Showing posts with label Mafia: Operation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mafia: Operation. Show all posts

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Mafia: Operation Hijack


Mafia: Operation Hijack, by Don Romano
August, 1974  Pyramid Books

“Attention Mafia hijackers: Richard Dawson has had enough of your shit!”*

The penultimate volume of Mafia: Operation is courtesy Paul Eiden, the first of two books he wrote for the series; he also wrote Operation Loan Shark, which happened to be the last volume of the series. But again as I’ve mentioned in every single review, Mafia: Operation isn’t really a series, per se, and instead is a set of unrelated, standalone novels focusing on the world of the mob. This time the plot is hijacking, obviously, and my only assumption is that Eiden, like most other ghostwriters for series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, was given the title and synopsis and told to cater a novel to it – only he had a helluva time figuring out how to write about hijacking trucks for 190 pages.

The end result is that there’s precious little hijacking in Operation Hijack, with the focus more on inter-family Mafia rivalries, a complex heist involving freight shipments from Europe, and finally the seduction-via-subjugation of a couple cold-fish beauties – an Eiden staple, and a clear indication that he was indeed the author who wrote another Engel production, Crooked Cop. There’s a subplot here that’s almost identical to the one in that earlier, superior novel, where the titular crooked cop went out of his way to subjugate a beautiful high-society whore…and she ended up falling in love with him. Eiden is in some ways in an even more macho, misogynist realm than Manning Lee Stokes: Operation Hijack states often that most women want to be treated like shit or generally abused, and it’s the surest way to get them to love you – and when they love you they’ll do anything for you. Actually there are “tips” throughout on how to get women in line and to do your bidding. (None of these tips seem to work on wives, btw; in fact, it turns out they have the complete opposite effect.)

Another hallmark of Eiden’s work is that his books are basically tragedies, featuring an arrogant alpha male protagonist who is clearly headed for misfortune – misfortune he could easily prevent if he was more aware of what was going on around him and not so much wrapped up in his own ego. There are a lot of similarities to Crooked Cop, so far as the protagonist goes: the “hero” of this one is Ralph Borden, aka Rafael Bardini, a muscular former boxer who still runs a couple miles a day and hits the weights first thing in the morning, working out in his penthouse apartment in Manhattan. He’s 29, sports a moustache, moves through women with ease, and runs the “hijacking scheme” for Don Carlo Renati. Ralph was plucked from the streets by Don Carlo, taken out of his successful Golden Gloves career and put on the fast-track to Mafia success. He was sent to college and put his business ideas to work in refashioning the mob, immediately making the family tons of money through various legal and illegal schemes.

The main plot actually has more to do with Ralph scheming to become the youngest Don in the Mafia. Don Carlo is in his 70s and frail and Ralph worries that he might be going senile. The other families are closing in on them, and Ralph’s afraid a mob war is brewing, and their little family will be wiped out – unless Don Carlo can “make” more soldiers (ie giving them kill contracts so they can become full-fledged Mafia members) and put himself together a proper army. So there’s a lot of plotting and scheming in this one, more of a “peek inside the Mafia world” than in Operation Loan Shark, so be prepared for a barrage of Italian names and histories on the various fictional families at play. I found it all a little boring, but at the very least it is a “Mafia novel,” more so than any others in the series, most of which focused on characters who orbited around the Mafia. Operation Hijack is different from the other four books in the “series” in that the protagonist is a full Mafia member, wholly part of the mob life.

The opening had me thinking we were going to get something similar to Operation Porno (the best volume of the series by far!), as we meet Ralph while he’s planning the financing of a “black action flick with white money behind it.” Eiden was certainly aware of the urban action movies of the day, with the characters specifically referencing Blaxploitation, and Ralph telling the young black director of the movie that he could be “the next Melvin van Peebles.” Or as one of the black characters says, “People who put down so-called blaxploitation films are mistaken.” Central to this group of filmmakers is a six-foot black beauty named Camille Caine, who is to star in the movie Ralph is financing: “Black Motor Cycle Girl.” The title sucks, but the plot sounds promising (what little we learn of it)…a biker/Blaxploitation hybrid. But sadly friends this will be all we hear about the movie!

Instead, the focus is on Ralph getting his “pound of flesh.” Haughty Ciarra, a model, is pissed that she’s getting such low pay, and Ralph goes out of his way to talk down to her, to make it clear she’s easily replaced – just total prig stuff, like referring only to “the girl” when speaking of the main actress, even though Ciarra’s sitting right there. This will just be our first glimpse of how Ralph must subjugate his female prey before he dominates them…and the more they dislike him, the more enjoyment he gets out of it. The guys leave, and Ralph makes it clear that Camille has “the classic decision” all aspiring actresses face: anonymity or the producer’s bed. Camille of course choses the latter, trying to get some digs in on Ralph for being a “wop.” He responds that “to be Italian is beautiful,” and further makes a compelling case that all black women secretly lust for a white lover! 

As with other Eiden novels I’ve read, Ralph’s poor treatment of the woman works to his advantage, with her soon pleading for sex in his swank penthouse. And promptly falling in love with him afterward! Indeed Ralph has to threaten to throw her out a few days later, as she refuses to leave him – and she needs to fly out to California to get started on the movie. In other words she’s willing to throw away her potential career for this guy she just met, this guy she hated at first sight. This sort of alpha male dominance is of course unacceptable in today’s entertainment, but as mentioned Eiden doles it out so casually that you almost forget Ralph’s supposed to be an anti-hero. He’ll go on to subjugate and dominate two more women in the novel, and unfortunately this is the last we see of Camille, or even hear about the movie.

