A rogue FBI agent, and a poetry-loving director of a Brooklyn funeral home. A frayed truce among New York's crime families, and a family of shopkeepers whose lives have come unglued. Bensonhurst is the story of people and events, real and imaginary, caught up in the June 1971 assassination attempt on Joe Colombo, the flamboyant head of New York's reigning crime syndicate. Fast forward thirty years and, as William Faulkner once noted, "The past isn't dead. It's not even past." Hidden identities revealed, political ambitions run amok and a lingering thirst for revenge mix with ghosts from the past, only weeks after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.