I mentioned in my review of Kenny Gallo’s book, Breakshot www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=36678 the fact that Gallo ran socially and criminally with a now-retired Irvine cop whom Gallo refers to as the Teflon Cop. A chummy photo also appears in the book with Gallo and the named cop, Jerry Head. The OC Register follows-up.

Frank Mickadeit writes on www.ocregister.com – Could a University High student from a middle-class family in Irvine have been a major player in the violent Orange County cocaine-dealing scene in 1980s? Could he have been a teen protégé of Joey Avila, of the El Ranchito restaurant family, who was machine-gunned down in Costa Mesa by a rival cocaine kingpin?

Could this kid have been aided by an Irvine cop who tipped him off to police surveillance, drank with him, taught him to shoot and to make a car bomb – essentially how to become a master criminal?

This is what is claimed in a just-published book called “Breakshot: A Life in the 21st Century American Mafia” by mobster-turned-FBI-informant Kenny “Kenji” Gallo and journalist Matthew Randazzo. Gallo is not his real name, but he says he was widely known as Kenji on the streets here.

His is a book so astounding in its allegations about the O.C. underworld in the 1980s that if even 20 percent is true, it would make me – a newspaperman here since 1987, a guy who’s covered his share of crime and courts – feel more naive than Jimmy Olsen.

Our veteran courts reporter (more than 30 years in O.C.) Larry Welborn checked out Gallo’s story with deep law-enforcement sources before he blogged about the book last week, and they said Gallo is who he says he is. They can’t, of course, claim knowledge of each detail in the book.

I met Gallo on Sunday at a book-signing hosted by Sisters in Crime, a group of female mystery writers.

The scene was a little bizarre. There in a sun-splashed, nicely appointed community room at the Irvine Ranch Water District headquarters stood a pleasant-looking man of 41, smiling and chatting easily with grandmothers. It took me a few minutes to realize this was Gallo. He was dressed in stonewashed jeans and an Affliction T-shirt. His head was shaved and he was well-muscled, but there were no (visible) tattoos, no (obvious) bodyguards. If there was any tension, any sense of threat in the room, I didn’t feel it. Maybe his audience would have been a little ill at ease if had it read a few excerpts from Gallo’s book. Like:

“I became a crook because I get high from danger, pain and violence. … I used to mix kerosene or turpentine with food coloring until it looked like Mountain Dew, then poured it into plastic Mountain Dew bottles. When someone crossed me … I’d splash him in the face, and toss my ignited lighter at him. You make a reputation quickly when you set (people) on fire.”

So there we were listening to Gallo, some of the 20 Agatha Christies eating carrot cake or sipping a soft drink, asking him technical questions like, “Could you clarify how much $1 million in 20-dollar-bills weighs?” (Answer: 120.2 pounds.) If only we’d had tea and watercress sandwiches.

Gallo says he was hardened in military school before enrolling at University, where Will Ferrell was a classmate. Gallo’s father, a Japanese-American artist, got him a job at Setoya, a Japanese restaurant on Irvine Avenue, near the Back Bay. Setoya was owned by Avila, who also had a nightclub above. Gallo’s father didn’t realize he’d put his son in the middle of a coke operation.

The bright Gallo went from busboy to coke seller to teenage coke lord with his own crew of sociopathic thugs. All the while, he was allegedly aided by a cop he calls “the most evil person I’ve ever met.”

The book names him (even has a photo of him) but at my editor’s direction we are not – at least not yet. Irvine P.D. Lt. John Hare told me the cop retired “in good standing” Aug. 7 – about when the book published. The P.D., O’Hare says, takes the allegations seriously, however, and is investigating. What would happen if any are proven is unclear.

Gallo expanded into bookmaking and loan-sharking and, when things got too hot in Irvine and Newport, into porn. He was even married briefly to a porn queen. Through porn, he met East Coast mobsters and became an associate of the Colombo family, which he ultimately turned on in exchange for a witness-protection deal from the FBI.

The book is profane and scary-violent, and a fair question is whether this newspaper should help promote it. Unfortunately, it is also Orange County history and it would be worse to cover it up.