Michael Cannell's "Blood and the Badge"

Michael Cannell is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. His previous books are A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

Cannell has worked as a reporter for Time and an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications.

Cannell applied the “Page 99 Test” to Blood and the Badge and reported the following:

Page 99 of Blood and the Badge recalls a true story from the Brooklyn streets. On the late afternoon of September 3, 1987, a mid-level mafiosi named Frank Santora was walking down Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst, a quiet stretch of shops and well-kept homes, when a man crept up from behind and unholstered a .38 revolver. Santora was not the target. The shooter aimed instead at Santora’s friend, Carmine, a member of the Lucchese crime family. Carmine fell dead on the doorstep of the Bath Avenue Dry Cleaning and Tailor Shop. Meanwhile, Santora took two stray bullets in the torso. He dribbled a trail of blood as he stumbled to the doorway of a delicatessen, G & T Salumeria, but did not enter. Instead, he teetered and fell to the ground in an alley between deli and dry cleaner. He was pronounced dead thirty minutes later at Victory Memorial Hospital.

This lurid incident does not reflect the overall story of two decorated NYPD detectives who acted as double agents, and assassins, for the Mafia.

Santora’s accidental murder is, nonetheless, critical. It was Santora, after all, who connected his jailhouse friend, Burt Kaplan, an exalted drug dealer, with his cousin Louie, a corrupted cop, and his partner, Steve. Santora told Kaplan that Louie and Steve could do more than run license plate numbers or share sensitive information aboutwho the police surveilled and which Mafia soldiers had turned informant. The detectives would do anything, Santora said. Anything.

Visit Michael T. Cannell's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Limit.

The Page 99 Test: The Limit.

My Book, The Movie: Incendiary.

My Book, The Movie: A Brotherhood Betrayed.

Writers Read: Michael Cannell.

My Book, The Movie: Blood and the Badge.

--Marshal Zeringue