Updated news on the Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese and Colombo Organized Crime Families of New York City.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Turncoat Philadelphia mob boss to tell all in new book


Ralph Natale, the boss of the Philadelphia Mob in the mid-90s, is set to tell his story with the help of producer Dan Pearson (I Married a Mobster) and New York Daily News investigative reporter Larry McShane.

Lost Lives and Forgotten Vows will be published by Thomas Dunne Books in Fall 2016.

Natale becomes only the second Mafia Godfather to tell his own life story, following New York’s Joe Bonanno. The book pitches “a behind-the-scenes master’s class on organized crime.”

Natale is reported to have gotten his start in organized crime when he took control of Local 170 of the Bartenders, Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Workers Union in Philadelphia. In 1979 he went to jail for insurance fraud and separately for selling cocaine and he was paroled in 1994. He soon became the head of Philadephia’s organized crime family, but was indicted on charges of financing drug deals in 1999. He was sentenced to 11 years in jail and was released in 2011.

“Ralph Natale, has out killed, out smarted and outlived his adversaries. Now he gets to tell history in his own words not just mafia history but American history,” said Pearson in a statement announcing the deal. “Lost Lives and Forgotten Vows will take the reader on a trip into the epicenter of Americana in the mid-to-late 20th Century where pop culture and politics frequently intersected with the underworld, and where Ralph Natale was the man charged with greasing the wheels so the multiple relationships between those entities could run at full speed.”

Pearson and McShane were represented by Frank Weimann of Folio Literary Management.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bookmark/i-married-a-mobster-producer-806362



0 comments:

Post a Comment