Mob Novel With A Subterranean Twist

SEVEN HUNDRED FEET BELOW the beauty of Central Park, "sandhogs" toil in darkness and cold, hammering through rock and laying the foundation for famous skyscrapers and sewer lines. Seven hundred feet below the lights of Time Square, the darker side of the New York City underworld surfaces in Thomas Kelly's first novel, Payback, a look into the opulent 80s construction business that thrived on Reaganomics and mob violence. Kelly, who worked for ten years as a sandhog before graduating from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, brings his own underground expertise to a sordid story of hard men, hard neighborhoods, hard-to-break families ties and Mafia connections impossible to abandon.

Deep below the city streets, Water Tunnel Three, one of the largest construction projects in American history, will bring pure water from upstate New York to Manhattan. What city planners didn't count on was that the water tunnel project would also bring together the Mafia and the Irish Mob of Hell's Kitchen in a plot to eradicate the unions and increase the bottom line.

More than just a macho mobster novel, Payback centers around two brothers, Paddy and Billy Adare. Paddy is an ex-boxer who just missed Olympic glory and at 32, has spent his life working for Jack Tierney as a mob enforcer. Billy is the first in the family to have left life as a laborer behind to embrace education, a college degree and a sub-urban, green-lawn dream of prosperity.

Still, the family ties run deep: Billy and Paddy's father was the first of twenty-three men to die in the construction of Water Tunnel Three twenty years earlier, and Billy has returned to Hell's Kitchen once more to work as a sandhog in the tunnel to pay for his first year of law school. If the union disintegrates, he may not be able to make the money he needs to move beyond the streets of Hell's Kitchen and into a new world.

For Paddy, a destruction of the unions by mob cohorts produces a more deadly dilemma: if he cooperates with the Italians and agrees to bully union leaders into resigning, he will destroy his brother's chances, his family's livelihood and forge an alliance with the Mafia that is potentially lethal. If he refuses, he will be eradicated by the violence that has made him rich. Both brothers are faced with impossible choices and impossible decisions that draw them deeper into the world of the New York underground than a sandhog ever ventured.

Kelly's crew of Mafia godfathers, Irish thugs, federal agents and neighborhood boys reads like a police dossier. There is Butcher Boy, a psychotic neat-freak who lives on steroids, Twinkies and cocaine and who lost count of his kills at thirty men. There is Mary Moy, a pregnant FBI agent determined to uncover the construction conspiracy before a maternity leave takes her off the case of a lifetime. There is Vito Romero, a Mafia man devastated by the death of his wife and tortured by the desire to rehabilitate and control his pierced, punk and promiscuous teenage daughter. Of course, there are also the Godfathers: John Tuzio, leader of the Mafia and Jack Tierney, Paddy's boss, the sadistic Vietnam war hero turned Irish mob boss.

But there are many others as well--too many to support the story. While Mary Moy's struggle could make a very interesting subplot, she isn't fleshed out enough to be anything but a distraction in the action. There is also Rosa, a former grocery store cashier who has enchanted Paddy for a decade, but must now decide whether she can live with the life he has chosen. The romance between Rosa and Paddy is a fascinating but short lived device that leaves the reader stranded. Kelly creates some unforgettable characters, but there are also characters he should have forgotten about in order to tighten the fevered pace of the novel.

Payback reaches its climax when Billy accepts construction work on a mob project site from Paddy, who realizes that for him, it is now kill or be killed. Both brothers are drawn into a death trap that no college education or mob connection can rescue them from.

In the book's epigraph, Kelly quotes Seamus Heaney: "Humans suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. No poem of play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured." Indeed, Payback comes to no conclusion, offering no closure in the lives of Billy and Paddy. In one sense, it is very frustrating not to know whether they die or how they choose to live. Yet in the bleak, violent, greedy New York City of 1987, from water tunnels seven hundred feet below the bustle of Broadway to overcrowded bars of Hell's Kitchen, humans suffered, and often, there was just no way out.