The only hijacking stuff in the novel occurs early on. Ralph’s lieutenant, a former street soldier named Mickey, oversees a trucking hijacking scheme, where they rip off some poor trucker, stuff him in the trunk (eventually letting him go), and take the wares to a secret location to sell later. We see one of the hijacks go down, then learn later that the hijackers themselves were hijacked – some guys with shotguns and lead pipes ran the truck off the road and beat the drivers so unmerciful that one of them dies and the other loses an eye. Mickey is simmering for revenge, as is Ralph, but Don Carlo finds out from the Mafia commission that they’re to let it slide – longtime rivals the Palucci family were behind the counter-hijack, lying that they didn’t know Don Carlo’s men had already hijacked the truck. The Don sees something Ralph missed: there must be a traitor in their family who let the Paluccis know about the truck.

Ralph succeeds into talking the Don into vengeance, so an elaborate scheme is set up where they can foil the hijackers…and figure out who the mole is in their own organization. The cover painting comes into play here, with Ralph and Mickey waiting in a decoy truck with shotguns; when they’re hit by hijackers they come out blasting, wiping out would-be hijackers in gory splendor. This will be the only action scene in the novel. After which it’s more into the “Mafia drama suspense” mode, with a lot of stuff centered on the elaborate revenge on the capo who set them up in the first place…a revenge which has another of Ralph’s men, Joey, making his bones by carrying out the hit. Later the Paluccis will approach Ralph, basically offering him the role of a minor don if he himself will kill Don Carlo. Ralph will of course refuse the offer, which sets off the climactic events, but honestly the Mafia subplot also disappears for long stretches.

Instead, Eiden is more focused on Ralph’s breaking down the icy demeanor of a “full-breasted” Dutch beauty named Holly, who is such a cold fish she wonders if she’s a “Lez.” Actually she doesn’t even wonder; she reveals later she’s had sex with “many” women, in addition to men…it’s just that no one’s able to get her off. This is the subplot that is so reminiscent of Crooked Cop. Holly works for Dutch airline KLM, and Ralph’s had this complex heist scheme in mind for a long time…basically, from what little we learn of it, involving Holly using her contacts in the freight departments of various airlines in Europe to hijack shipments by changing the shipping addresses. But first he’ll need to seduce Holly, so we have a lot of stuff of him breaking down her icy reserve, despite her reservations and hesitations and constant reminders that nothing turns her on. Of course Ralph succeeds, quite easily it seems, by merely going down on her…after which he has her calling him “Lord Ralph” and literally begging for sex.

I should mention that despite all the focus on seduction and foreplay, there really isn’t much hardcore material in Operation Hijack, certainly not as much as there was in the first three volumes by Alan Nixon and Robert Turner. Also Eiden’s recurring “widely-separated breasts” line doesn’t appear here, so maybe it’s something he only used occasionally as his literary calling card. We are often reminded of Holly’s “heavy breasts,” but even this boobsploitation is nowhere on the level of later Eiden offerings like Operation Weatherkill. So focused is Eiden on the subjugation and dominance of Holly that the actual Heist material is over and done with in a few pages; we’re told Ralph and Holly venture around Europe for “two months” to set up the complex scheme, after which Ralph thankfully deposits Holly in Zurich and hurries back to New York – she has, of course, fallen completely in love with him, hoping for marriage.

Ralph’s third conquest happens immediately after and isn’t as much explored as the previous two. It’s a redheaded beauty named Eilen, and he meets her at his country club, where she rides horses and enjoys the highfalutin life of the jet-set rich. She’s a stewardess, and Ralph doesn’t have to do much in the way of subjugation or domination for her, but Eiden does cleverly work it in when the first time Eileen sees Ralph, he’s screaming at some poor stable hand for failing to take proper care of Ralph’s horse. In other words she’s glimpsed his alpha male dominance from afar. So we get stuff of them romancing, and meanwhile Eiden occasionally reminds us that Ralph’s in the Mafia and there’s a war brewing between his family and the Paluccis.

As is typical with most of Eiden’s work, things come to a sudden head after so many, many pages of stalling and padding. Holly comes back without warning, to catch Eileen in Ralph’s bed, and literally tears her face apart in a shocking scene. Things fly to a conclusion after this, as Holly claims to have been sent back due to a cable she received from Ralph…however Ralph never sent a cable. It’s a setup from the Paluccis, and the finale is almost hamfistedly rushed; major characters are killed off-page, and Ralph assembles the remaining family to discuss going to the matresses…while a squad of Palucci hitmen with Browning Automatic Rifles converge on the scene. It’s memorable at least, and definitely the ending we’ve been expecting since page one, but man if Eiden had only spent more time developing the Mafia subplot instead of hopscotching around so much other incidental stuff. In other words he’s squandered the plot’s potential, something he did – even more drastically – in The Ice Queen.

That said, Eiden’s writing is fine as ever; he has a definite literary touch, same as most other writers in Engel’s stable, yet never lets it get in the way of the narrative flow. But he had a tendency to pad and stall, same as Stokes. Perhaps not as bad as Stokes, but then Stokes was capable of more memorable plots and sequences, whereas a sort of blandness often settles over Eiden’s books. But when he was on form, he could knock them out of the park, as with Crooked Cop. Maybe he just took a while to warm up to the series he was hired for, as Operation Loan Shark was much better than this one.

*In the tradition of Zwolf’s hilarious takes on celebrity lookalikes on cover artwork

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Mafia: Operation Loan Shark


Mafia: Operation Loan Shark, by Don Romano
November, 1974  Pyramid Books

This was the last published volume of Mafia: Operation, and the second one to be written by Paul Eiden. His first was Operation: Hijack, published before Operation: Hit Man, but I haven’t read it yet. That’s no big deal, as there’s no continuity or recurring characters in this “series.” What’s important is that Eiden here delivers the sleazy crime novel we expect of him, featuring one of the most unlikable prick protagonists ever.

