The Pope of Brooklyn

Joseph Di Prisco’s latest memoir brings back to life the hustler, gambler, criminal, bookmaker, and confidential informer who was his father. On the street they called him Pope, and he made his bones in Brooklyn during the ’50s and ’60s. Di Prisco discovered by accident fifty-year-old transcripts of New York State Appellate Division trials, where his dad was the star witness against corrupt NYPD cops—cops with whom he collaborated. Suddenly, Pope’s hazardous, veiled, twisting past was illuminated. This new book is both sequel and prequel to his much-praised memoir, Subway to California, and enlightened by these disclosures, Di Prisco memorably traces how secrets once revealed led to even deeper mysteries. In The Pope of Brooklyn he grapples with unsettling truths that simultaneously bind and separate father and son.