He came from the same streets as mob bosses John Gotti and Vito Genovese. Before Scarface, The Godfather or The Sopranos, there was Pulitzer Prize winner Jimmy Breslin, 'the city's steadiest and most accurate chronicler' (Tom Robbins, Village Voice).

In The Mafia Rat, Breslin shows us the people and places that defined the Mafia. Here are Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, Tony Cafe, 'Gaspipe' Casso and, woven throughout, the tale of Burt Kaplan, one of the most devastating turncoats of all time. Breslin's famous station was at the bar of Pep McGuire's alongside Jimmy Burke, who paid with Lufthansa robbery notes and was played by Robert De Niro in Goodfellas. Capturing the moments in which the Mafia was made and broken, Breslin combines the most recent, the most memorable and the long-forgotten stories into a sharp-eyed portrait of the Mob as it lived and breathed in its heyday and as it struggles to survive.