GHOST

Marra’s memoir tells of his complicated life as a man associated with the Mafia and a covert operative trying to get drugs off of New York City’s streets.

The author reveals that he was once known as Luca “Doc” Gunn, a member of the Gambino crime family, and (incorrectly) considered a “made man.” But during the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was also an intel agent who once trained at “the Farm,” the CIA’s training facility in Virginia. No one in the family knew that he was a law enforcement operative except for an uncle. His primary goal was to gather information on heroin dealers, but he zeroed in on corrupt Drug Enforcement Agency operatives and beat cops who regularly accepted payoffs from pushers in various New York neighborhoods. But he still had responsibilities in the Gambino family; in one instance, the author hoped to find a nonlethal way to intercept “the Mortician,” a killer who was targeting members of the family in misguided revenge. The author’s ties to the government and the mob, as well as to the clergy, made him feel perpetually conflicted. Indeed, he calls himself a “ghost,” essentially meaning that his true self and motivations always had to remain hidden and that no one really knew him. Fortunately, he had the love of a longtime girlfriend, Tracy Capoletti, to sustain him, but as years passed, he experienced tragedies and became further entangled in his dual existence. He ultimately befriended a whip-smart woman who later became a federal agent; her dangerous work pitted them against the East Harlem Purple Gang and Soviet agents.

Marra’s account moves at a generally brisk pace. It starts off with a bang—two, actually—with an account of someone shooting the author twice in an alley. The story moves through several historical events, mostly related to the Mafia. For example, the author witnessed the start of a mob war stemming from the 1972 killing of mobster Joey Gallo (“The streets are going to run red with blood,” Gallo’s sister famously promised). The book’s timeline, however, isn’t always easy to follow. In a scene after the Gallo murder, for instance, the author tells of taking his girlfriend to meet Jimi Hendrix—although the musician died in 1970. The narrative, however, is mostly linear and becomes decidedly more focused in the latter half, when the author was eyeing an exit from a world laden with “spy shit.” Readers should anticipate a dour tale with sporadic bursts of violence, and the author’s interactions with Black gangsters included threats and racial slurs. But overall, the author wished for peace—a strange dichotomy that Marra fully acknowledges; he relates how his nobler side surfaced when he would come to the aid of someone in peril. The author’s unadorned prose is succinct and comprehensible though occasionally repetitive; for example, he overuses the metaphor of his mind being a gerbil on an exercise wheel, which can be confusing; once, as the author gathered his thoughts, he “threw the gerbil off the wheel and tried to slow down.”

An often engrossing and edgy story of a man with conflicting loyalties.