Palgrave, 2001), although the appeal of true crime fiction is its claim to give the reader 'stories of lived experience of crime, violence and murder', it usually reaches the reader mediated by the process of recycling - with reportage, anthologies and encyclopaedias ransacked for stories that can be packaged in a new publication in a slightly different form. Crime narratives created directly from first-hand experience do not necessarily escape this distancing - whether the distortions of retrospective narration (perhaps with some attendant mythologizing of 'evil' and reliance on the devices of popular storytelling) or the distortions that inevitably accompany the representation of the 'unrepresentable' (the 'brutal actuality of the events which source this literature'). But the reader's belief in the veracity of a 'true crime' narrative will generally be reinforced in a narrative that offers 'inside knowledge' of the milieu and crimes described.
In truth, of course, it is the combination of extraordinary skill in constructing a narrative with the claim to represent 'unmediated' first-hand, day-to-day experience that is most likely to produce a true crime story that compels our attention - that makes the account (to quote the New York Times critic's judgement of Wiseguy) 'absolutely engrossing'. Originally published in 1985, Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy has now been reissued under its film title, Goodfellas (Bloomsbury Film Classics, due out July 2005). Pileggi's retelling of Henry Hill's story remains one of the most riveting of all accounts of organized crime. Having saved himself by turning Federal witness, Hill looked for someone to write his story, and his attorney approached Pileggi, a New York crime reporter, who immediately saw that Hill was different from the other figures in organized crime he had met: 'Henry Hill was all eyes', and was 'fascinated by the world in which he had grown up'.
Hill's memory and his skills as an observer enabled Pileggi to create an account that takes the reader from the twelve-year old Hill's early days as an errand boy to his involvement in thefts, hijackings, scams and murders that are as routine as any office job. Interweaving third-person narrative and analysis with Hill's and his wife's own words, Pileggi (who also wrote Casino) is extraordinarily successful in conveying the flavour of an actual life, neither glamorized nor stereotyped, of a man who not only takes in everything around him but who is also acutely aware of the way in which others see him - from his earliest years ('On 114th Street in East Harlem, where the old guys were suspicious of their own noses, they used to look at me through their slit eyes whenever Paulie brought me into the clubs. I was a little kid and they acted like I was a cop.') to his sinking realization in jail that in all likelihood Jimmy is going to kill him, in spite of all they have done together: 'I grew up with Jimmy. He brought me along…It was Jimmy who got me into cigarette bootlegging and hijackings. We buried bodies. We did Air France and Lufthansa…We did it all, and now maybe he's going to kill me.'
As Pileggi says, Hill's powers of recall and observation were exceptional, and it is clearly not to be expected that other associates of gangsters will prove capable of providing so vivid and immediate an account of underworld life. A far less intimate insider's account of gangland is provided by Dominic Spinale's G-Men and Gangsters: Partners in Crime (Seven Locks Press, 2004), the true story of how far the FBI was willing to go in its obsessive pursuit of La Cosa Nostra. Spinale is identified as a close friend of the Anguilo family, handling their gambling activities until he was indicted in the mid-1980s, an experience qualifying him to provide a 'unique inside view of the internal workings and the fall of the Boston mafia'. The book focuses centrally on a devil's bargain struck between the Boston Bureau of the FBI (the 'Irish G-Men') and Irish gangsters (Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi), with the object of infiltrating and bringing down the Italian Mafia in Boston. Spinale's book doesn't aim for the kind of first-hand immediacy achieved by the Hill-Pileggi collaboration: indeed, this not really a first-person, first-hand account at all, but in large part a recycling of other materials - official memoranda, for example, and articles in the Boston Herald or Boston Magazine. There is also, however, a citing of first-hand knowledge ('Most of the accounts in this chapter come from my own experiences whole growing up in the city of Boston; also, from my personal contact with the Anguilos and other associates'), and his story is unquestionably a fascinating one: as the Mayor of Las Vegas said, 'Dominic always had a big mouth, which got him in trouble with the Feds. Now, his big mouth is going to cause trouble for the G-Men'.
