TOM folsom
Author
books
The Mad Ones
Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld
The Mad Ones chronicles the rise and fall of the Gallo brothers, a trio of reckless young gangsters whose revolution against New York City's Mafia was inspired by Crazy Joe Gallo's forays into Greenwich Village counterculture. Crazy Joe, Kid Blast, and Larry Gallo are steeped in legend, from Bob Dylan's eleven-minute ballad"Joey” to fictionalizations central to The Godfather trilogy and Jimmy Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight . Called the toughest gang in the city by the NYPD, the Gallos hailed from the rough Red Hook neighbourhood on the Brooklyn waterfront. As low-level Mafiosi, they were expected to serve their don quietly, but the brothers stood apart from typical gangsters with their hip style, fierce ambition, and Crazy Joe's manic idealism. Here, for the first time, is the complete story of the Gallos' war against the powerful Cosa Nostra, an epic crime saga that culminates in Crazy Joe's murder on the streets of Little Italy, where he was gunned down mid-bite into a forkful of spaghetti in 1972. The Mad Ones is a wildly satisfying entertainment and a significant work of cultural history.
hopper
A Savage American Journey
The chopper-riding hippie outlaw in Easy Rider. The prophetic madman in the jungle in Apocalypse Now. The terrifying psychopath in Blue Velvet. The kid gone wrong in Rebel Without a Cause. The actor taken under the wing of James Dean who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who revolutionized Hollywood. An enigmatic man from Dodge City, Kansas, on an endless quest to realize the American Dream.
Dennis Hopper built a career that was a half-century of rebellion waged at the edge of American popular culture.
Hopper is a wild ride through Dennis's many lives. Featuring interviews with Hopper's fellow actors, artists, musicians, and residents of Taos, New Mexico (where he spent much of his most manic time), as well as his ex-wives and many other people who knew him, Hopper takes you on an extraordinary - and sometimes troubling - journey. From Dennis's early days with his grandparents on a dusty farm in Kansas, where he watched trains go by on their way to Los Angeles, to his formative time in Hollywood as one of a bright new crop of actors straddling the edge of the studio system, to the rebellious 1960s and the start of the independent film movement, to the drug-addled 1970s and beyond, when Hopper staged one of the greatest Hollywood comebacks of all time - Tom Folsom has crafted a biography as unconventional as Dennis Hopper himself.
The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Heroin’s Telfon Don
From inside the Federal Witness Protection Program, the "Black Godfather" Nicky Barnes explains how he went from being a small-time hustler and heroin addict to the one gangster that the Feds cannot touch.