MOB APPEAL.(The Talk of the Town)(Gianrico Carofiglio)

"It was May 14, 2002. I was in my office with two policemen," Gianrico Carofiglio, an Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor, began. "And then my phone rang. The two guys that were in my room look at me because my face was--how can I say?--strange. They didn't know what was going on."

The caller wasn't a gravel-voiced tipster or a menacing don. It was a book editor, phoning to say that he wanted to publish a manuscript that Carofiglio had submitted. Carofiglio is not only a prominent procuratore della Repubblica; now he is also one of his country's best-selling authors. He made a name in the nineties, arresting Puglian Mob bosses like Il Cecato (the Blind Man) and Lo Spazzino (the Street-Cleaner); last year, he broke up a syndicate that enslaved prostitutes and sold their newborn babies. By day, Carofiglio conducts searches, interrogates suspects, and leads trials. By night--or, more specifically, during the early-evening hours--he writes crisp, ironical novels that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers. He inhabits the roles of crime fighter and crime writer with an almost Supermannish ease.

"I was a judge in the beginning of my career," he was saying the other day, at the Italian Cultural Institute, on Park Avenue. "But then I switched to a prosecutor, because I'm kind of a cop in my soul." Carofiglio, a handsome man, has a five-o'clock shadow, a leftover suntan, and a hairline like Eliot Spitzer's. He was there to read from his first book, "Involuntary Witness," which has been translated into thirteen languages and was released last month in the United States. (In Italy, the book will become a television series, making its protagonist, Guido Guerrieri, a Continental Perry Mason.) "If somebody asked"--Carofiglio pronounced the word with two syllables--"me some years ago what is my most absurd dream, I would have said presenting a book, my book, in translation, in New York City." (Carofiglio is an aficionado of American culture. His "ideal library," he wrote recently in the magazine Crime Time, ...