In 1961, the Di Prisco family fled Brooklyn—and the FBI. The father was a compulsive gambler and small-time member of a crew that specialized in bookmaking. He knew too much about police corruption to stick around and break bread with federal agents who one Sunday afternoon tracked him into the woods of Long Island. He escaped at age thirty-five and ended up in a strange place called California, where his Brooklyn-born wife and two of her four sons eventually joined him. One of those sons, Joe, would be the only one in the family to graduate from high school, and he would come to make book of a different sort.

He wasn’t called to a life of crime, but the evidence is mixed. One day, Joe himself would be named the prime suspect in a federal racketeering investigation. This was somebody who, as a young man, lived as a Brother in a Roman Catholic novitiate. During Vietnam he was an activist who took over his college’s administration building. He played blackjack professionally around the world, staked by big-money backers. He managed Italian restaurants with laughable ineptitude. He also did graduate study and taught for twenty years.

In time, though, Joe buried his unstable, manipulative, and beautiful mother and all three brothers, including his heroin-addicted younger brother. Later, Joe cares for his father as he holds on for years against the ravages of Alzheimer’s. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Subway to California recounts Joe’s battles with his personal demons, bargains struck with angels, and truces with his family in this richly colorful tale that reads like great fiction.