I really wasn’t looking forward to this volume. Loan sharking just didn’t sound like a compelling enough topic to dwell on for 190 pages of smallish print. Luckily Eiden isn’t as much interested in the mechanics of loan sharkery as he is in the sleazy vileness of his protagonist, a hulking mountain of muscle named Mickey Di Angelo. In many ways Operation: Loan Shark harkens back to the BCI Crime Paperback Eiden wrote for producer Lyle Kenyon Engel the year before, Crooked Cop (still one of my favorite novels I’ve ever reviewed on the blog). Just like the “hero” of that earlier novel, Mickey Di Angelo is a sadistic bastard who has gotten wealthy from crime and will do anything possible to get himself a bigger piece of the pie. To do so he’ll trample anyone in his path, even going as far as setting up elaborate murder triangles. Plus he enjoys forcing the occasional innocent young woman into prostitution.

The back cover has it that the plot concerns Mickey trying to wrest full control of his loan shark operations from his boss, Dominic Zinna, and in this effort Mickey retains a willing young woman to cater to Zinna’s depraved interests. Well, that’s sort of what happens…towards the very end of the novel. For the most part, Operation: Loan Shark is a slice-of-sleazy-life yarn more concerned with Mickey’s lurid daily activities, without the hassle of a plot getting in the way. In fact Zinna barely figures into anything; Mickey’s the true star of the show, and as mentioned he’s a major bastard. 

Mickey’s more focused on his long-vanished father, a drunk who knocked up Mickey’s mom thirty-one years ago and only came around long enough to beat little Mickey around. In fact the bridge of Mickey’s nose lacks any cartilege because Mickey’s dad, in a drunken rage, smashed Mickey in the face with a broomstick. This happened when Mickey was ten years old. He mentions this often in the text and Eiden works in a nicely-done undercurrent of Daddy Issues which isn’t nearly as overdone and melodramatic as it would be in today’s cliche-ridden entertainment, while at the same time being a lot more over the top.

However Mickey disdains any sympathy and despises any sign of weakness in others. Very much like the protagonist of Crooked Cop he is the personification of the Nietzschean superman, unburdened by morals or emotions. His prime motivator is the accrual of power and wealth. He doesn’t even care about sex (a big difference from the Crooked Cop character), despite which he keeps no less than three women around Manhattan. The dude seems busy as hell in this regard, constantly shuttling around in his El Dorado to hook up with one or another of his mistresses: from Louise, the busty barmaid at one of Mickey’s legitimate establishments, to Joanne, a haughty doctorate student who gives Mickey a bit more lip than the others. Finally there’s Rosa, an Hispanic mother of three girls who serves more as Mickey’s accountant.

The female character who takes up the most of the text is Gerry St. John, a blonde actress who starts trailing Mickey around in the opening quarter of the novel, which introduces us to Mickey as he rushes around Manhattan on various business interests. One of Mickey’s concerns is a punk who owes money but can’t or won’t pay back, so Mickey’s already had one of his stooges, a muscular Sicilian named Grieco, break both his legs. Turns out Gerry is the punk’s brother and, after following Mickey around all night, hopes she can offer her body in exchange for her brother’s debt.

Mickey of course gets a good laugh out of this – he even laughs when Gerry reminds him that he had her brother’s legs broken – not that this stops him from screwing her. There are a few sex scenes throughout but nothing overly raunchy. But what’s crazier is that Mickey decides that Gerry can earn the money for her brother – by becoming a hooker! He drops her ass off at the whorehouse of a madame he knows and tells Gerry she can pay off the debt in no time on her back. Surprisingly Gerry’s game for it, realzing that if she can have sex with Mickey she can have sex with anyone. 

There isn’t much in the way of gun-blazing action, though. Later in the novel Mickey’s almost gunned down by two would-be assassins, obvious heroin-addicts in grungy army fatigues, but he just ducks and covers and spends a few pages wondering who sent them before forgetting about the situation. He passes it off as one of the dangers of his profession. He also rubs out a “client” who has been unable to pay back his hefty loan. Mickey talks the guy, Corkell, into driving Mickey and another stooge into Central Park on some b.s. assignment, and Corkell agrees because he’s eager to do anything to get back in Mickey’s good graces. Mickey, in the backseat and casually giving driving directions, puts a gun to the back of Corkell’s head and blows him away. I found this scene reminiscent of the finale of The Friends Of Eddie Coyle.

Eiden saves most of the action for the super-sick climax. Zinna we’re told is a thorn in Mickey’s side, despite being the guy who set Mickey up as one of the prime loaners and collectors in Manhattan. The way the pyramid works is that a Mafia don retains Zinna, who himself retains a few loan sharks, one of them being Mickey. So while Mickey does all the work, Zinna gets ten percent of his profits, all while doing nothing but sitting around. This is what really grinds Mickey’s gears; that, and fifty year-old Zinna’ growing interests in very young girls. Early in the book Mickey encounters a husband-and-wife acrobat team, Carlos and Carmen, and Mickey comes up with the idea of using nubile Carmen in his plot against Zinna. She’s got the build of a young girl, and quickly proves to Mickey that she’ll do anything he asks if he pays her.

This plays out over the last quarter of the novel, with Eiden never informing us of Mickey’s plans. He hires Carmen as a secretary in the office of another of his legit firms and Carlos as a gofer, constantly sending him off on assignments. Mickey plays on Carmen’s obvious interest in him – she’ll do anything for the money and lifestyle Carlos can’t provide for her – and even rents an apartment in the city “just for them.” But Mickey always passes off on her offer of sex. Then he starts whoring her out to random guys, with Zinna being the top job. Mickey’s twisted plot is revealed in the final pages, and any hopes that he will find come kind of salvation or redemption are quickly dashed. This is one of the most shocking climaxes I’ve read in a while, with Mickey setting up an elaborate murder scene.

