Magnate 'o cà

Michael Gambino

Michael Pelligrino (born 1966) is a U.S. man who fooled publisher Simon & Schuster into thinking that he was Michael Gambino, grandson of Mafioso Carlo Gambino.In 1999, Pelligrino was jailed for theft and impersonating an FBI agent. In jail, he contacted literary agent Joel Gotler of the Artist Management Group, a talent agency in Hollywood, and convinced him that he was actually Michael Gambino, the illegitimate grandson of Carlo Gambino. When he was released in 2001, Gotler sold his story to Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, for a $500,000 advance.Pelligrino used a ghostwriter to make a book The Honored Society, a novel that was supposedly based on his own experiences as a gangster. In the book he claimed that he had been 12 years in prison for… more »