I want to send the biggest shout out imaginable to my friend Tom Bauerle, who managed to turn my "Mob Boss: A Biography in Blood" into a bestseller here one day last week.
Bauerle was kind enough to ask me on after I sent him a copy of the book. Like me, he's a mob buff from way back, and knows what he's talking about when it comes to the history of the syndicate in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or the city controlled directly by the Five Families of New York.
Like a lot of people here, he found it odd that, while the Buffalo Arm was mentioned tangentially in any number of other books, no single work dedicated to it had been written. Most of what most people here know about it are stories passed down by families, or told in bars and coffee shops by aging wiseguys and lawmen.
I thought I'd be on for 10 or 15 minutes at most. That can be a long time when you're on the radio. But one segment passed and then another. We were having such a great time that it seemed to fly by, and once we started taking calls, the listeners did the rest. The show went off the air at noon, and by then I'd been on for three hours.
My cell phone started ringing as soon as I got in the car. Amazon wanted more books. So did Barnes & Noble. Mike DiCamillo at the great DiCamillo bakery called and then called again. I'd left 20 there a week or so earlier, and they sold out while the Bauerle show was still on the air. In a little more than 24 hours, we'd sold or placed on consignment upwards of 500 copies, a phenomenon I'm now calling the "Bauerle Bump."
The good folks at WBEN thought the show went pretty well, and rebroadcast the whole for three hours on Sunday night.
And to top it off, I'll be appearing with Bauerle and signing books this Friday, Dec. 5, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., as part of a radiothon to raise money for the Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals at the Northtowns Animal Shelter, 205 Ensminger Road in Tonawanda.
I'll donate 50 percent of the proceeds from sales of the book that day to our furry friends here on the Niagara Frontier, so come on down. It'll be fun, it's for a good cause, and nothing says "Merry Christmas" like a book full of photos of bullet-riddled bodies!
Which brings me to my next topic, Cleveland's wonderful Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
I was there the week before I went on Bauerle, and I had a blast. They were interested in another book, my "Diary of a Punk," and I read sections of it and answered questions about my days as a rock and roller in front of an audience inside an excellent little theater they have there.
The audience was what threw me. I knew maybe 15 or 20 of the people, but the other 120 or so were strangers to me. Some had read the book, some more I'd imagine heard the music we recorded back then, but most, it seemed, braved a snowy Wednesday night in Cleveland out of curiosity and an interest in popular culture.
I was interviewed by Jason Hanley, director of the museum's educational department, who has an abiding professional interest in all things rock and roll and is something of an expert on the late '70s cultural phenomenon known as punk rock.
Between 1977 and 1996, I managed to churn out 16 albums worth of the stuff, so -- with the television cameras rolling -- we had quite a bit of ground to cover. Turned out Jason's wife's family is from Lockport, which made me think once again about how small this world really is.
They put us up in what I consider to be the nicest hotel in Cleveland, the Hyatt Regency at the Arcade on Superior Avenue across the street from the library. The hotel bar and restaurant are first class, the staff is courteous and helpful, and the rooms are big and well-kept, with those on the north side affording a great view of the library complex below. I spent a lot of time in that library when I was a kid.
The Rock Hall itself is a beautiful edifice, designed by the brilliant architect I.M. Pei and located right on the Lake Erie shoreline, next to the stadium they built for the Browns to play in. It's also nearly adjacent to the Great Lakes Science Center, a wonderful museum in its own right, and is just down East Ninth Street from Progressive Field, where the Indians play baseball, and the Quicken Arena, home of the Cavaliers.
There are plenty of great restaurants and nightspots nearby, and you could easily spend a week seeing the sights along East Ninth without having to get your car out of the hotel garage.
So this week, mille grazie to Tom Bauerle, Jason Hanley, and all the great folks at WBEN-930 AM and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum for making the past couple of weeks some of the most memorable of my life.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 2 2008 |