They're not goodfellas.

For the Sins of My Father A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life Albert DeMeo (with Mary Jane Ross) Broadway Books, $24.95, 275 pp.

A prominent character in the folklore of my childhood was Frank Zito, a local Mafia chieftain who had been arrested at the infamous Cosa Nostra conference at Apalachin, New York, in 1957. His career was an open secret in Springfield, Illinois. Many in the Catholic ghetto knew that he had done time in Leavenworth long ago for bootlegging, and his name occasionally came up in discussions of unsolved murders. One of his conspicuous local competitors, an anomalously wealthy pinball machine operator, disappeared in the late 1950s. A few years later, when the apposite skull, complete with identifiable dental work, was dragged in from an area cornfield by an energetic dog, many glances were discreetly cast in Zito's direction. A Chicago newspaper columnist had written that Zito was the most powerful underworld figure in Illinois "outside of Chicago." There may even have been a hint of downstate pride in our willingness to include him in the capital city's informal Who's Who. Nevertheless, Zito was a congenial neighbor and anything but a braggart. When compelled to testify before a Senate investigative committee, he politely invoked the Fifth Amendment using more words than most of his neighbors had ever heard him speak. "You hafta excuse me," he told the senators. "I don't mean I don't wanna said it. I can't said it right."

A mild-mannered man who bore a disconcerting resemblance to Pope John XXIII, Zito was also a member of our parish, and his wife was a regular customer of a religious goods and bookstore in which my father and uncle were partners. Another of my uncles, a priest who had studied in Rome and was fluent in Italian, was an acquaintance of his, and he was on my brother's newspaper route. I remember seeing Mrs. Zito praying in the back pews of our church on Sunday afternoons when I served as an acolyte at benediction. I never saw her husband receive Communion, but I often (guiltily) wondered if he ever did, and whether he ever went to confession and what Jesus thought about it all.

This, of course, is familiar terrain to Sopranos fans--the juxtaposition of cozy domesticity and rapacious economics; the savagery of gang warfare impinging upon the security of parochial concord. The perplexing drama to which these tensions give rise has always been an alluring one.

Much, perhaps most, of the allure is simply the titillation of violence. "Connected" guys (at least as they are popularly imagined) embody, revere, and adhere to an exotic set of Mediterranean rules. They are Italian-American rogues who bring a reprieve from suburban tedium, and their unabashed readiness to make threats, break legs, and slit throats exposes what might be fatuous, hypocritical, and--let's just say it--effeminate in the more customary, white-bread ways of making do. They stimulate macho geezers like Donald Rumsfeld, who derives and excites mild thrills in his Pentagon news conferences by using such taboo verbs as "kill," and they inspire postadolescent policy wonks, some of them not yet entirely free of acne, to speak confidently of "taking out" Saddam Hussein. They are indispensable stereotypes of American culture, like cowboys, rock stars, and television anchormen.

To enjoy the picaresque, as most people--certainly most Americans--do, is one thing. To idolize the picaresque, as most connected guys--certainly guys like Roy DeMeo--do, is quite another. His son's reminiscence brings the psalmist's admonition into harrowingly sharp relief. They do indeed multiply their sorrows who court other gods. Roy DeMeo, a Gambino family lieutenant, knew very well which gods he courted. Albert recalls one of his father's rare visits to church during which he refused to receive Communion with the rest of the family. When Albert's sister, Lisa, asked her father why, his "face darkened as he said matter of factly, 'Because I'm not a hypocrite. I know who I am and I know where I'm going in the end.'"

Roy DeMeo certainly knew who he was: Professionally, he was a loan shark, a car thief, a porn merchant, and a hit man. He also knew, or had a rough idea, where he was going: penultimately at least, he was going into the trunk of his maroon Cadillac, abandoned on a Brooklyn side street and discovered, along with his bullet-riddled corpse, on his son's seventeenth birthday.

This was a burdensome self-knowledge, and it was accompanied by a corrosive loneliness that debilitated the prosperous suburban family DeMeo raised and coddled. "Bad guys are not bad guys twenty-four hours a day," Albert observes, and for twenty-three of those hours, Roy DeMeo was as splendid a patriarch as ever delighted a family. Yet his staunch refusal to be a hypocrite brutally truncated his son's childhood as Albert was set to work at an early age, building and maintaining the walls of deceit and denial that separated an idyllic home life from the human carnage that subsidized it. When it came to "compartmentalization," the DeMeos made the Clintons look like amateurs.

The compartments began to leak when Albert was thirteen. In the wake of a disastrous deal with the Colombian Mafia, his father averted the cartel's reprisal and the Gambino family's wrath by murdering the principal dealmaker, a close friend of the DeMeos. The entire household was infused with palpable guilt. As father and son silently watched the report on the evening television news, Albert's childhood ended. "At thirteen," he remembers, "I knew my father was already dead." This is not, as the Godfather movies are, a romance about modern Americans enacting arcane Sicilian duels, nor, as The Sopranos is, a numinous gothic soap opera of suburban morals. It is a report on toxic sentimentality, mauled paternity, and heartbroken adolescence. It is a sobering description of the sacrifice--in flesh, bone, blood, and tears--required by the pitiless demon of aspiring to be one of the "Goodfellas."

Invisible murder reverberates through Albert DeMeo's autobiography like the echo of distant screams. This is hardly surprising, as little more is agreed about the number of murders his father committed than that it is in the three figures. Albert spent the years between his thirteenth and seventeenth birthdays worrying that each of his father's departures from home would be the last. The son's remarkable ability to retrieve what is admirable about that father from all the much more obvious mayhem and wreckage is a poignant and quietly triumphant feature of the story: He wanna said it, and he said it right. God bless him for that.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault.