Mafia Doublecross (a novel by Vinny Parko, first published in 2021)

 

Mafia Doublecross

(novel by Vinny Parko 2021)

 

I recommend this book; it’s short, has a great plot, and is loaded with sex, violence, and Italian food. But I must warn you, it’s not well written. Don’t worry, just sit back, have fun, and leave all thoughts of artistry, or even artisanship, behind because, well, sex, violence, and Italian food is what makes the world go round.

 

The set-up is this:

 

You see, there’s this gang of Mafiosos from Brooklyn who’ve just pulled off one the biggest jewel heist in New York City history and are celebrating by going on vacation in a brand-new, amazingly appointed, luxury hotel/casino in the Bahamas.

 

And you see, there’s also a group of NYPD Detectives and FBI Agents from the Organized Crime Task Force who are taking a well-earned vacation together, feeling they timed it just right because they escaped the headaches of the huge jewel heist that has everyone else at One Police Plaza tearing their hair out over.

 

Ooops. The Cops and the Mafiosos picked the same hotel. And the Cops learn that Mafiosos are the prime suspects in the fore-mentioned jewelry heist. And there’s no extradition from the Bahamas, so the Cops can’t touch the Mafiosos. And the Mafiosos know this, so they are having a grand time pulling pranks on the Cops who can’t touch them. And there’s also a there’s a big jewelry expo going on at the same hotel at just that time, so Cops are sure the Mafiosos are there to pull off another heist.

 

Ooops. The Mafiosos are not after the jewels in the hotel, but someone else is. Terrorists seize the hotel and take everyone hostage. Their goal is to steal the jewels and use them to finance attacks on the USA. Suddenly, the Cops and Mafiosos have a common enemy.

 

In the real-world, author Vinny Parko is one of NYC’s most flamboyant Private Detectives (he was called “the ultimate hard-boiled detective” by Penthouse Magazine), a Reality TV and streaming star, and a notorious scandal-magnet. He famously went to prison after doing something really dumb on behalf of a client and during that time, he wrote this novel, a true-crime book about the adultery cases he worked, another true-crime book about the case that got him jailed, and (of all things) a cookbook, all of which he self-published after his release. This novel is the only one of the four I read, but I gave my sister the cookbook and she liked it, commenting, “He uses even more wine in his recipes than I do.” 

Parco brings his insider knowledge of how Cops and Mafiosos work and behave to bare in this “Die Hard” inspired action/adventure (one of the Terrorists is even named Hans Gruber), but he clearly never read any of Nancy Kress’ books on the craft of writing and the copying-editing is kinda iffy.

 

Parco’s view of the world is very much a part of the fabric of the most contemporary expression of American populism. He demands we stand all up and “Support our troops, at home and abroad” (meaning Cops and Soldiers), while just as loudly expressing his deep resentment of the authority those troops are empowered with. Though this novel little ambition to make any statement on life, the universe, or anything, this worldview permeates, making the action far more buoyant because of his audacity in insisting that the Mafia and violent vigilantism aren’t necessarily bad things. When things go really bad, the Cops aren’t going to protect you, so in a world as scary as this one, you really need a couple friends that are violent thugs.

 

The biggest problem with the book is that it’s painfully obvious Parco had as little interest in being a novelist; this is more a film treatment than anything else. Parco does have contacts within the film industry, specifically a group working on making a remark of “The Bronx Tale”; that yet-unmade film is referenced at least twice in this novel. In the book, the descriptions are untextured, they are generally shopping lists that a production designer, costumer, or set dresser are supposed to pay attention to at some later date.

 

Generally, in novels, characters are introduced either one-by-one or in pairs, the reader is brought close to one and an environment is built around them; as the character moves about, they encounter another, then another, and a world is assembled methodically, like laying bricks for a wall. Though this is sometimes derisively referred to as “white room syndrome” but it can be done masterfully, as in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which opens with the narrator waking up alone in a near featureless white room, and then it expands beyond that.

 

In cinema, it is easier to just dump one’s audience into the middle of a busy world, as the director and screenwriter don't need to methodically build on a first, narrow, impression of setting and characters in the audience’s mind’s eye, it is visualized right in front of them. Director Francis Ford Copula and his co-Screenwriter Marion Puzo were masters of this; the first “Godfather” film opens at a wedding party and the second at a Christening party. The roving camera gives us indelible images of the central characters, demonstrating relationships and pecking orders, before the plot is really engaged.

 

There are, of course, writers who are skilled enough to open a novel in the middle of a crowd and introduce a huge cast of characters in the first few pages. A notable example of this is the masterful first chapter of “Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett.

 

Parco follows the example of cinema more than prose. He gives us four groups of important characters, the eight mafiosi, most of whom will soon be going on vacation; the six Cops and Feds from the Organized Crime Task Force, who we first meet in the lobby of the hotel; the eleven Terrorists who will ruin everyone’s vacations; plus another group of cops who never leave NYC because they are investigating the first jewel heist; and beyond these there’s an assortment of other cops and criminals, private security, jewelers, hotel guests and staff members, and this adds up to probably far too many characters for a book as slim as this one. In three separate scenes, the Mafiosos, Cops on vacation, and Terrorists are introduced in groups like we would see in a Copula movie, and it is worth comparing Parko's way of doing it to the opening chapter of the Patchett novel, a Christening party which introduces a huge cast of characters as Copula would’ve, is but roughly one-fourth the length of Parco’s entire book.

