Capeci was in Hong Kong recently, on holiday with his wife, Barbara, and daughter, Jenna, and was persuaded by the University of Hong Kong to give a seminar entitled 'Gangsters, Crimebusters and the Godfather'. He spoke grippingly about the Mafia but it was apparent that all the journalists who had turned up wanted to know real stuff about triads. This is not Capeci's field of expertise, as he remarked several times, but nonetheless, everyone was hopeful he might be privy to vital information about dire deeds on this side of the world. Searching questions on this topic were asked at regular intervals.
He visibly became more and more politely baffled with each query. I had a feeling there was a mild degree of competitiveness, a sort of scandal-mongering turf war, going on ('You think the Gambino family's bad? Jeez, you should see the 14K!'). When we sat down for a cup of coffee afterwards and I asked him if he'd ever heard of Big Spender, he said, 'Er, well, I know what a big spender is ...' whereupon one of the people from Hong Kong University, sitting nearby, cried, 'Those ransoms were two billion dollars! They should be in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest ever!' 'That is impressive,' conceded Capeci with a grin.
I'm sorry to say that he's a lovely man. I'd been rather hoping to encounter a sleazeball, freshly coughed up from the gutter, but he was shruggingly modest about what he does and how he deals with it. 'I'm a reporter,' he kept saying. 'You, or a million other reporters, could do what I do. It's no big deal.' But what about the contamination of evil, the angst, the shifting of his moral compass? Capeci sat back in his chair, lifted his eyebrows and thought (I'm sure) 'Who is this crazy broad?' But what he said was, 'Whoa, that's heavy stuff. Let me see ... You try not to be cynical, you try to be sceptical. I view all my stories with scepticism.' Learning not to believe what he sees probably sprang from his early days as a reporter back in the 1960s. On his first feature for the New York Post, he was sent out with the photographer known as Weegee - now dead and a collectible legend - to run a heart-breaking Christmas story on a South Bronx family with no heating. 'But there's a heatwave, it's, like, 60 degrees, and for photo purposes we needed a picture of the cold. So he's got the water boiling on the stove, everyone's standing over it warming their hands, in their jackets. He was great.' Capeci added, with professional self-consciousness, 'If that story doesn't fit into your thing, then just leave it out.' I said not to worry; I liked the fact that his first feature revolved around heat because that, in its street form (firearms, police, mayhem), was the direction his professional life was heading. His big break came in 1976. 'Carlo Gambino passed away, he was the boss of the family that Gotti eventually took over, and I was assigned to cover his funeral. There were these big guys with big necks at the back of the church, but I was raised a Catholic and knew about churches, so I went in the side door.' He interviewed the priest, stayed for the Mass, strolled out into the cameras of the assembled media and, 'Lo and behold, I became a Mafia expert.' Naturally, some of the other hacks accused him of dubious access: 'They said, 'Come on, Jerry, you're an Italian-American from Brooklyn, you must have an in' and I realised that I was being stereotyped in the same way my grandfather had been, 70 years previously, when he'd arrived in the United States.' Perhaps this has made him, if not exactly reckless, then peculiarly determined. When he was writing Mob Star with Gene Mustain, in 1988, he heard taped conversations with references to a gang of killers so psychotic that John Gotti was afraid to go after them. Murder Machine is about that gang. 'This is the book we like best, it's the true story of how bad gangsters can be. They were five serial killers. Two of them were killed by their own crew, three are in prison.' What about threats? 'I'm still alive, I haven't been threatened to any real serious extent. I've had a couple of shouting matches with Gene Gotti [John's brother], he was pretty upset about the book. In the United States, thank goodness, the Mafia has a rule they haven't violated yet of not going after law enforcers and reporters because of the heat.' (At the seminar, Capeci remarked, 'I'm curious to hear if journalists in Hong Kong have had threatening phone calls from triads.' A short pause ensued, and that was that.) He says his greatest professional satisfaction comes from his Web site which he created during a one-year fellowship at Stanford University in 1996. The way he speaks about it - 100,000 hits a month, 'I'm my own boss, it really does it for me' - is spookily in keeping with the subject matter, which revolves around such individuals as Carmine 'Junior' Persico, Salvatore 'Sammy Bull' Gravano and even (because Capeci does write occasionally on Chinese wiseguys) Johnny 'Onionhead' Eng, dai lo dai or capo di capi of the Flying Dragons. Indeed, one of his news reports contains an explanation from an assistant US attorney after a Chinese Mafia-style execution - 'Wing Yeung Chan believed that Peter Eng Wong was a snitch' - which is a perfect cross-cultural quote.
Capeci, who doesn't approve of the film The Godfather because it romanticises killers, has just refused a Web site ad for an offshore gambling operation. He also turned down an ad from a chap making a Monopoly-type board game based on the Mafia ('At the end of the game, you take over the family and become the boss and I didn't think that was appropriate'). He's so scrupulous about what he does that he says he'll never write a novel: 'I don't have the imagination. I'm fact-intensive, I don't have the ability to make stuff up.' I tried one last psychological prod (does he sleep at night?) but he laughed and said: 'It's not dramatic. I'm sorry. It isn't.'
