The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia Book Review

The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia is a memoir written by Frank DiMatteo. It was first self published in November 2014 as Lion in the Basement but was later picked up by a publisher and published as The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia on July 26, 2016.

Like I said before, this book is a memoir. It tells of Frank DiMatteo's life growing up in the mob. It reads like just a bunch of really short, one page stories about different things that happened in DiMatteo's life. Whether it is about meeting his wife, a failed robbery, his good friends, bar fights, or something else, there is always an interesting story. The book deals with death, hate, guns, drugs, and family. The majority of the book was about other people that made an impact on DiMatteo's life, but the rest was DiMatteo's life and different famous mafia hits. There isn't always a clear direction that the story is going, in fact there isn't that much of a story at all, just page long accounts of DiMatteo's life. Throughout the book DiMatteo runs with the Gallo family, a new family with smaller resources, but one that isn't afraid to start a war with the big names.

I did enjoy the book, but it wasn't a page turner, it was just good. However, I would recommend it if you are interested in the mafia, gangs, or other organized crime. I did learn some interesting stuff by reading this book, and I am glad I read it. It wasn't the most captivating book, but because most of the parts were just a page long it made it very easy to just read a page or two at a time here and there. I did feel like I knew some of the main people well enough though, and some of them were surprisingly sweet for violent criminals. However, as much as I felt like I knew a few, there were twice as many that I had no idea who they were, there were new characters being introduced almost constantly. The little page long stories usually had an connection to the rest of the chapter, but because it was the most interesting parts it made it an interesting book. Overall, the book was well written and entertaining, but not a page turner, with over half of the characters being hard to trace. If anything I mentioned sounds interesting it might be worth a read, and it is on Kindle Unlimited.