Prince of the City

I KEEP SAYING THIS; but I've found a really good book to read:-- Prince of the City by Robert Daley. It's a rivetting expose of organized crime and dishonest cops in 1960s/1970s New York City. Bob Leuci (is this prounounced "Loo-chi"? Surely? He's an Italian American who hobnobs undercover with the godchildren of the stinking underwurlde. Otherwise it'd be "Lucy" which sounds silly for a butch New York cop.) Anyway, what was I saying? Bob Leuci our stolid hero goes "busting" folks' "asses" all over the Narcotics Division and the City. At one most memorable point, taped up with a bodyhugging one-amp "wire" for an evening's hobnobbing with pockmarked broken-nosed gunpacking retired "enforcers" with a soft spot for their two year old neice and a heart of gold who would shoot you dead as readily as they'd pee all over you if you were on fire, his profuse sweating shortcircuits the covert device's batterypack. Imagine a zippo lighter taped to your bulging belly with winds and winds of surgical tape. Taped on so fast that to all intents and purposes, unless clothing is removed, this taped-on appendage feels like nothing more than an extra roll of pasta-yamming flesh. So short-circuiting, the metal box begins to heat. And overheat. And to burn. And sitting through a mafia meal as everyone orders extra drinks and dillydallyingly grazes on more and more courses of desert, after dinner mints and so on. The toilets are no help. There's no way of stopping the door and the lavatory stalls have no door let alone a bolt. If this cop is discovered fiddling with a wire in here he is dead. So there's no choice but to go on wearing this tightly bound on device as it sears into his flesh. The maf boss even stops the car later complaining of the bad smell in here, pulls over and has everyone check his shoes under the sidelight as it smells like somebody's stepped in something ... Pouring with sweat by now and shaking everyone asks what's wrong. It's an hour and a half until he gets to shoot into a (locking) toilet stall and tear the thing off that has literally burnt the full thickness of his skin off. No wonder he hurt! This is the most memorable story from the book. I wonder does anyone else know it? It came out in 1978 and was subsequently made into a film in which John Travolta starred ...

I've gotta go, Coronation Street's on ...