[6] He also held a variety of jobs, including working as a porter for his family's business in New Jersey, as a paste-up artist for the Lovable underwear company in New York City,[6][7] and later, in the early 1970s, as a snake hunter for the Miami Serpentarium, in Florida.
He subsequently wrote biographies of the singer and entertainer Dean Martin, the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, the heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston, the country singer Emmett Miller, the soul/rock band Hall & Oates and the racketeer Arnold Rothstein.
He published five novels, Cut Numbers (1988), Trinities (1994), In the Hand of Dante (2002), Me and the Devil (2012), and Under Tiberius (2015); and a collection of poetry, Chaldea and I Dig Girls (1999).
He also worked on Never Trust a Loving God, a book he did in collaboration with his friend the French painter Thierry Alonso Gravleur.
[10] He described his literary influences as "Hesiod, Sappho, Christopher Marlowe, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, Charles Olson, and God knows who else.