Like a Bat Out of Hell by Mick Wall

Author:Mick Wall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Ltd

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Shark Bait

Karma was a bitch, man. By the time he threatened Meat Loaf and his wife Leslie in November 1981, Al Dellentash’s spinning plates were one by one starting to fall. Salvatore Ruggiero wanted to get into the heroin trade, something Al realised might be too rich for his blood, not least because it would bring him into the orbit of Salvatore’s even more fearsome older brother, Angelo – an out-of-control mob enforcer who the FBI regarded as ‘an unpredictable psychopath’. Nonetheless, Salvatore ordered Al to stop fucking around in the music business. He wanted to come up to New York from Florida to see Al face to face and reinforce the message. Al sent his Lear Jet to pick up Salvatore and his wife, and on the return flight it crashed into the sea off the Georgia coast, killing both passengers and the pilot. The bodies were eaten by sharks. Al had to call Angelo to tell him what had happened. Unbeknown to him, the FBI was listening in when he did.

The events of that day spread outwards in a baroque pattern, reaching as far as John Gotti, then head of the Gambino family, for whom big brother Angelo worked directly. Al Dellentash was caught between a rock and a hard place and ended up testifying against members of the Gotti family in return for immunity on certain charges and a lighter sentence. In 1983 he received twenty-five years, served five and disappeared, some said into the witness protection programme. He didn’t surface again until 2014, when Jeff Maysh found him working as a car salesman in Los Angeles, married to Bonnie and adamant that the death of Salvatore Ruggiero was nothing more than a terrible coincidence. ‘Whatever the truth is,’ Maysh wrote, ‘he still prefers to sit where he can see the door.’

It was during this crazed period after the death of Salvatore Ruggiero that Meat Loaf’s life fell completely to pieces. He now declared personal bankruptcy in order to allay the gathering lawsuits. He also vowed never to work with Steinman again. ‘The problem was with a million different forces – his manager, his lawyers, his vocal chords, his brain,’ Jim Steinman tried to explain to Rolling Stone in 1993. ‘He had lost his voice, he had lost his house, and he was pretty much losing his mind.’ Not helped by the fact that Jimmy was now suing him, too. ‘It was padded-cell time,’ Meat recalled in the same interview. ‘When I declared bankruptcy, they said, “It’s not like this big scourge.” But it was a big scourge. It was horrible. The kids took a beating. My wife would try to write a cheque at the grocery store, and they wouldn’t take it, even though it was fine. So I just worked. I always have. No big deal.’

He certainly worked, but to ever-diminishing returns. If you could call an entire decade a write-off, that was the rest of the 1980s for Meat Loaf. ‘There was a period of time when it was ridiculous.

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