A Wiseguy’s New Racket

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

Talk about struggling for freedom. Louis Ferrante has been there.

At Passover, he thinks about his “trip through the iron furnace,” his 81/2 years in prison, where he served time for armed robbery, credit card fraud and racketeering. This week marks Ferrante’s fifth Passover “on this side of the wall.” He has been celebrating Passover since 1998, when he began the process of converting to Judaism, while behind bars.

“Unlocked: My Journey from Prison to Proust” (HarperCollins) is Ferrante’s memoir of his years on the street as part of the Gambino crime family, the investigations into his crimes, and his years in prison, where he became a voracious reader of Tolstoy and Cervantes as well as Jewish history and Torah. “Unlocked” has been

optioned for a feature film by Lorraine Bracco (who played the therapist in “The Sopranos”).

When asked in an interview with The Jewish Week about what freedom means to him, he replies, “Had I not gone to prison and experienced all that I had, I may have lived out my life in ignorance, a set of light chains. Freedom exists in the mind; I felt more freedom while cramped in a cell than most people will experience in their entire lives.”

As he explains, reading set him free. When his books were taken away by prison guards, he’d turn to writing.

“They couldn’t take away what I had up here,” he adds, pointing to his head of dark short-cropped hair.

The Jewish Week met with Ferrante last week in a Manhattan café, while he was visiting from the new home he shares with his girlfriend in the Catskills. He paid for coffee with his credit card, and then joked that he used to carry only cash and isn’t used to having credit cards in his pocket.

“At least not my own,” he quipped.

Ferrante is candid, articulate, energetic and warm — a very likeable fellow with a lot to say. He enjoys talking about his theology. That he is a lover of books is clear from the way he speaks of them, and quotes from them with ease.

“He has a rough exterior, but you can sit down and talk about philosophy, literature, poetry, and anything in Judaism,” says Rabbi Arthur Rulnick, who formally converted Ferrante to Judaism after he was released from prison. The two men have remained in close contact. In a telephone conversation from his home in Baltimore, Rabbi Rulnick, who retired from the Woodbury Jewish Center on Long Island, explains that he’d heard of jailhouse conversions and never took them seriously. But that changed when he encountered Ferrante. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a layperson who knows as much about Jewish history and the Bible as he does.”

Now 38, Ferrante grew up in an Italian Catholic family in Flushing, Queens, with crosses on the walls, statues of saints and his own rosary beads, but no books — his father read the racing forms, his mother read magazines she picked out of the trash in front of a doctor’s office and he cheated his way through school without ever reading. The family didn’t go to church much. He speaks lovingly of his late mother, who was very open-minded and taught him to be the same way.

He took care of his mother when she was suffering from cancer, and she died in his arms. That was when he gave up on God, and that’s when he dates the time he “went astray.” He saw people doing bad things and driving big cars and living in large homes, saw good folks driving buses and living simply, and he chose the former route.

Speaking for his friends, he writes, “The streets, the whole mob thing, gave us a sense of honor and camaraderie we needed. An 18-year-old in the Midwest, searching for these same feelings, might join the Army or Marines. In our neighborhood, we threw in with the Mafia.”

On the streets, Ferrante had a good name among fellow wiseguys. And when he was arrested, he wouldn’t rat on friends and associates in the Gambino family. He was sentenced to serve in various maximum-security prisons, living among men serving life sentences who had nothing to lose. There, he faced uprisings, sexual threats, and killings.
Once, when he took the rap for someone else’s breaking prison rules, Ferrante was thrown into solitary confinement. After a captain called him an animal, he began to think for the first time about whether those words were true, and what made him that way.
With plenty of time on his hands, he started contemplating the existence of God, and began reading — he thought that books might have answers to his questions. He read the Gospels, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Torah, and felt powerfully drawn to Judaism. He approached the prison rabbi who at first thought Ferrante was interested only in the bagels, but then understood his seriousness, and then would look for Ferrante when he didn’t show up in synagogue.

“Prison is designed to break the individual. It outright destroyed me, the old me. I was building someone better,” he writes.

When Ferrante, who began wearing a kipa in jail, started to feel that there was a Creator, he believed that some higher power was punishing him for bad things he had done. And he was grateful that he hadn’t been killed or given a life sentence, and that instead he had been given tools to improve himself.

“I was totally alone,” he says. “There was nobody to talk to. The guy next to me was talking about who he whacked. But that was the key. Had I had outside influence, it may have been detrimental to my belief system developing. I was a rebellious guy. I had nobody telling me what to believe.”

He kept reading. Bibliographies lead to book lists, and he’d ask his family and friends to send certain titles. He read Maimonides and Rashi and Torah commentaries from many perspectives. His eyes were opened by William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and Max Dimont’s “Jews, God and History.”

And he discovered that he loved to write. He began a novel set in the antebellum South. His ambition to write was fueled by the “same cockiness I had running a crew at 19 or 20 and thinking I could rob an armored car and get away with it.”

When released from prison, he was determined to publish the 1,100-page novel. But friends encouraged him to write a memoir. He wasn’t interested in revisiting his mob days, but agreed to write a sample chapter as his parole period was ending. Soon he had a literary agent and book contract.

Ferrante, who’d had many girlfriends in his old life, also was interested in romance, and was hoping to meet a Jewish woman. But he found it difficult to find someone who wasn’t going to judge him based on his past. While in a pizzeria with a friend, he struck up a conversation with a young woman. She told him she was a librarian and she was reading Ovid’s “History of Rome,” which he had also read. He told her he was an aspiring writer.

She has since converted to Judaism, a decision she made on her own, he says. They keep a kosher home and observe the Sabbath and holidays.

When he was writing the memoir, they’d drive together to scenes of crimes he committed, like a corner in Queens where he hijacked a truck, and he’d recall as much as he could. They also visited Lewisburg prison and sat outside the walls.

“I was astounded by what I remembered,” he says. “I was scared of myself — the person I am now got more nervous thinking about what I did than I got when I was doing it.”
Ferrante still hopes to publish the novel, and to write others. He has been writing his own Torah commentary since his prison days, and hopes to publish that, citing Onkelos, a well-known commentator during Talmudic times, who converted to Judaism.

The author dons tefillin every day. He doesn’t attend synagogue, as none are walking distance from his home. He thinks he might enjoy living in a Jewish community someday, but he also likes — and is used to — solitude.

“Unlocked” is very well written, at turns disturbing, funny and astonishing. Ferrante’s story not only resonates with Passover’s themes of freedom, but its example of resilience, its vivid reminder that change is truly possible and its emphasis on the power of words, make this a fine book for the Days of Awe as well.
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Louis Ferrante will be speaking on Tuesday, June 30th on the Upper West Side, as The Jewish Week Literary Summer series kicks off its first event of the summer. He will be joined by Ernest Adams for Uncommon Conversions: How an Italian-Catholic mobster from Queens and an African-American atheist from Harlem found their way to Orthodox Judaism. Program moderated by Sandee Brawarsky, Book Critic for The Jewish Week. 7pm at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, 7 W. 83d Street. Free, including reception, but reservations suggested: events@jewishweek.org