Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (35 page)

The irony of RICO’s first triumph was not lost on Blakey.

“When Nixon signed the bill, he handed the document to John Mitchell, the attorney general, and said, ‘Go get the crooks,’” “Blakey remembered. “And who were the most prominent people brought down by the act—Richard Nixon and John Mitchell.”

Unity Day

M
onday, June 28, 1971, was tailormade for Joseph Anthony Colombo. Joe Colombo was in an ebullient mood and the clear, relatively cool weather was ideal for his plan—a massive Italian-American Unity Rally in the center of New York City. The pleasant temperatures that afternoon would insure a huge audience that would generate enthusiastic applause for what Colombo considered the high point of the festivities, his televised speech.

As Colombo prepared for his big day, RICO, the get-tough-with-the-Mafia law, had been on the books for almost one year and had been ignored by law-enforcement agencies. For Colombo, RICO was equally unimportant, and the law’s acronym probably represented nothing more to him than a male nickname. Major mobsters and their attentive lawyers were unconcerned about a statute that had attracted sparse attention and was not being enforced. Like Joe Bonanno, the New York bosses and their lieutenants knew they operated inside an unstable volcano, and the greatest life-threatening dangers to themselves were from internal eruptions by envious, revengeful rivals, not from external assaults by the FBI or the police.

None of the bosses was cowering in his lair, fearful of RICO’s bite. On the contrary, in 1970, while RICO was being passed in Congress, Joe Colombo was organizing a national campaign—an unsubtle counterattack—to protect the
Mafia. Unlike conventional mobsters who avoided the exposure of publicity, Colombo began courting the media, contending that he and countless other Italian-Americans were being falsely vilified because of their ethnic background. At forty-eight, Colombo was cresting on a wave of unparalleled career success and widespread public popularity. He was the godfather of one of New York’s five Mafia families and, simultaneously, the founder and leader of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization championed by public officials, corporate executives, and show business personalities.

It was an unheard-of triumph to simultaneously run a borgata and to be acclaimed a civic leader and civil-rights pioneer. Joe Colombo had managed to accomplish it.

Shortly before noon, ten thousand people were streaming into Columbus Circle at the entrance to Central Park for the second annual Italian Unity Day rally. From eighty feet overhead, atop a distinctive column, the giant statue of Christopher Columbus gazed downward as bodyguards cleared a path for Colombo to reach the speakers’ stage. Smiling and waving, Colombo ambled slowly past admirers wishing him well, striving to touch him or shake his hand, past the plastic red, white, and green buntings and streamers, the colors of the Italian flag.

In the din of the huge, noisy crowd and the band music pulsating from loudspeakers, witnesses heard three muffled pops that sounded like faint firecrackers. They were gun shots from an ancient .32 caliber pistol. The bullets ripped into Colombo’s head and neck. He plummeted to the ground. As blood gushed from his mouth and ears, Colombo lay motionless, irreversibly paralyzed, his dreams of underworld supremacy, national respectability, and political influence shattered.

Joe Colombo was no stranger to violence. Growing up in South Brooklyn, one of the Mafia’s spawning grounds, he knew from an early age the spectre of gangster-imposed justice. When he was sixteen, his father, Tony, a made man, met an early and brutal death over some Mob misdeed. Signifying a Sicilian-style revenge slaying, the bodies of his father and a girlfriend were found trussed and garroted in the back seat of a car.

Drafted into the Coast Guard in World War II, Colombo served three years before being discharged early, suffering from “psycho neurosis.” It was a malady that cronies attributed to his theatrical skills since he later never exhibited the slightest sign of mental distress. Briefly working as a longshoreman on the gangster-saturated Brooklyn docks, he switched to running crap games, and
then found his calling as a proficient hit man for the Joe Profaci gang. Mob insiders credited Colombo with being in a squad that whacked at least fifteen victims to resolve Profaci’s most troublesome problems.

