BOOK REVIEW : Inside the Mob: A Candid, Ugly Account : JOE DOGS: The Life and Crimes of a Mobster <i> by Joseph (Joe Dogs) Iannuzzi</i> ; Simon & Schuster $23, 368 pages

The Mafia is sometimes depicted in books and movies as grand opera and sometimes as low burlesque, but the reality is that the life of a mobster tends to be short, nasty and brutal. Or so we learn from “Joe Dogs,” the memoir of a garrulous mob enforcer named Joseph (Joe Dogs) Iannuzzi.

Iannuzzi was the muscle for the Gambino family in South Florida, and his book is a bone-rattling and blood-curdling account of what it is really like to work the rackets as a member of a Mafia “crew.”

“I was hustling like never before,” he writes of those happy days when he was breaking heads and other body parts. “Shylocking. Shakedowns. Bookmaking. I started dealing drugs. The whole bit.”

Iannuzzi delights in revealing the secrets of a successful mobster. We learn, for example, that a hit man will use a bullet to the head to kill his victim and then a bullet to the heart to stop the bleeding. We are shown the finer points of getting rid of dead bodies, fencing stolen diamonds and fixing horse races. All of these details are recounted with a marked enthusiasm that betrays Iannuzzi’s genuine pleasure in his work.

What he loved best, Iannuzzi admits, was the respect that he commanded from those who feared him. “I didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but if someone owed money and didn’t pay, I knew how to break a leg,” he explains. “Because of all these factors, whenever I walked into a restaurant or a club, I was given the red-carpet treatment. And I loved it.”

The underworld that Iannuzzi describes in “Joe Dogs”--the casual violence, the extravagant sexual infidelities, the medieval rituals of initiation and execution, and even the joy of Italian cooking--will be familiar to anyone who read Nick Pileggi’s “Wise Guys” or saw the movie version, “Goodfellas.”

Indeed, it was Pileggi who first put Iannuzzi in touch with the Sterling Lord Agency and turned Joe Dogs from a wise guy into an auteur . And the author is gracious enough to thank his publisher, Michael Korda, for “the opportunity to get started on a new life and (I hope) career.”

Of course, the hand of a ghostwriter may be discerned here and there in “Joe Dogs,” as when the author describes Tommy Agro, his mentor-turned-nemesis, as “a squat, florid little man” with “incongruously large shoulders.” Still, the book is full of hard talk that sounds like the real voice of a Mafia hit man.

Iannuzzi, to his credit, does not try to pretty himself up in print, and that’s why the book has the ring of ugly truth.

But Joe Dogs has reformed to the point where he disavows the twisted moral code of the Mafia, which he now compares to a gang of juvenile delinquents.

“In a way, being a member of a crew is like never leaving high school,” he says. “The boys are all ganged up and strutting around like roosters . . . and the jokes never get beyond the 12th-grade level.”

As if to illustrate the point, he describes a conversation with a fellow mobster who complains about his unruly son: “It’s real odd that your kid is like that,” cracks Joe Dogs in what must be a kind of Mafia in-joke. “I mean, considering that his father is a graduate of Penn State and all. Or is that the state pen?”

Mostly, though, “Joe Dogs” is a string of war stories that adds up to a saga of serial betrayal--there is not much honor among these thieves, and they are forever selling each other out and stabbing each other in the back, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally.

Iannuzzi himself fell victim to Tommy Agro and a couple of thugs who intended to beat him to death on the orders of a capo with a grudge. The embittered Joe Dogs offered his services as an informant to the FBI and eventually testified against a string of highly placed Mafia defendants in a dozen trials. “I got into the whole thing for one reason,” he concedes. “I wanted revenge.”

If there is a redeeming quality in the confessions of a man like Joseph Iannuzzi, it is his willingness to disabuse us of the notion that there is anything heroic or romantic about the Mafia. But he makes the point by piling up horror upon horror, outrage upon outrage.

By the end of “Joe Dogs,” I felt battered, dazed and even sullied by the squalor, the treachery, and the brutality that he describes with such relish and in such harrowing detail.