From the first page it’s evident what kind of ending Mickey himself is headed for; it’s almost a prefigure of Training Day, with Mickey becoming increasingly deranged and unhinged as the narrative proceeds. Longtime friends even start to turn on him, much to Mickey’s confusion; he can only learn things the hard way, and the only comeuppance he could ever receive would have to be fatal. The conclusion of the book’s almost as shocking as Mickey’s plot against Zinna, if for no other reason than how abruptly it happens – it seems clear Eiden was up on his word count.

Overall I enjoyed Operation: Loan Shark a lot more than I thought I would. Like the other three books in the series I’ve read it was a great example of sleazy ‘70s pulp crime. Maybe not as good as those other three volumes, but good enough. Eiden really keeps the narrative moving, with the first half almost coming off like a breathless rush, occuring over just a few days in Mickey’s harried life. I also appreciate how he delivers such a zero-morals bastard of a protagonist with little of the niceties or maudlin cliches of today. Eiden even finds the time to render chilling fates for minor characters.

As mentioned this was the last volume of Mafia: Operation, and I can only assume it was low sales that killed the series, as there was plenty of opportunity for more novels. I for one would’ve enjoyed reading something like Operation: Hooker. At any rate I’ve still got the third-published volume, Eiden’s Operation: Hijack, to look forward to. Here’s hoping it’s as entertaining as the others.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Mafia: Operation Hit Man


Mafia: Operation Hit Man, by Don Romano
October, 1974  Pyramid Books

Allan Nixon and Robert Turner deliver their final installment of Mafia: Operation. Technically this was the fourth volume of the “series,” with Operation Hijack by Paul Eiden being the third one, but Mafia: Operation has more in common with the crime thrillers “produced” by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel than the actual series he oversaw, like John Eagle Expeditor or The Baroness. There is no continuity in the five volumes of Mafia: Operation, with each book really just a standalone crime novel. 

While Operation Hit Man is pretty cool and sometimes attains the sleaze level of the previous two offerings from these authors, it sadly fails to live up to expectations, and is nowhere as phenomenally lurid as Operation Porno. More than anything Operation Hit Man reminds me of Scorpio, a BCI crime paperback that was written by Robert Turner on his own. Like that novel, Operation Hit Man is mostly made up of arbitrary narrative digressions, with lots of background histories of one-off characters, usually shoehorned willy-nilly into the plot. It also lacks the sleazy drive of the previous two installments by Nixon and Turner, and comes off like something quickly banged out to meet a deadline. Given this my suspicion is Nixon was the main writer of Operation Porno and Operation Cocaine, and Turner wrote most of Operation Hit Man. But I’ve been wrong before, as my wife likes to remind me.

Turner got his start in the pulps, editing The Spider and writing scads of stories himself, and he did tons of crime short stories in the ‘50s for publications like Manhunt. It seems to me that he brought the short story aesthetic to his novels: lots of scene-setting and character-building before getting to the action. In other words there’s a lot of telling before showing; Operation Hit Man is filled with a lot of backstories and background setup before we get to “the good stuff,” which was also the case in Scorpio. I mean in point of fact, the novel is ostensibly about a Mafia hit man, yet we only see him carry out a handful of hits – and there’s no pure action stuff, like shootouts or whatnot. I assumed this installment would have more action than the previous two books by these authors, but as it turns out Operation Cocaine was the most action packed.

Also, sadly, the sleaze is kind of gone too, this time, which I think is more indication Turner was behind it; whereas the previous two books had all kinds of hardcore shenanigans, Operation Hit Man only gets down and dirty a few times; I knew something was up early on when a Mafia capo had sex off-page. Off-page!! This same sort of thing happened in Scorpio. And speaking of which when we meet our “hero,” Dominick Caressimo, he’s just gotten lucky with the landlord’s slutty wife in the sleazy Manhattan hovel he’s staying in. Caressimo is 25, a ‘Nam vet who ran a suicide squad, where he was nicknamed “The Noose” for his proficiency with strangling Charlie in the dead of night with a garrotte. (Unbelievably, the authors do nothing with this in the story that follows – I thought it would be a given that Caressimo would carry out a Noose-style hit at some point, but it never happens.)

Caressimo is offered his hit man job within the first few pages, proposotioned by Anthony Vicarella, the aforementioned capo. Vicarella’s been monitoring Caressimo, noting he’s a former ‘Nam badass who has had a hard time transitioning back to “the world.” He offers him the chance to make big bucks killing people for the Mafia; Vicarella wants to start a new Murder, Incorporated, which he will name “Operation Hit Man.” Caressimo would be the first assassin he’s hired, but if it all goes well Caressimo could be the top guy with his own legion of hitmen. The authors don’t waste the reader’s time; Caressimo accepts posthaste.

Whereas the previous two books were mostly ensemble pieces, hopscotching around a large group of characters before settling on one (or two) in the final chapters, Operation Hit Man keeps Caressimo in the spotlight for most of the narrative. Unfortunately he’s kind of a cipher…he literally becomes a Mafia hit man because he needs the cash, and there but few moments of introspection or self-doubt. But he’s definitely the man for the job; Vicarella clarifies that most of these assignments won’t be simple gun-them-down deals; Caressimo will need to show some invention in his work. He also must follow an elaborate method of getting his jobs, going to a dead-drop box when notified, collecting the dossier left for him, and studying his latest target.

His first job has him taking out a CPA who has somehow run afoul of the mob; since Caressimo himself isn’t in the Mafia, he is never given the reason why he must kill. But usually he figures it out. This first job takes up a good portion of the opening quarter and has Caressimo shadowing his prey, discovering that he has a hotstuff mistress on the side, and deciding to kill them both when they go away for an illicit weekend in the countryside. On the job Caressimo drafts a fellow vet, a black dude named Hampton Jarvis who was in Caressimo’s suicide squad. This one involves a lot of setup as Caressimo, using a cheap rifle, figures out the range and distance to blow out the CPA’s tire as he drives up the mountain; he ends up killing both the CPA and his mistress in a tire blowout that sends their car flipping down the mountain.