The Gallo brothers’ war against Joe Profaci in the early 1960s proved to be a stepping-stone for Colombo’s advancement. He remained loyal to Profaci against the insurgent Gallos and, after the old boss’s death, seemingly supported Joe Magliocco in his aborted quest for leadership of the borgata. Stellar service as a killer for the Profaci-Magliocco faction earned Colombo a promotion to run a crew as a capo. But in the power struggle between New York’s family bosses, he switched sides. Rather than obeying Magliocco, he engineered a double-cross, warning Carlo Gambino of the assassination plot hatched by Joe Bonanno with Magliocco’s assistance to murder Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. Gambino outmaneuvered Bonanno to triumph as the reigning personality on the Mob’s Commission. Impressed by Colombo’s chicanery, Gambino, the aging leader of the largest New York family, adopted him as a protégé. Don Carlo’s unqualified endorsement in 1964 eliminated any opposition to Colombo’s ascending the throne as boss of the old Profaci gang. The borgata of two hundred soldiers and more than one thousand associates was swiftly renamed in Mob circles. It became the Colombo family.

Colombo’s installation as a family godfather with a vote on the Commission at the comparatively young age of forty-one rankled Mafia old-timers. An FBI wiretap in the office of Sam The Plumber DeCavalcante, the boss of a small New Jersey family named after him, heard him grousing to an unidentified caller about Colombo’s undistinguished qualifications and Gambino’s judgment. “He was nothing but a bust-out man,” Sam the Plumber said of Colombo, referring to him disparagingly in Mob slang as a small-time operator of card and dice games. “Yeah, he was always hanging on Carlo’s shoulder,” replied the unhappy voice on the other end of the telephone line.

Older bosses might envy Colombo’s rapid ascension, but he knew how to fulfill the role of an established family Caesar. Upgrading his appearance, he outfitted his stocky frame in conservative suits, muted ties, and customed-tailored shirts, trying to pose as a prosperous businessman. As another emblem of middle-class respectability, he took up golf instead of shooting pool with the boys. Colombo’s real income poured in from illicit million-dollar gambling, loan-sharking, hijacking, and shakedown rackets, but to appear legitimate, he
became a “salesman” for a Brooklyn real estate company owned by an associate in his crime family. Overnight, the new venture capitalist was a partner in a funeral parlor and a florist shop. Those were popular “front” occupations for mobsters, and both of them were run by hirelings. The fictitious income from the salesman’s job and investments that could be justified to the 1RS allowed Colombo to adopt a lifestyle befitting his Mob title. He moved his wife and their five children into a spacious split-level house in the Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s middle-class version of Little Italy. For a more elegant and bucolic retreat, he acquired a five-acre estate near the Hudson River, one hundred miles from the city.

A second-generation American, Colombo was far more articulate in English than Don Carlo Gambino and other immigrant bosses whose speech was heavily accented and grammatically mangled. And, Colombo had no fear of going
mano a mano
with law-enforcement officials and speaking his mind.

In 1964, after a soldier in Colombo’s family was gunned down, Albert Seedman, then a New York detective inspector, asked Colombo to appear voluntarily at a Brooklyn station house. To Seedman’s surprise, the new Mob boss showed up alone, without a lawyer, and unabashedly tore into Seedman. “If I was a Jewish businessman, you’d never dream of calling me down here on a murder,” Seedman recalled Colombo railing at him. “But because my name is Italian, that’s different. I’m a
goombah
mobster, not good people like you.”

Before departing and without providing any information about the homicide, Colombo fired another verbal barrage at Seedman. “You lean back at that big desk, and you’re thinking. ‘This guy is sitting here, feeding me a line. He’s nothing but a two-bit greaser trying to look respectable.’ Well, you’re wrong. I am an American citizen, first class. I don’t have a badge that makes me an official good guy like you, but I work just as honest for a living. I am a salesman in real estate. I have a family to support.”

