New TV series chronicles the lives of mafia rats
Monday night's discovery is that there’s a downside to being born into a Mafia family.
Say you love your father, for instance, and you decide to follow him into his line of work, which is doing things like killing people.
But then your father picks the wrong side in a mob argument. One day when you’re waiting for him in the barber shop and he never shows up because a couple of his pals have strangled him and buried him on Long Island.
The next time you see him he will have been buried for about nine years.
Okay, that doesn’t happen to everybody in the mob. It did happen to Bill Cutolo Jr., a bright kid, first in his family to go to college, who decided his first job once he graduated would be apprenticing under his father.
“Wild Bill” Cutolo was a good soldier in the Colombo family.
But when Colombo boss Carmine Persico went up the river for a while and a disagreement emerged over who should run things in the meantime, Wild Bill picked the wrong team.
Six years later, in 1999, Wild Bill was invited to a meeting with Carmine’s son and Jackie DeRoss, one of Wild Bill’s closest pals. Wild Bill was best man at Jackie’s wedding.
This time Wild Bill was a dead man.
Which is where “Mobster Confessions” comes in. Billy Jr. was so offended by the rather casual murder of his father that he became a government informant.
Monday’s opening episode is built on his testimony, as the other five shows in this series are built on the testimony of other informants. Okay, other rats.
The episodes will run two a night for the next three Mondays, by the way, so don’t wait too long to catch them.
Billy Jr. says informing was the best way to get revenge for his father’s death. He considered the more traditional path of simply killing Jackie, he says, but figured he had a better shot this way.
He seems to have made the right call, though it came at a price. When he told his family what he’d done and that he was going into the witness protection program, they let him go. Alone.
He hasn’t had contact with them since, he says. But despite the loss of his family and the fact he knows there’s still a bounty on his life, he tells “Mobster Confessions” he would do it again.
First, he says, he avenged his father by getting the bad guys put away for life.
Second, he “broke the cycle,” because he will not lead his own son into the mob life.
That sounds like a good thing.
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