Books: Out Like Flynn

MADE IN AMERICA

by Peter Maas

Viking; 347 pages; $10.95

Made in America seems at first blush an odd title for a novel about the Mafia, but Peter Maas should be forgiven his irony. Sicily’s best-known export has, of course, become as American as frozen pizza. As Maas has shown in The Valachi Papers and Serpico, Cosa Nostra reaches far below the imperial realms of The Godfather into virtually every working-class neighborhood where cash is short and the Mob’s loan sharks cruise.

The all-American slob-hero of Maas’ book is Richie Flynn, 33, a poor Irish boy from Manhattan who had a flurry of fame as a New York Giants’ running back eleven years earlier. Though still honored on the saloon beat, where he peddles Goldblatt beer, Flynn has gnawing dreams of recaptured affluence. His road to riches is outlined for him by a city hall insider, who shows the ex-jock how he can buy a building condemned by the city and lease it back to New York as a day care center. All Richie needs is title to an abandoned synagogue in the South Bronx: for $50,000 ($10,000 down), he will be able to unload the building on the city for $125,000 a year for 15 years. Until this kind of scam was exposed a few years ago, it was almost as lucrative as a card-carrying membership in OPEC.

To get his down payment, Richie must go to the Mafia, where he is quickly impaled on the meat hooks of 243-lb. Albert (“King Kong”) Karpstein, a.k.a. The Animal, a.k.a. Milky, for his diet of Milky Way chocolate bars. A part-time enforcer for Joe Hobo, a.k.a. Joe Hoboken, a.k.a. Joseph lacovelli, the simian Karpstein is a semidemented Jew whose appeal to his Italian bosses lies in the imagination and diligence he brings to his work. He would as soon see his creditors default as pay, for the added diversion of carving them up. But Milky is also an independent Shylock, one of the biggest and most ruthless around, as Maas describes with relish. Sure, he can advance Flynn $12,500 for 30 days in return for $20,000 in on-the-dot weekly payments.

In his euphoria, Richie acquires a one-seventh part of an expensive call girl and recovers some of the old Giants swagger. Inevitably his deal with the city dies, and Richie faces a similar fate at the hands of King Kong. Flynn is saved temporarily because of a minor Mafia dispute. A more permanent salvation is offered by the FBI and an ambitious new special prosecutor, Hamilton Wainwright IV, who has vowed to rip out the “cancer” of organized crime. They want Richie to sing.

Author Maas’ novel is a comedy of terrors that is all the more absorbing because of the methods used by both sides: the law bending the law, the mob making a farce of it. The area’s top don, whom Wainwright is out to get despite his non-involvement in the case, roves free as a boccie ball. King Kong, among others, is appropriately retired by his own associates. Amazingly, Richie Flynn comes out a little wealthier and healthier, though back to selling booze.

Made in America is brutal, often funny, and all too realistic. Maas is never sentimental or pious; his Mafiosi trail no clouds of glamour. They are, in fact, a grimy bunch, as are many of the law-and-order boys they do business with. Grimier still is the author’s unspoken truth:catering to the needs of the desperate, loan sharks and their harsh persuasions will be around at least as long as neighborhood banks with their milder methods of foreclosure.