The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 19

Arts Are Jack and Meg White the future of rock roll? WMM'i How did mobster Michael Gambino walk straight out of jail and into a million-dollar book and movie deal? Charles Laurence meets him sure beats hijacking Picture: STUART CONWAY cessful appeal He boasts really boasts of a career that has taken him from New York to Colombia Mexico and Russia but insists he has now slammed the door on his life of crime done my time like a he says I have walked away from the life in good And now he has the chance to escape his destiny He compares his situation with that of Diana Princess of Wales She too he says was destined for a life that would destroy her and she tried to defy it a most graceful the news came in about her death" he savs was in this big adult video and book store I owned in Vegas and you know in that place we all cried for her The books and the movies are giving Gambino a chance at the old Mob dream of business" He has never married but now he plans to settle down and propose to his girlfriend His mother Carol only person a son can go to and know he will not be judged is even starting work on her own book Life is good And that thought launches Gambino into another story One day he watched his father distribute his favour to an unemployed building worker a widower who could not afford to buy his children dessert in the restaurant where they ate their pasta He was out of work because he could not get a union card By the end of the meal the children had eaten all the dessert they could and the man had a note signed by Vito to a union official who would give him the necessary card The man is now a construction foreman and sends flowers to Vito's widow every year on the anniversary of the old Don's death learnt that I am the strong man and it is my duty to look after the says Gambino my plate is full I give to those whose plates are empty This is the way I learnt from Dad It is a religious thing: ou do bad things vou atone" tell you this from I my says fj Michael Gambino want to be known for JL-doing good That is what I want to do now I have been given a second chance and that is like a bless ing In these days of fake television gangsters and annabe tough guys Gambino is the real thing He is the grandson of Carlo Gambino the Mafia Godfather who ruled the Five Families of New York with Machiavellian cunning and an iron fist and who became the model for Mario Godfather novels and films He is the son of mob boss Vito Gambino and a wise guy in his own right His most recent rap sheet he says included suspicion of murder robbery use of a deadly weapon va know a bunch of bulls- A handsome 36-year-old Gambino was recently released after 12 years in one of America's toughest jails and is very happy to be here eating steak at Chez fabled bistro under the palms of Santa Pacific shore on a glorious summer afternoon The memory of the federal maximum security penitentiary in Marion Illinois where he was locked up alone in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day is still fresh in his mind Just down the aisle from cell was John Gotti the former head of the Gambino mob empire who is now7 dying of cancer and is not expected to taste freedom again Gambino loved Gotti wish him nothing but the best he is a good but his fate is a reminder of how such men often end their days It's the kind of destiny Gambino ants to escape His only hope is to get out now and he feels he has a chance for he is set to become the most remarkable mafioso cross-over yet in the long and delicate dance between kings of organised crime and the media machine that both glorifies and vilifies them He has written a book The Honoured Society and is being groomed for stardom by a coterie of top agents and movie studios On the very day that he walked free last December he had a meeting at the AMG talent agency in Hollywood At the suggestion of a group of showbusiness acquaintances who include Pierce Brosnan and Julian Lennon he had spent some time in his cell writing 20 pages of a script and within a few days of going straight he had signed a three-book million-dollar-plus deal The Honoured Society will be published in November and Gambino relishes the thought of a global book tour that is sure to make him a celebrity The trilogy is to be a fictionalised but true-to-life account of his years as a mobster starting with a coming-of-age memoir in which he learns the family trade at the knees of Grandpa Carlo and his mob-boss father Vito The movie rights have a big price for the life we lead the broads the money the suits But you pay the ultimate sacrifice with your freedom or your prostitutes and making serious money "People like me pay a big price for the life we are supposed to he says broads the money the suits and the high living But down the road you pay the ultimate sacrifice and that is with your freedom or your life If the Feds are not after you your friends ant to whack you called my book The Honoured Society because it is supposed to be about strong family loyalty and people you can trust But it is not how it looks It is about betrayal The only way to be the boss is to whack the So did this rising literary star ever get to whack anyone himself? Gambino puts down his fork wipes his mouth carefully with a napkin and looks at me over the top of his steelframed executive glasses He has deep brown eyes flecked with hazel and when he looks at you like this they are very expressive indeed But then the piercing gaze softens and he smiles have been accused of he says never been convicted" He has been lucky He served 12 years in Marion but that would have been a lifetime if the FBI had not on its racketeering charges and so let him slip through the net on a suc Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile 9 Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile Stile Michael remembers saying told me never to confess to anything! then Dad wanted to know why I denied Danny as there even though Father Lou saw him with his own eyes and I said: you told me never to rat on At that point all the wise guys rose from the card table and cheered they said done the greatest job raising this And with that says Gambino he was a paid-up member of the family and no one tried to keep the secrets of the trade from him ever again Vito Gambino whose notorious gang operated in Chicago New York and Detroit for years died of cancer 12 years ago a kid you think your bad and you just grow into the Michael says my Mom and Dad came from mobbed-up families and my life was inevitable I became a very aggressive young The nuns at his Catholic school would rap him on the knuckles with a ruler but that just gave him the opportunity to prove his mettle gotta show how7 big your balls he says a guy gets away with things but he has to live with them and they go to your soul My life makes me wanna By the time he was 17 