BULL SESSION?

By BRUCE HANDY

It is beyond the scope of this reviewer's expertise to adjudicate the accuracy of events as related by the title figure to author Peter Maas in Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia (HarperCollins; 308 pages; $25). Like most people when you get right down to it, our protagonist--the most famous snitch in Mob history, the man whose testimony helped put "Teflon Don" John Gotti behind bars for good--sees himself as a voice of reason in a world of blowhards and sociopaths. A contract on his brother-in-law, which Gravano himself doesn't carry out but which good manners force him to sign off on, prompts this reflection: "The bottom line is that I let it happen. That makes me just as guilty. [But] I didn't know his body would be chopped up afterwards. That's not me." Hey--I believe him.

Like Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can't get enough of, Al Pacino or no Al Pacino. Both Gravano and Maas (author previously of The Valachi Papers) claim Gravano will get no money from this de facto memoir. But why a man who recently left the federal witness-protection program would want to draw such attention to himself is a mystery. Maybe, given his gift for aphorism, he's thinking about going out on the corporate lecture circuit. "There's enough people to shoot in the head without looking for it all the time," he tells Maas--words any manager could live by. Amen, I guess.

--By Bruce Handy