Joey Author:Donald Goddard From the riveting self-portrait on the jacket (painted in prison by gang leader Joey Gallo) to the last words of the last page (written by Joey's ten year-old stepdaughter after his murder by rival Mafiosi), this is a life story of electric intimacy. It is also the love story of two strong-willed, intelligent and wildly anarchic people-two high... more » octane temperaments-whose passion for one another was inextinguishable and ruinous, a frenzy born of mutual need, mutual delight and mutual destructiveness. Compared with Joey and Jeffie Gallo, Antony and Cleopatra stand as models of stodgy domesticity.
From Jeffie Gallo's blazingly detailed recollections of their twelve-year relationship, from extensive interviews with Joey's intimates and with the police who monitored Gallo headquarters on Brooklyn's President Street, from teh psychiatrist who visited Joey in Attica, from the testimony of fellow prisoners and correction officials and from conversations with Joey himself, Donald Goddard's nonstop narrative reveals the fantastic incongruities, the brilliance and ruthlessness and incredible stamina that won Joey his brief term as a power in the criminal world and continued to function even during his long decline and fall. In his own eyes, Joey never ceased to be the Nietzschean superman, above the laws to which other men are subject, in command of his destiny...and, not least, of his death. The driving energy which sustained that belief-and affected everyone Joey ever met-informs each page of this extraordinary book.« less