Gambino was running seven illegal gambling dens and a string of even more Will PAY YOUR VAI 3 PAY SPKIAI Gambino: like me pay already been sold in an auction Gambino describes as being like "throwing popcorn in the water and seeing the guppy fish go for He chuckles beats hijacking he says I love this life being a writer like going to confession: it cleans my soul And Hollywood what a town the only place you can come to as a bad guy and say: I just got out from 12 years in the and they say to go! You got the It takes only a few minutes to understand why Hollywood has fallen in love with him In his bespoke pin-striped suit and Italian silk tie he looks as though he has come from a Beverly Hills casting agency he wears gold cufflinks a diamond-encrusted gold watch and his hair is gelled to perfection The Mercedes convertible in which he arrives was he boasts steal a friend of mine had financial trouble so I took it off But he has a knack for putting strangers at their ease and a natural talent as a story-teller Gambino cannot surely be a nice guy but he certainly has charisma me tell you a he says and he is off with another anecdote that is pure Hollywood gold dust Gambino was about seven years old and on his way home from school with his friend Danny when he decided he had to Delicious with polenta donkeys the dear gloomy Eeyores and sweet little chaps who tramp up and down Weston-super-Mare beach icecream melting into their manes as I am capable of being fond of any animal But I cannot understand the reasoning behind eating one animal and not another Why is it considered more cruel and this is the word that animal sentimentalists invariably use to kill a find out what would happen if he dropped a bowling ball from the fourth-storey fire escape on the tenement behind the old Catholic church So up they went and when they got to the top they rolled the heavy ball over the edge But just then Father Lou pulled up in his Cadillac and the ball crashed straight through the windshield Gales of laughter echo guy has to live with things My life makes me wanna through Chez and now old Jay himself seasoned host to such Hollywood wild guys as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson is joining us transfixed I almost killed a says Gambino then Father Lou gets me by the ear and drags me home and my dad is there playing cards with the Michael denied everything even when Father Lou threatened him with the flames of hell Only when he was gone and Vito had stripped off his belt did the boy start to talk donkey than it is to slaughter a cow a pig or a little baa-lamb? My lack of squeamishness is more than just misplaced machismo or greed Yes an element of curiosity but at the risk of sounding like the school-dinner lady who insisted you finish your sprouts it is hard to justify limiting yourself to a small group of animals and then only to certain prime cuts when there is so much hunger in the world My family come from a small village in Lombardy Although he was lucky enough never to be hungry as a child during the war this was largely due to luck and a healthy indifference to what he ate an attitude that I appear to have inherited As a consequence I have little patience with fads intolerances and snobbery In rural Italy there are three types of animal: those that are eaten those that work and pests These categories are not rigid: a cat that stops chasing mice is soon consigned to the pest bracket and pests can become food Squirrels were eaten when times were hard and my father once caught my recently 1700 256 MHz M8 be an ass give it a try So the North Korean leader eats donkey Angela Pertusini is licking her lips 6 STM7TE VAT deliver? £999 You We've reduced the price of this massive 256MB 1700MHz P4 package to just £999 VAT delivery What's more for the next 3 days well even pay your VAT and deliver it FREE saving you a further £224! 17GHI POWER PC 0 Intel Pentiums Processor 17GHz 0 256MB RAM Memory 0 60GB Hard Disk Storage 0 CD-Rw Re-WriterCD-Copier Drive (first 200 orders only) 0 DVD ROM Drive 0 32MB GeForce 2 MX 200 Graphics Card 0 17" SVGA Colour Screen (16" Visible optional) 0 All standard features inc: Microsoft Windows ME 30 Wavetable Sound stereo speakers 2 US8 ports 56K modem and supanet internet access Code: P4 00160 SPEED DEMON DDR Models With VAT Paid FREE Del) 256MB DOR as above but with 30 faster Athlon 1400 00R processor 256MB DOR memory 4 USB ports and SoundBlaster 128 £1099 512MB DOR with 64MB GeForce 2 graphics card and TV-out 1198 SPUD DEMON Digital Photo Packages includes Epson 480 printer 1200dpi scanner and 3 in 1 digital camera £169 extra Codes: 256 DOR 00092 512 DDR 00161 256 DDR package 00094 512 ODR package 00162 Sales Hotline Call the Sales Hofline NOW! to order your new PC direct Sales Hotline open: 830am 700pm Monday to Friday 900am 500pm Saturday 1000am 400pm Sunday Pay Just No VAT FREE delivery if you order by 5pm Saturday widowed grandfather preparing hedgehog a creature that challenged the tolerant range of even the Pertusini palate you tell me what I can Nonno allegedly cried your gone going to do what I Nor would an Italian understand the culinary synonyms that English-speakers use to disguise their meat-eating: pork is maiale (pig) veal is vitello (calf) and donkey is unsqueamishly referred to as asino and is eaten widely in Piedmont So I am proud to have eaten worms snake and duck embryo (Vietnam) beetles (Cambodia) rotten fish pickled in petrol what it tasted like Sweden) reindeer (Norway) dog (Vietnam again) testicles (Italy where waste is a sin) lizard (Guatemala) and curried chicken tripe with raw onions (Bolivia actually that was a mistake) I deplore the fussiness and hypocrisy of many of my compatriots and can conclude only that if everyone were like me the world would be a much better and less hungry place Tom Kemp is away No one could accuse me of being a picky eater If there is food on offer I will consume it rarely-managing a moment of polite hesitation and usually coming back for seconds I eat democratically trying everything that is put before me and enjoying the vast majority of it So the news that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-11 has a passion for dishes featuring donkey produced few of the squeals and retching noises from me that it elicited from colleagues For the taste of as the Dear Leader has coyly termed the meat is still fresh on my lips having eaten my first cut just two weeks ago while holidaying at my family home in northern Italy And unlike the stricken Korean official who first revealed details of menu I can inform the world that donkey tastes much like a sweeter bloodier version of veal and is absolutely delicious braised and served with a nice wedge of polenta And why not eat donkey (baby donkey actually since anything older than two or three years is hopelessly tough and stringy)? 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