Vicarella isn’t happy that Caressimo has taken out an innocent, and advises that if something like that happens again, Caressimo himself might end up dead; the Mafia only wants the person in the dossier dead, no one else. But otherwise Caressimo did great and is on his way to money, with ten thousand and up for his hits, even more for big jobs. Vicarella cautions Caressimo not to go overboard with the high life, which ultimately leads to a subplot in which Caressimo develops an alternate identity for himself. He has a hidden door built in his apartment – again, all of it described via page-filling backstory summary – which leads into an apartment in the high-class building that happens to be on the other side. Caressimo merely slips through the hidden door and becomes a high roller; a pulpish vibe from former pulp-writer Turner.

More jobs follow, each of them playing out more as interesting obstacles Caressimo must encounter and overcome rather than slam-bang pieces of action. Caressimo takes out a pair of brothers who have been notorious thorns in the Mafia’s side by electrocuting them in their pool, and another guy, who has been skimming the Mafia’s cigarette-tax-scheme profits, he bulldozes right in front of his employees. This latter one definitely has the feel of a short story, all of it being relayed through the perspective of the witnesses. Eventually Caressimo does head up his own execution wing for the mob, with Hampton Jarvis as his right-hand man; the other killers are taken from Caressimo’s old ‘Nam unit.

After that first kill, of the CPA, a horny Caressimo picks up a married cougar-type babe; he’d once been told that if a guy wants to score quick, look for an older, married woman, as most of ‘em are super-horny thanks to husbands who no longer screw them. Caressimo does just that, leading to the novel’s first explicit sex scene, which brings to mind similar sequences from the past two books. Caressimo doesn’t even learn her name – but he does learn it, memorably so, when the same woman turns up in the drop-box dossier some months later. The Mafia wants the woman dead, despite the fact she’s just some random wife and mother of two teen kids; Caressimo deduces on his own that the husband has set up the hit, likely to get her out of the way and cash in on life insurance.

Not that this stops Caressimo from carrying out the hit. As yet a reminder of the cretinous cur we’ve been presented for a protagonist, Caressimo not only kills her – but makes it look like the work of a rapist-murderer who is operating in the vicinity! In one of the more bizarre segments I’ve ever read in a novel, Caressimo calls the lady up, tells her he’s looking to rekindle that one-night stand they enjoyed months ago – but first wants her help trying to make a break in that whole rapist-strangler deal that’s going on in her neighborhood. Caressimo tells her this tall tale about being a psychic who has helped the cops break similar cases; he needs to go to the rape-murder scenes with a woman, concentrate, and let his psychic skills tell him who the rapist was(!).

The woman goes along with him, and Caressimo ends up raping her – not that she doesn’t enjoy it. Then he strangles her! He tosses her nude corpse aside, wondering if he’s impregnated her…meaning, if so, he didn’t just kill her but also his unborn kid(!). Folks, nothing beats the sleazy vibe of these ‘70s crime novels. But even though Caressimo ends up killing the husband in vengeance (on his own dime, and without the Mafia’s knowledge), he is so unnerved that he’s unable to have sex…three weeks later and only a talented hooker can get him to rise to the occasion. He takes a trip to Europe, where a horny American governess takes him to a torture-sex show in Amsterdam; Caressimo’s so excited he loses it in his pants, relegating a hasty retreat back to the hotel for more explicit sex.

Gradually Caressimo learns that he can only overcome his limp hangup by getting whipped and beaten every once in a while; this he learns via a hooker Hampton knows. Once she hears Caressimo’s problem, she gives him a phone number, which leads Caressimo to a strange interview with a professional-looking lady in some business office. From there he’s sent to a location where he’s blindfolded, taken somewhere else, and then whipped and sodomized by a gorgeous nude dominatrix and her teen accomplices, after which Caressimo screws them all. At this point the novel is far beyond a Mafia yarn and into the realm of pure sleaze.

Eventually the don of Vicarella’s family gets wind of Caressimo’s quirk (the whips and chains hooker service being yet another Mafia venture), and he doesn’t like it; he summons Vicarella and tells him Caressimo is now an asset, as you can’t trust a guy who gets off on being whipped and tied up. As Zwolf said, “Murder doesn’t phase these guys, but a liltte hanky-spanky gives them the vapors?” But this takes us into the homestretch, as one evening Caressimo goes from his high-class secret apartment into his Vicarella-appointed one next door and spies Vicarella’s henchman waiting in there for him. Promptly Caressimo realizes the man is here to kill him, and blows him away. Next he takes care of a traitorous “best friend” before (almost anticlimactically) dealing with Vicarella himself.

But Dom Caressimo has done too many evil things to get a Happily Ever After. Justice finally finds him months later, living on the beach in Cannes, delivered via a submachine gun salvo to the crotch and sternum – a fitting finale, but an unexplained one, given that the authors have informed us that Caressimo is here in Cannes under yet another fake name, one that no one knows about. So how did the Mafia gunners find him? The authors hope we’ll overlook this, more intent on giving their series-mandatory downbeat ending in which everyone dies.

I guess Mafia: Operation didn’t do well enough to continue past five volumes, which is a shame; these two authors certainly could’ve come up with a sleazy fourth book together. Anyway next time I’ll move on to Paul Eiden’s two contributions; having now read Crooked Cop, which I think was by Eiden, I’m game to read anything he wrote.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Mafia: Operation Cocaine


Mafia: Operation Cocaine, by Don Romano
March, 1974  Pyramid Books

The second entry in the Mafia: Operation “series” is courtesy the same authors who delivered the stellar first volume, Operation Porno: Robert Turner and Allan Nixon. These guys make for one hell of a powerhouse combo, for again they have turned out an uber-sleazy tale of the underworld and the fucked-up criminals who populate it.