The tale has been told by others as well (very effectively told, for example, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill in Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, published by Perennial in 2001), but Spinale has insights of his own to add, and the picture he gives of FBI corruption does indeed fall into the category of 'shocking revelations'. He exposes the machinations of agents who shielded the Irish gangsters, for example, from charges of drug dealing, extortion and murder in exchange for the information they supplied. The ensuing scandal was one of the most damaging in the history of the FBI, and the question at the centre of the narrative - the use of demonstrably unlawful tactics to achieve 'lawful' objectives - gives the narrative an interest considerably beyond its local story.
Wiseguys and feds are by no means absent from the 'decadent nocturnal empire' of clubland that in the 1990s stretched over several cities, including New York and Miami. Frank Owen's Clubland Confidential (St Amrtins Press, 2004) - also published as Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture - weaves together the stories of a nightclub impressario (Peter Gatien, owner of Limelight and the Tunnel in Manhattan), a gangster (Chris Paciello, who started Miami Beach's Liquid) and the 'club kid king', Michael Alig. For readers who want to penetrate the mindset of the 'real' insider in this decade of partying club kids, there is, of course, James St James's Party Monster (1999; reissued by Sceptre, 2003, and the basis of the film of that year starring Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green), focusing on Alig himself and his grotesque murder of his drug dealer and roommate, Angel Melendez. There's much to distrust in the James St James version of the story, but its immediacy is alternately rather endearing - 'I was barefoot and without a coat. I was wearing...hmmm, what was I wearing? Goodness! I guess I was wearing a peignoir - not at all suitable for a blizzard in Times Square' - and horrifying:
'"No, Michael, I said, "I haven't seen Angel lately...you really ought to get rid of him..."
'"Oh. Well, you'll be happy to hear I did just that. I got rid of him, all right." He laughed in that staccato, half snort and gulp that is uniquely his. "Yep, I got rid of him, boy, once and for all. Skrink-la-da-doo! I killed him."'
Not as caught up in these events as James St James, Frank Owen does nevertheless have his own claims to being an insider, having energetically inhabited the world he writes about, and he is also in a position to provide a considerably more coherent and panoramic view of the decade's Miami and Manhattan club scenes. Clubland Confidential is an amalgam of campy pop culture and lurid crime thriller that begins when Owen, gonzo-style, starts his journalistic researches into the effects of ketamine, 'Special K', the 'psychedelic catnip' that everyone in clubland saw as 'the new Ecstasy'. The conjunction of partying club kids and a potential for gruesome violence is suggested in Owen's opening anecdote: when he enters the Limelight in search of K, he both acquires the drug (being peddled by the eventual murder victim, Angel Melendez) and finds himself stepping gingerly around the puddles of blood at Michael Alig's extravagant thirtieth birthday party, themed around H. G. Lewis's 60s cult gore film, 'Blood Feast'.
Owen compellingly captures this 'pandemonium of dope fiends, gender benders, and all-purpose weirdos dressed to excess', recording in fascinating detail the descent of clubland into a murky world of self-destruction and murder. Clubland Confidential is an all too credible Gothic tale of 'people looking for beauty in horror', as well as a chronicle of Owen's own growing disillusionment, as the liberatory party scene of club culture morphs before his eyes into a crime scene: 'Nightclubs,' he says at the end, 'are meant to function as laboratories of style where new trends and modes of being are spearheaded. They're not supposed to come with a body count.'
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
For any readers who haven't yet seen the films based on these gangland and clubland revelations, Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) was re-released as a two-disc special edition DVD in October 2004; and both the Fenton Bailey/Randy Barbato film Party Monster (2003) and Party Monster: the Shockumentary (also 2003) are available as DVDs.