 

In Parco’s crowds, character introductions are a string of paragraphs, one character per, and the descriptions are not especially evocative, so lists more than anything else. A comparison here will be demonstrative: The opening paragraph of Dashell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”:

 

“Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan. He said to Effie Perine: ‘Yes, sweetheart?’"

 

And the first detailed description of Parco’s lead character:

 

“James ‘Jimmy’ Fanelli, 41 years old, is 5-foot-10inches in height and weighs 185 pounds. He has brown hair with flecks of gray, good looking and charismatic. He’s the nephew of Rosario Rinaldi, ‘The Godfather.’ He’s the capo of his crew and a hero of military action in Afghanistan. He singlehandedly drove off a large group of Taliban fighters when his lieutenant and most of his patrol was killed in an ambush. Using grenades and an assault rifle, he killed 20 hostiles and saved the rest of his patrol that were wounded. He was promoted to Master Sergeant and received the Silver Star for gallantry. He’s a born leader and is a big earner for the Rinaldi family.”

 

The setting of the first example is Sam’s office, Effie is his employee. The setting for the second is a Mafia-owned social club, Jimmy is in a crowd of other men he’s interacting with, but what’s going on in the room disappears for that paragraph, and all the similar paragraphs introducing the other Mafiosos one-by-one; also, almost nothing later in the novel refers back to Jimmy’s military service.

 

Though the characterization is thin, they are still entirely believable (well, except the Terrorists, Parco clearly knows a lot about Cops and Mafiosos, but Terrorists not so much). The tribe enmity between the Cops and Mafiosos takes up more real-estate than the Terrorists’ attack and is most of the fun of the book. A good example concerns the one female embedded in each tribe. The Mafiosos have Maddie Recaro, who is a cold-blooded prostitute and killer with a porn-star body, but also fiercely loyal to her boyfriend Jimmy (by the pool, Maddie wears a string bikini). The Cops have Mary Kelly, a retired Detective, middle-aged, attractive though putting on pounds as most of us do and married to one of the Cops on the Task Force (she wears a one-piece bathing suit). In the hotel lobby, Maddie marches up to the Cops, locks her eyes on Mary, and introduces herself by saying, “You all dress alike. Did you all go to Men’s Warehouse together when there was a sale?”

 

The Cops are neither corrupt or incompetent, but the Mafisos have more money, win more at poker, wear better clothes, get better meals, are fawned over by prettier women, have a great deal more sex, and even before the Terrorist attack, beat up two of the Cops. Jimmy caps this off by giving a surprisingly impassioned speech about how his thieves’ honor is far more honest than what the public servants represent.
 

Parco brings up retired NYPD Detective Frank Bolz, who in the real-world was among the best hostage negotiators this country ever produced. While the Cops being held hostage in the hotel, and the Bahaman Cops are outside surrounding the hotel, all the public servants do everything that Bolz’s protocols insist they should. Problem is, the Terrorists also read Bolz’s book (so can you, it’s available on Amazon) and worked it into their master plan, thus rendering all the Cops impotent. But Mafiosos don’t play by anyone’s rules and therefore save the day. Says one of them after dispatching a Terrorist in front of witnesses, “We are the Mafia, the good guys.”

 

The sex and violence are abundant, but described with inadequate sense of tactile dynamism, Parco relies only on sight and sound, ignoring the other three senses, but he does show more love when describing food – well, he did write a cookbook after all. Parco’s gastronomic devotions are well-known in his circle; and I remember how he was described in William Parkhurst non-fiction book, “True Detective” (and please forgive the paraphrase), “Vinny was unhappy, and everyone was scared. At times like these only an exorcist or bowl of fettuccini could save them.” Parco even provides a significant public service to the reader: during the New York scenes, Detectives who are supposed to be gathering intelligence on the first jewel heist keep getting distracted by the restaurants and food markets in Little Italy in Manhattan and on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. In these chapters, Parco introduces the readers to his personal favorite places, and makes recommendations of what to order. That alone is worth the price of the book.

 

Another flaw in the novel is that it violated a basic maxim in fiction, Chekov’s gun or, as Anton Chekhov wrote in an 1889 letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." Throughout the book there’s a lot of discussion of explosives and there’s a lovingly described shark tank at the hotel. By the end, despite the book having an impressively gory body-count, the explosions are only a few and small, and I’m heart-broken to report no one was eaten by a shark.

  

The “Doublecross” of the title refers to a string of instances throughout the book, but mostly the final one, after the Terrorists are already neutralized. It’s when the Mafiosos play their meanest prank on the blameless Cops. It quite satisfying unless the breath-taking cynicism is off-putting to you.

It will make a great movie.