Thursday, August 17, 2017

HuSTLe City: Seth Ferranti

A few weeks ago I was looking up reviews and discussion of the film Let Me Make You a Martyr on the eve of its release and found this interview with co-directors Corey Asraf and John Swab on Ozy. After reading the piece the author's name caught my eye - Seth Ferranti... Ferranti... Ferranti... Sounded familiar. I thought he must be a film critic I'd read before.

About an hour later it hit me - Seth Soul Man Ferranti? Holy shit!

I read my first Seth Ferranti piece in the Out of the Gutter #5 - the same issue I made my fiction debut in print with the story A Fuckload of Scotch Tape. It was a hell of an issue to be included in too alongside names I already knew and revered like Vicki Hendricks, Charlie Stella and Sophie Littlefield as well as a murderer's row of up and comers like Glenn Gray, Jordan Harper, David Cranmer, Greg Bardsley, Nolan Knight, Garnett Elliot, Nik Korpon, Matthew Louis and the late-great Mike Sheeter.

Seth's contribution, The Aryan Circle, was a non-fiction piece about the Texas prison gang (not to be confused with the Aryan Brotherhood). I dug the piece and was happy to discover he had something of a regular column about prison life in OOTG.

Turns out Seth was nearing the end of his own time in prison (he did 22 of a 25 year sentence on drug charges - he's got a lot to say about draconian measures taken in the war on drugs) where he had started his own publishing company Gorilla Convict. I found him on Crimespace and sent him an appreciative note. He sent me a reply some time later. It was polite, but brief, and didn't seem to be an invitation to further correspondence. So that was the last time I'd had any interaction with him.

Nine years later I see his name on the Ozy piece and had to look him up. I found his Twitter handle @SethFerranti and it listed his current residence as St. Louis.

So I looked him up and we had coffee a couple days later. I asked him what he was up to these days.

A lot, it turns out.

Gorrilla Convict is still publishing books and comics as well as true crime/culture pieces on the blog and Seth is a full time freelance writer with regular contributions to:
VICE
Ozy
Don Diva and
Penthouse to site just a few.

That's not all. He's making films too. Check out the trailer for the documentary White Boy about the case of White Boy Rick Wershe Jr. directed by Shawn Rech. Seth is a talking head in the trailer, but he's also a producer on the film and he's writing and directing a wild comedic crime saga The Easter Bunny Assassin in segments - check out the trailer for Chapter 2: Santa Claus Crack Dealer
Guy's got a serious work ethic, some great insights and a hell of a lot of time to make up for. I found out that all of his pieces and personal correspondence from prison had been hand-written by him and then typed up, edited and submitted for publication by his (now) wife because (duh) he didn't have access to the internet.

I let our earlier dropped communication slide.

St. Louis is sometimes called HuSTLe City and I think it's fitting Seth's making his home here now.

If true crime, gangsters, prison life or history are your thing, fucking check out the writing of Seth Ferranti. Go ahead and start with the latest issue of Penthouse you've been pretending to read.

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