The Brass Wall: The Betrayal of Undercover Detective #4126 / Kocieniewski, David

The cover of David Kocieniewski’s The Brass Wall, featuring a shadowy figure walking down a dark urban street, is plenty stylish. But one wonders after reading the book if they should have gone ahead and constructed it out of actual celluloid instead of paper since the story it tells seems to have been ripped from a movie screen and placed on the pages of a fascinating true crime story. Detective Vincente Armanti (think a young Pacino or possibly Johnny Depp) is on a deep cover assignment in an area of the Bronx notorious for ties to organized crime and he’s trying to track down whoever set an arson fire that killed a highly regarded New York firefighter. Armanti, according to author and New York Times journalist Kocieniewski, is a highly regarded detective renowned for how seamlessly he infiltrates the world of his suspects and posing as Vinnie "Blue Eyes" Penisi, a Brooklyn hood looking to lay low, he befriends a gang of Mafioso who frequent Sebastian’s bar. All is going well until some loose conversation makes Armanti realize that someone within the NYPD has tipped off his suspects to the investigation, a particularly troublesome development given how enemies of these gentlemen often seem to end up in not one but several garbage bags. In time, that informant is revealed to be the son of one of the top commanders in the NYPD Internal Affairs, necessitating an effort by Armanti to not only save his own life but also root out high-level corruption. The day-to-day details and countless dangers of undercover work are explored in fascinating depth and passages where Armanti realizes he is very close to being killed are packed with suffocating dramatic tension. Since the story is true, there are a few cinematic clichés missing: Armanti loses the girl early and never gets her back and the climax is not a gun fight or a car chase but a satisfying public expose. But these details can be worked out once Martin Scorsese gets a hold of it. --John Moe
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