For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life
by Albert DeMeo

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Book Reviews of For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life

Book Review: A journey into one young man's Heart of Darkness
Summary: 5 Stars

The author Albert DeMeo pulls no punches as he chronicles not only his father's life, the Mobster Roy DeMeo and his steady rise to power in the Mafia in New York but also his own involvement from the tender age of five in a world that was seductively charming as it was dangerous. "For the Sins of my Father" is a brutal, candid, violent, tender portrayal of a life in a huge glass bubble in which escape is not an option for anyone.

However Albert DeMeo is not an apologist for his father's actions, rather he pulls the reader in a world in which corruption is at the heart of everything. Just as you can't feel sorry Roy DeMeo for the choices he made in his life you also cannot feel anything for the Police, the FBI, the Government, the Court system because they were often as corrupt as the people they claimed they were trying to bring to justice.

Albert's father knew many people and many considered themselves law abiding whilst at the same time asking and getting favours from the Mafia Capo who was their "neighbour" and "friend".

In one chapter the young Albert helps his father's "crew" to work out how wipe clean some audio tapes that could send one of their members to jail; magnets the child tells them men can wipe clean magnetic tapes of all their contents. It is a corrupt police officer who puts a magnet next to the audio tapes so that they will be blank when they are played in court.

It is also to Mafia owned drinking dens that many court officials, police officers and other city officials attend to drink, buy drugs and enjoy the company of Prostitutes.

Roy DeMeo's murder in the early 1980s is a brutal wake up call for the teenage Albert and hounded by both the Mafia who want his silence and the FBI wanting him to turn State's evidence, Albert somehow manages to salvage his life out of the wreckage of violence his father has left behind.

This is not a fairy tale, there is certainly no happy ending but Albert DeMeo is living proof that you can walk a way from organised crime and go on to live a legitimate life, all it takes is a lot of courage, the memory of how your father, a man you loved beyond all words, died in a hail of bullets, murdered by the very people who were supposed to be his friends and associates.

This book is very different from the gratuitous Best Seller "The Murder Machine" which demonises Albert's father; this is a book that puts a life into perspective, warts and all. Violence, car crime, prostitution, gambling, protection rackets, corrupt officials, loan sharking, pornography are put on display and it is left up to the reader to judge where the line between right and wrong lies.

There is no moving away from the fact that Roy DeMeo was a murderer, a Mafia Capo and a man with a criminal mind, but the world he worked in was a world providing services and commodities that people wanted and even the law was not above the stench of death, and corruption.

Read this book with an open mind and remember a father's love can transcend even the most vile of crimes....

Summary of For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life

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