978-1-942762-42-3
Pub Date: Summer 2017
Author: Steve Villano
During a span of seven years, from 1985-1992, when Steve Villano worked in the press office of Mario Cuomo, Villano’s brother Michael was also at the peak of his association with John Gotti. Within days of each other in December, 1985, Gotti became the head of the Gambino Crime Family, following the murder of Paul Castellano—and Cuomo became favorite leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States. In Tightrope, Villano shares the wrenching conflict between his family’s ties to organized crime, and his own values and professional integrity.
“Steve Villano paints a complex, intimate portrait of two worlds: the political one surrounding New York Governor Mario Cuomo in the 1980s; and the criminal one of Big Apple mobsters. His telling of these stories, intertwined through the presence of these two worlds of Steve and his brother—Steve a staffer for the governor, and his brother a reputed bagman for John Gotti—is both brave and jarring. Can one hate a person’s choices and still love them? In his descriptions of his relationship with his brother, Steve argues powerfully that one can. The result is a narrative rich both in emotional detail and in the historical nuances of a very particular moment in New York life.”
—Sasha Abramsky, author of Inside Obama’s Brain and The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
“Steve Villano’s book is a frank and unvarnished account of the long struggle in his New York Italian-American family between him and his brother over the lives they chose to lead. Steve took an upward path in his career becoming an impeccable civil servant working for one of America’s most distinguished Italian-American governors, Mario Cuomo. His brother took an opposite path in life toiling for the most venal Italian-American mobster of his generation, John Gotti. How Villano dealt with these opposing forces of light and darkness, abhorring his brother’s choice but still feeling love for him, hiding the truth from friends, sticking to the right track but coming to terms with an unalterable nightmare, and finally settling on a fraught decision to reveal his family’s fate, is a gripping tale. This is like a Hollywood story but it is all true.”
—Stephen Schlesinger, co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (with Stephen Kinzer)
“Steve Villano’s Tightrope is a richly insightful, deeply moving account of love, loyalty and family lived out in the complex intersection of organized crime and big-league politics. A true story told with all the narrative power of gripping fiction, there’s not a false word in these pages. Villano writes like an angel as he wrestles with the devil. Tightrope is a triumph.”
—Peter Quinn, author of The Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York
“Rich and insightful, Tightrope probes the mysteries of family, the divergent paths of children, the consequences of their choices and the blood bond that holds them together against the odds and possibly against all common sense. Steve Villano’s moral and emotional struggle will take your breath away…Tightrope is a book about the Italian-American experience that is also about any immigrant family’s journey…”
—Chiara Coletti, former New York Newsday/Newsday Vice President of Public Affairs
Steve Villano, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is the former head of Governor Mario M. Cuomo’s New York City Press Office, with decades of experience in public service, public education, public health, and as CEO of several national, non-profit organizations. As a key member of Cuomo’s staff during two Presidential boomlets, Villano wrote Op-Ed pieces and worked on speeches that ranged from the First Amendment, to immigration, race relations, affordable housing, higher education, nuclear power, the environment, and ethnic stereotyping.His writing has appeared in mass circulation newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, Newsday, The Albany Times Union, The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the Suffolk Sun, the Napa Valley (CA.) Register Newspaper Group, the North Shore (Long Island) Newspaper Group, Working Mother Magazine, Multichannel News, Cable Fax Daily, The Jewish World, Associations Now Magazine, and Today’s Education. Villano has published professional articles in the Federal Communications Law Journal, Free Speech (the Commission of Freedom of Speech, Speech Communication Association of America), and in Contexts: A Forum for the Medical Humanities (Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society). His essays have been published on-line on www.thenationalmemo.com, with a subscription circulation of 300,000; on Medium.com; and on his blog, Radical Correspondence (www.socialvisionproductions.com).
Villano has authored major pieces on ethnic stereotyping in Ambassador Magazine, (the National Italian American Foundation’s 100,000 circulation magazine) about actors Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, and the HBO series The Sopranos.A labor journalist for the National Education Association for a decade, Villano has written about censorship, the rise of the Far Right in America and about sweatshop conditions at cap and gown factories in New York. He developed a national Holocaust curriculum for classroom use while with the NEA, and a curriculum on Ethics in the Workplace for Cornell University’s ILR School’s Labor Studies Program. His writing has received numerous awards from the Educational Press Association of America, the Long Island Press Club and the New York State Press Association, as well as a leadership award from the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.
Additionally, Villano’s digital poetry book, We, Haiku, an interactive e-book of Haiku, received a QED (Quality, Excellence & Design Award) from the Digital Book Publishers of America in 2014, and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.He holds a Bachelors Degree in Political Science from the State University of New York at Albany, a Masters Degree in Communications, and a Juris Doctorate (JD) from Hofstra University Law School. Villano presently lives in Northern California.