In a way Operation Cocaine is like an installment of Marc Olden’s Narc series, only without a hero; they’re all villains in this story. But it retains the same Byzantine plotting as one of Olden’s books, with every character scheming against the other to get a piece of the cocaine empire. That’s true for the first half, at least, after which the novel almost turns into a sort of Sharpshooter or Marksman variant, with a psychotic lone wolf swearing vengeance against the Mafia…and really busting the shit out of them.

But for the first half the novel’s a bit structureless, and is comprised of a barrage of characters with similar names plotting against one another. This detracts a little from the eventual sleaze impact, which when it occurs is almost but not quite on the level of Operation Porno. Also unlike that previous book, there’s really not much about the cocaine business in this one; it’s more of a revenge scenario, as the ruler of a South American cocaine empire is set up by the Mafia and swears revenge.

This character is the closest we get to a hero, or even a protagonist: Paul Duray, Belgian-born 45 year-old who lives in ultra wealth and has a lucrative deal with the New York-based branch of the Mafia, which spend lots of money on his top-quality cocaine. The novel opens with sabotage, as the dude who unwittingly carries the shipments of coke up to New York is killed (while thinking about the awesome blowjobs he gets from a New York whore, naturally – I’m telling you, these authors are masters of sleaze). This sets off a chain of events which will, just like in the previous book, end on almost Shakespearian levels of tragedy.

New York Mafia bos Carlos Carriglio, head of the Prescipio Family, vows to find out who stole these three kilos. He has Duray himself investigated, as it appeared to be an inside job, even though Duray is so wealthy, not to mention that it wouldn’t make any sense for him to rob from his own stash. Nonetheless Carriglio tasks his top caporegime, Al Dennono, with looking into Duray and perhaps making him and/or his associates sweat a little, in particular Duray’s top assistant, Flip Hondo. It’s Hondo’s death that sets Duray off and turns him into an ostensible Johnny Rock.

Before that happens though we get a bit too much about Al Dennono and his screwed-up world. Hiding his “lavender” proclivities from his boss, Dennono is gay and is currently smitten with a young male hooker named Nino DeSico who has silicone tits and sometimes, we later learn, puts special silicone attachments around his shaved privates so his male customers can screw him like a girl…! Nino’s got a stupid brother named Baba, whom Dennono is training as an underling, despite the guy’s stupidty – all so Dennono can keep getting special favors from Nino.

This stuff gets a lot of print; there’s even an arbitrary part early in the book where Paul Duray, looking for quick cover, finds himself in a gay bar in Manhattan, and we get lots of description of this lifestyle. But the authors don’t shirk on the straight sex; this comes in the form of Lacey Johnson, a smokin’-hot redheaded “actress” who in pure ‘70s style wears a silver coke spoon as a necklace, so that it dangles in her “impressive cleavage.” Flip Hondo hooks up his boss Duray with her, warning the older man first off that the gal is a fiend for coke, totally addicted to it.

Paul could care less, and takes her back to his swinging bachelor penthouse on Park Avenue. Here we get an explicit sequence that brings to mind the shenanigans in Operation Porno, as first Paul screws Lacey, who we learn cannot achieve orgasm, “regular” style…and then afterwards he covers her nether regions with cocaine, puts some on his own privates, and then they go at it big time!  Harold Robbins couldn’t have written a more over-the-top scene. Not only does Lacey achieve that ever-elusive orgasm, but she also feels like she’s falling in love with Paul Duray, and he’s starting to feel the same for her.

But when Flip Hondo is captured by Dennono’s goons and killed, Paul goes into vengeance mode. Here the novel kicks into gear as he makes short but grisly work of the various flunkies who are part of Carlos Carriglio’s operation. Paul retains two henchmen/bodyguards, hulking “Peruvian Indians” named Tala and Jorge, and the three make for a very impressive team. First they take out “the Scorpion,” a ‘Nam-trained assassin who was responsible for Hondo’s death, paralyzing him with a curare-tipped dart (shades of The Penetrator) and then hurling his car into the bottom of a quarry.

Meanwhile Al Dennono’s storyline continues to get more and more fucked up. For we learn that Nino, Al’s little transvestite playmate, is in a sexual relationship…with his own brother!! You see, I told you these authors know their sleaze! But yeah, Nino and Baba enjoy going at it, and we get a lot of crazed and wild stuff with the two of them, and then it gets even more crazed and wild when Dennono shows up at Nino’s place unannounced and catches the brothers in the act. When Paul and his two henchmen show up and carry off a numb Dennono, there’s a pair of twitching corpses on the bed, something which a puritanical Carlos Carriglio is desperate to keep out of the papers.

Paul Duray could give Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan a class in sadism: his offing of Dennono is particularly novel. They take him to one of Carriglio’s legal operations, a laundromat, and stuff him into a dryer, Paul confident that Dennono will be knocked out of his shock by the heat and the centrifugal force of the dryer, and thus will be cognizant of the horrifying way in which he’s dying. And as the man pleads and bangs against the dryer door, Paul knows he was right. Next up Paul and the henchmen (who he raised as sons) take on a six-man task force Carriglio sends after them.

In a move Rambo would later endorse, the three take positions on the rooftop of a building across from Paul’s apartment building and launch flaming arrows down at the two cars that wait in ambush outside it. The authors are also masters of dark comedy, and this sequence features an almost proto-Simpsons gag, as some random dude in the apartment building happens to be watching a gangster movie on television while the battle rages outside, and when he gets up to turn the channel he’s hit in the head by a stray bullet.

Along the way Paul has learned that the culprit behind the kilo hijack was a guy named Errico Rosario, one of Carriglio's Mafia men and a person Paul had been training to be his second in command. Rosario’s plan was to sow dissent against Paul so that Carriglio would have him killed, and then Rosario would become the owner of Paul’s cocaine empire in South America. As if that wasn’t enough, Rosario has also moved in on Lacey, who figures she’s been dumped by Paul – she feels that her lot in life is to be used by men and then dropped. So she plays right into Rosario’s hands, especially when he offers her some coke.

