The Last Jewish Gangster, The Middle Years, starts in 1968 with Michael Hardy entering the world’s most dangerous prison in Mexico after taking the rap for his mother’s counterfeiting scheme, trusting she’ll love him this time. He’s set to do twelve years for the crime. To survive, he works for a gay drug lord as his gringo pistolero, and kills three times.
After he gets out, Hardy returns to Brooklyn, tries to go straight, but drifts back into a world of crime. He gets Sammy “the Bull” Gravano to join his crew to pull major heists like kidnapping drug lords for million-dollar ransoms, and robbing cop bag men. To evade the law, he goes to Europe and ends up in Israel where he works on a Kibbutz, touching the hem of his Jewish heritage.
Hardy devolves further into a gangster’s life when he returns to Brooklyn, running a finger of the Mob’s Five-Fingers International Car Theft Ring, participating in a stolen airline ticket scam, and does fourteen hits for the Mob, hoping his mother will notice. When she gets busted for the car theft ring, she turns him in to reduce her time. He’s taken by marshals across the country twice, and ends up cutting a deal wearing wires for Rudy Giuliani to nab a very dirty cop to reduce his time.
Fed up with his antics, Giuliani sends Hardy to federal prison. There he meets a mentor who changes his life, setting him on a new course. Soon after Hardy gets out, his mentor dies. Adrift and scammed by marshals running a halfway house, Hardy wears wires again for Giuliani to nab them. When Sammy the Bull disrespects Hardy, he accuses him of the Dunn brother murders, goes into WITSEC, and is sent to L.A. under an alias. It doesn’t take long for Hardy to land a gig as muscle for a Hollywood studio, and meet his future wife, a hooker who stole crystal from his mother with she was in prison.