Veteran organized crime
reporter and author George Anastasia looks back at the life of criminal Ron
Previte for jerseymanmagazine.com.
They called him the Fat Rat,
but he didn’t really care.
Ron Previte always knew who
he was and what he had done. And he was okay with that, which made him unique
in the underworld and immune to the slurs and epithets other wiseguys threw at
him.
For him, it was a game and he
always thought he knew how to play it better than they did.
It wasn’t about right or
wrong, about morals or ethics. When it came to crime, he was totally amoral. He
would smile and say he was a “general practitioner.” He did it all.
And becoming an informant,
first for the New Jersey State Police, and then for the FBI, was part of his
practice.
Previte died two months ago.
He had been sick for over a year, battling various ailments that eventually led
to a fatal heart attack. He was 73.
“What would you have bet that
it would have been a heart attack that took him out?” an FBI agent asked at
Previte’s memorial service. A dozen other law enforcement officials standing in
the back of the funeral parlor down in Hammonton, NJ, that night nodded and
smiled.
Nobody figured he would die
of natural causes.
Ronnie Previte lived life on
the edge and most people figured that he would die out there taking another
chance, trying to make one more score.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
You can also read my Philadelphia
Inquirer review of George Anastasia’s book on Ron Previte, The Last Gangster, below:
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