Authors: Kenny Gallo & Matthew Randazzo V
Publisher: Phoenix Books
ISBN: 13: 978-1-59777-615-8:  10: 1-59777-615-7

Click Here To Purchase Breakshot: A Life in the 21st Century American Mafia

Kenny “Kenji” Gallo's memoir Breakshot: A Life In The 21st Century American Mafia co-authored with Matthew Randazzo V will either astonish you or repulse you. And if you are wondering why, Gallo is an Asian American and Italian American gangster who specialized in trafficking in narcotics as well as pornographic films in the 1980s and 1990s. He was associated with crime families in the Los Angeles and New York areas including the Colombo family. Presently, he is a FBI-protected informant against the Colombo Family as well as the Lucchese Family. The Colombo family has issued a contract on his head and there have been several attempts on his life.
Breakshot is his story as related to Matthew Randazzo V over a period of four years consisting of almost daily phone calls, e-mails, letters, and in-person interviews.

When you read Gallo's story you may be inclined to brush it offer as bravado. However, for what it is worth, the last page of the book states that the publisher, Phoenix Books, engaged the services of Edward Gelb, a well-known polygraph expert, who conducted a polygraph examination of Gallo in relation to the material presented in the book, and he passed the test.

Gallo describes himself as a bright and energetic kid that today would be diagnosed as someone with an attention deficit disorder and “cured” with a payload of pharmaceuticals. At the age of thirteen he attended the prestigious Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California where he began his criminal career, and as he recounts, “my life underwent a Lord of the Flies shift toward the deranged and cannibalistic.” At the time little did Gallo's father know that when he secured a job for his son as a busboy at a new Japanese restaurant, Setoya in Newport Beach, run by a member of the respected Avila restaurant family, that this would be the beginning of his criminal apprenticeship. Joey and Sal Avila were the best mentors an aspiring gangster could ever wish for and so began Gallo's illustrious career in the world of crime.

What is quite interesting is that when he became an FBI informant, Gallo was paid around four thousand dollars a month plus rent money for his apartment, and he was also permitted to continue his cocaine business. Gallo cooperated with an undercover cop, Sergeant Jerry Head, whom he agreed to help out in his career provided, he did the same for him.

Some of Gallo's associates or crime bosses that he discusses in his memoirs include Michael “Big Mike” Marvich, whom he greatly admired, and whom he describes as someone who would have personally strangled the Pope on Christmas Day and sold the corpse to a coven of necrophiliacs. Others are Emanuel “Uncle Manny” Garofalo, whom he calls his mentor in New York City's Colombo Family, Vince “Jimmy” Caci of the Los Angeles crime family, Theodore “Teddy” Persico Jr. , John Baudanza, Craig Marino,  and Griselda Blanco.

An interesting chapter is the one devoted to Gallo's pornography enterprises as well as his tidbits concerning Al Brown, or as he was known in the porn trade as Peter North. Gallo describes North as “one of the most virile babe-hunting studs in heterosexual America.”

One of the shortcomings of this book is that some of the digressions feel unnecessary and redundant, as Gallo jumps around from one character to another making it at times difficult to keep track of who's who. The result is that the vitality of the writing sputters to a mere trickle about half way in the book. On the other hand, I have to admit that we would rarely expect a drug dealer and porno film maker to be a great wordsmith, however, Gallo does surprise us.

Click Here To Purchase Breakshot: A Life in the 21st Century American Mafia