Using Lacey as bait (and the little nympho, we learn, has introduced him to Paul’s little coke-on-your-privates trick), Rosario hopes to roust Paul out of hiding. But as usual Paul Duray is two steps ahead and captures both of them. Another sadistic death ensues, as Paul takes his captives out on his cruising yacht, strips Rosario down to trunks, and ties him to a line, tossing him into the water behind the boat. This all works up to a gory send-off for Rosario, who is chopped to hamburger by the powerful propellors.

Lacey suffers an equally crazed fate. Paul, feeling betrayed by the girl, leaves her to sulk in her prison of a room as he takes the yacht on down south, announcing he’s due a “vacation” after all this nastiness in New York. Finally he talks to Lacey, playing nice, and offers her a drink. Only, he’s dosed it with a mixture of cantharides (ie Spanish Fly) and strychnine. This leads to a mega-horny and nude Lacey screaming on the deck of the yacht, pleading with Paul, Tala, or Jorge to have sex with her – even threatening to kill them if they don’t. The cantharides, we’re informed, were used by the Peruvian Indians as punishment for unfaithful wives.

Strangely, the authors don’t exploit Lacey’s eventual rape, as Paul figures at length that she’s “had enough” and then he and his two henchmen take their turns with her in a fade to black scene. But when they dock at a Florida port a few days later while a sort of pirate celebration is going on, they find that Lacey is dead, killed by the fatal cantharides poisoning. This isn’t something Paul intended to happen, but he’s as resourceful as ever, disguising the girl’s body as a mauled pirate victim and dumping it into the water along with the other effigies – part of the bizarre annual celebration, we’re told.

The reader will of course understand the novel is headed for a dark conclusion, and here in the home stretch they dole out the final betrayal. Jorge and Tala, who as mentioned were raised from childhood by Paul, have been given an offer by Carlos Carriglio: get rid of Paul Duray and his cocaine empire will be theirs. This is a savage scene, as the authors cut straight to a nude Paul Duray, cast naked and adrift in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of rescue or of swimming to safety; we’re informed in one of the most abrupt but disturbing finales ever that he’s nothing more than a mauled corpse a mere three hours later.

While taking a bit too long to get going, Mafia: Operation Cocaine is nevertheless a masterful blast of lurid pulp, which makes it a shame that the authors’s next installment, Operation Hitman, was their last for the series.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Mafia: Operation Porno


Mafia: Operation Porno, by Don Romano
October, 1973  Pyramid Books

Delivering just the kind of ‘70s sleaze I demand, Mafia: Operation Porno is yet another paperback original copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, the man who gave us such series as The Baroness, John Eagle Expeditor, Richard Blade, and on and on. However Mafia: Operation isn’t really a series, moreso just a group of five unrelated novels offering “inside looks” into the world of the mob, all branded under a series title and house name.

The books were each credited to “Don Romano,” a house name which according to this site belonged to three authors: Allan Nixon, Robert Turner, and Paul Eiden (who around this time was also working for Engel on the Expeditor series). Operation: Porno was written by Nixon and Turner, and man if this book is any indication, their other two contributions are must-reads. This one’s all about the mob’s venture into the lurid world of “skin flicks,” and it pushes all the right sleaze and exploitation buttons.

Our nominal protagonist is Luigi Canello, a 40 year-old New York-based mobster who oversees the Acme corp, one of the Mafia’s many legal enterprises. Canello is tasked by aging Don Appolito with boosting the family’s lackluster peepshow sales. After a bit of research Canello discovers that not only is the guy currently running the peepshow business skimming the profits, but he’s also been shooting such cheap footage, with junkies and burned-out whores, that he’s forced customers to move on to porn that’s more pleasing to the eye.

There follows one of the novel’s many enjoyably-sleazy scenes where Canello screens some of these cheaply-filmed “loops” for the don and his men, the authors explicity detailing each and every act, even how blowjob moneyshots are faked. Canello promises that for a ten thousand investment, he can go to Hollywood and put together a XXX-rated film that will rake in piles of cash; he’s even figured out how to make extra profits off of it, like selling stills to the porn mags that publish “beaver shots.”

Canello turns out to be such a screwed-up character that you can’t help but laugh. For immediately after the Don leaves, Canello lays down to nap…and the authors casually inform us that he wakens from an “erotic dream” about his own daughter! Yes, Canello is totally in lust with his gorgeous, 16 year-old “Lolita” of a daughter, all of it starting the other month when he caught her masturbating. Perhaps you’re now getting a picture of how sleazy this novel is. And it gets sleazier, as the authors not only document how Canello watched secretly as his daughter played with herself, but how he now sates his shameful lust on a hooker who looks just like her, paying her $200 a session so he can vicariously fuck his own daughter!

The authors open up the mob world for us a bit with the brief introduction of Jim Croce, a young ‘Nam vet who, Joe Skull style, has become a hitman, as he takes out the poor sap who was previously running the family’s peepshow business. In true pulp style the guy gets a near-sexual thrill from murdering. And the lurid stuff continues as we meet 18 year-old Helga Ryan, a super-busty blonde from Smalltown, USA who waitresses in a diner and, of course, dreams of Hollywood stardom. Naïve and good-natured, Helga is about as all-American as you can get, other than her first name, which is courtesy her Swedish mother.

Helga is sweet-talked into riding cross-country with a truck driver named Mack, who claims to be cousins with an up-and-coming director. This is actually true; the cousin’s name is Howie Jamison, and in Canello’s storyline we learn that he is the director who through various means gets the porno gig. Meanwhile Helga falls in love with Mack, who is the first guy to bring her to orgasm – cue a very explicit sex scene. In fact she wants to get married, and figures they’ll do so once they get to Las Vegas.