Six years later, Colombo pulled off an even more daring surprise. His son, Joseph Jr., was indicted in April 1970 on a rare federal complaint: a $300,000 conspiracy to melt down nickel coins and sell them as silver ingots. Instead of the customary Mob tactic of retaining high-priced lawyers to win a courtroom acquittal, Colombo responded by staging demonstrations and picket lines outside of the FBI’s Manhattan offices. The picket lines were manned mainly by Colombo borgata members, wannabes, and their relatives, handing out leaflets
assailing the bureau for being anti-Italian and for persecuting Italian-Americans on fictitious charges.

The almost daily protests orchestrated by Colombo coincided with widespread national unrest over the Vietnam War and a rising clamor by African-Americans, Hispanics, and feminist groups for civil rights and equality. With New York as the vortex of the national and international media, the novelty of a reputed Mafia boss giving extensive television, radio, and print interviews catapulted Colombo into a media celebrity. He began appearing frequently on news and talk shows, expounding his views that “the Mafia was a myth” manufactured by law enforcement and the press, and that Italian-Americans—like black Americans and other minorities—were victims of FBI and police bias and brutality. The viewpoint, glibly expressed by Colombo and echoed to some degree by earnest, prominent Italian-Americans, struck a chord in the Italian community. Distrust of authority and government agencies, fanned by opposition to the Vietnam War, was on the rise, and the public was acutely aware of the government’s abysmal record of violations of, and indifference to, the civil rights of many groups.

Colombo’s son was acquitted in the silver conspiracy case, benefiting from a standard development in Mob-related trials. The key witness against twenty-six-year-old Joe Jr., a former wannabe named Richard Salomone, had an abrupt change of heart in the witness chair, recanting earlier incriminating statements by suddenly stating that young Colombo knew nothing of the scheme. After the court victory, Colombo senior revved up his personal crusade. In less than a year, he formed and become the head of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, with a claimed dues-paying membership of 45,000 and 52 chapters in the nation. Harangues by Colombo and his followers against the FBI, law enforcement in general, and the press convinced thousands of decent Italian-Americans that their community was being unfairly stigmatized as the Mafia.

“The president is knocking us down; the attorney general hates our guts,” was Colombo’s provocative sound bite on late-night TV talk shows. Interviewed in a thoughtful article in
Harper’s Magazine
, Colombo, posing as an abused defender of his community, asked, “Is it possible in New York that only Italians have committed crimes?” Arrested thirteen times, Colombo had a police record for minor gambling misdemeanors. Having escaped major felony convictions, he could reasonably contend that he was being smeared, without proof, by the authorities as an organized-crime gangster. “I wasn’t born free of
Sin,” he thundered, “but I sure couldn’t be all the things that people have said—I got torture chambers in my cellar, I’m a murderer, I’m the head of every shylock ring, of every bookmakin’ ring, I press buttons and I have enterprises in London, at the airport I get seven, eight million dollars a year revenue out of there. Who are they kiddin’ and how far will they go to kid the public?”

Colombo’s pitch that his mistreatment typified frequent abuses suffered by law-abiding Italian-Americans was an instant success. Almost overnight the league—in effect Colombo—became an electoral weapon, recognized and respected by politicians. At the first Unity Day Rally in June 1970, the theme was “restoring dignity, pride and recognition to every Italian-American.” An estimated fifty thousand people cheered Colombo and other speakers in Columbus Circle as they pounded home that message. Mindful of the league’s rapid growth, elected officials quickly responded to its potential voting power. New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller and scores of lesser politicians rushed to accept honorary league membership. At the rally, four congressmen and a New York City deputy mayor rose on the speaker’s platform alongside Colombo to support the league’s goals of preventing discrimination against and slander of Italian-Americans. The league’s lobbying efforts intimidated Governor Rockefeller and Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell into officially banning the use of the word “Mafia” by all law-enforcement agencies under their jurisdiction.