But the dark comedy ensues, as Mack brings along a co-driver, who one evening sneaks into Helga’s bed and fools her into thinking he’s Mack! After screaming rape she starts to enjoy it royally, and the two world-wizened truckers try to inform Helga that she’s a sex maniac and doesn’t need to worry about marrying Mack just because he can get her off, etc. And it of course leads up to the expected three-way, with the two guys getting Helga nice and drunk before double-teaming her.

So basically, a lot of the novel comes off like a more streamline, more lurid variation on Norman Spinrad’s Passing Through The Flame, with the good-natured sexbomb getting into hardcore porn. The authors spend quite a bit of time with Helga, so that you almost forget about Canello, who meanwhile goes about cementing his Family’s porn distribution network. Howie Jamison meanwhile turns out to be a hirsute “artiste” who thankfully has no pretensions about his art – he knows he does great work, and has won awards, but is willing to do anything commercial if the price is right.

The Mafia’s lack of mercy is displayed when Canello runs into any trouble. If he meets any pushback, a simple call back to the Family in New York and an “accident” will befall the troublemaker. Canello’s biggest run-in is with the a pair of brothers who have gone rogue from an LA Family. These guys run their own porn ring, and beat Canello near to death. After this the Appolito Family retaliates by hiring a group of notoriously-deranged bikers to crash the brothers’s next porn filming.

This is one sadistic sequence. The chapter encapsulates practically everything in ‘70s sleaze, opening with details on the porno filming, which is being shot on a large farmland. The 80 year-old owner is so excited by the activities that he bangs one of the girls while the crew watches – and then the bikers storm the property, blowing the old man away mid-orgasm. They butcher the other men, then line the still-naked women up. Hopped up on speed, the bikers have even less mercy than the mobsters; when one of the girls is too shocked to have sex, a biker jams his gun into an unexpected place and blows her away. It’s all so twisted that by the time they’re finished with the women, even the bikers have sated themselves – not that this stops them from lining up the girls and killing them.

For the most part, though, long portions of Operation: Porno come off like Hollywood-set trash fiction, with Helga introduced to the high life by Howie – that is, after he’s taken some nude photos of her and then had sex with her. The trash fiction vibe is particularly strong in a party sequence at some millionaire’s place, complete with famous faces, lots of drugs, and open sex all over the premises, including a “humping room,” where an orgy takes place. After a joint – her first ever – Helga loses all inhibitions and goes from modelling a fur coat with nothing on underneath it for the millionaire, to throwing herself among the orgiasts and taking part in the group sex.

But this is a dark tale, and Helga’s used by everyone she meets in Hollywood. A female casting director shows interest in her…and soon enough is trying out her new vibrators on her. An ad agency bigwig promises to make Helga the face of a new hair product, but only after the expected sexual favors. And Howie too uses her, in a bigger way, inviting Helga over for a “party” which is really a secretly-filmed portion of his porn film, Howie urging Helga to get stoned and “have fun” with the other men and women in the room, each of whom are paid actors who know what’s going on. When Helga sees the footage and throws a tantrum, Canello takes care of it by getting one of his women, a “friend” of Helga’s, to get Helga hooked on heroin.

The novel gets darker and darker, like your typical “true Hollywood story” taken to absurd degrees; in a blur of weeks Helga has become an addict, starring in so many porn flicks that she can’t even remember them. Soon she’s so messed up that she’s useless, and Canello unceremoniously fires her; now she’s out on the streets. Canello proves himself truly merciless, dispensing with Howie in even more ruthless fashion when the now-drunk of a director could prove to be a liability if Canello’s porn-producing company is ever taken to court. In fact Mafia ruthlessness becomes more and more pronounced as the novel goes on, the authors doing a great job of swindling you in the opening half into thinking they might not be such bad guys, after all. 

And it all builds to an even darker finale, with Helga, now as mentioned reduced to a heroin-blitzed street dweller, getting ripped on junk and deciding she wants a little revenge. Coming across a handy bayonet, she stumbles down to the porn studio’s set (where “Hotpants Henrietta” is being filmed), bullshits her way inside, and starts slicing and dicing the nude actors and actresses! It’s all so sleazy and dark and disturbing that you can’t help but laugh. And of course it builds up to a suitably-dark finale, at least for everyone but Canello, who blithely goes on with his life, more concerned that this latest teen girl he’s being sent photos of will look more like his daughter. (Turns out though it really is his daughter!)

If there’s any problem with Mafia: Operation Porno, it’s that too many characters and subplots are given sharp focus early on, only to disappear. For example Canello’s daughter-fixation. This is introduced early on, and is such a bizarre moment that the reader can’t help but want to read more about it. However it’s ignored until veritably the final page. Same for other tidbits throughout the narrative, like Howie’s galpal Annette, who seems as if she’ll be important to the story, but also disappears, only showing up again in that doomed Hotpants Henrietta shoot, where the authors off-handedly inform us that Annette has taken over Helga’s mantle as the “queen of the pornos.”

However, this is just a minor complaint. Otherwise the novel’s an excellent trawl through ‘70s trash and sleaze that doesn’t hold back on the graphic nature. The sporadic scenes of violence are very bloodthirsty, and the sex scenes are just as exploitatively detailed. The authors have a gift for doling out sleazy and memorable characters, and they capably bring to life the lurid underbelly of Hollywood. I’ll certainly read their other two contributions to the series, Operation: Cocaine and Operation: Hit Man.

The authors were an interesting pair of guys: Robert Turner was a prolific pulp writer, and seems to have churned out many stories and novels before his death in 1980. Allan Nixon, who died in 1995, also published many paperback originals, from the lurid private eye series Garrity to a handful of trashy Harold Robbins-esque potboilers in the late ‘60s, one of which I have and will definitely read: the wonderfully-titled The Bitch Goddess, from 1969. Nixon was also an actor in the ‘50s and ‘60s, starring in B-movies like 1960’s Prehistoric Women.