Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (36 page)

Hollywood also felt the sting of Colombo’s wrath. Before Paramount could begin filming the first of its
The Godfather
movies, Colombo fired off a threatening press release. Characterizing Mario Puzo’s novel, on which the film was based, as a “spurious and slanderous” account of Italian-Americans, he warned the producers against using the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” and depicting Italians as immoral criminals. For additional pressure, Colombo persuaded a dozen elected officials to caution the studio to portray Italians more positively than they had been characterized in the novel. Aware that the Mob’s union goons could sabotage location shooting schedules, Paramount mollified Colombo; for “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra,” it substituted “family” and “syndicate” in the script. And perhaps seeking authenticity and Joe Colombo’s good will, the producers hired several of the Mob boss’s gofers as extras. The actor James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone, son of the godfather portrayed by Marlon Brando, spent a good deal of time cavorting with one of Colombo’s capos, Carmine “the Snake” Persico, a feared killer. Caan’s movie performance drew rave reviews.

Financially, Colombo’s unique league seemed to be on the road to success. Frank Sinatra, who had a penchant for socializing with mafiosi, sang as the star headliner at an event in Madison Square Garden that raised $500,000 for the organization. A benefit dinner in Long Island netted $100,000. But Colombo’s astonishing achievement with the league began to draw unfavorable notices among his Mafia brethren. For some mafiosi, the dissatisfaction was inspired by both the lurking green-eyed monster of jealousy and by ubiquitous greed. They were sure that a goodly portion of the funds and dues collected by the league was diverted into Colombo’s private treasury and they were offended by not being cut in on a new racket. The omnipotent Don Carlo Gambino had a different concern: the league’s success and Colombo’s drumfire of denunciations and picket lines were embittering the somnolent FBI and police departments. Shortly before the second rally, Colombo spat out more venom at the FBI. He accused the bureau of deliberately encouraging the use the of the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” to excuse its investigative inadequacies. “When they don’t solve something, it’s because there’s this secret organization they still haven’t penetrated,” he said mockingly. “You can’t solve it so you blame somebody. You make up labels.”

Colombo’s ceaseless attacks were becoming imprudent, attracting the kind of attention that could create a backlash, Carlo Gambino told confidants. The end result, he feared, would incite investigators to strike at all the families. Gambino clearly was behind his protégé in 1970 at the first Unity Day Rally, sending out word that all longshoremen in New York’s waterfront were to have the day off to attend the rally. At the approach of the second rally, Gambino issued a directive: keep the cargoes moving and no time off on the docks. Moreover, Paul Vario, a Lucchese capo and Gambino ally, abruptly resigned as the league’s membership director, a clear indicator that the Luccheses had withdrawn their support. A final sign of displeasure from Don Carlo came when his army removed the 1971 Unity Day notices and placards from stores in Bensonhurst and other South Brooklyn neighborhoods. He was delivering a candid rebuke that Colombo’s ego was getting too large and his boldness was endangering other families. Without Gambino’s blessing, attendance at the second annual rally was expected to dip to 10,000 from the previous year’s 50,000.

There was never any doubt as to who shot Joe Colombo. Despite a ring of Mob bodyguards and phalanxes of uniformed and plainclothes officers, a lone gunman
had slithered through the protective shield in Columbus Circle. As Colombo sank to the ground, from fifteen feet away a horde of policemen and bodyguards pounced on the shooter, covering him like a besieged quarterback sacked in a football pileup. When the mound of bodies was peeled off, the gunman, a twenty-four-year-old black man, Jerome A. Johnson, lay dead, fatally shot three times, presumably by one of the Colombo soldiers who had failed to safeguard his boss. Embarrassed police brass assigned a special detective unit to figure out who Johnson was and who was behind the assassination attempt.

From the outset, detectives leaned toward the theory that Johnson had been a “patsy,” a tool used by a Cosa Nostra enemy of Colombo to undertake a suicide contract. Four hours after the assassination attempt, a caller to the Associated Press, identifying himself as a spokesman for the “Black Revolutionary Attack Team” (BRAT), said Colombo had been shot in retaliation for violent acts committed by the white power structure against African-Americans. Detectives soon determined that the group was fictitious. They were dubious that an authentic underground black group would see any political purpose in knocking off a Mafia leader. No connection could be found between Jerome Johnson and any radical black political activists. In fact, Johnson mixed mainly with whites, and detectives were unable to find a single close black friend of his. The fake claim by BRAT, detectives speculated, might be a red herring to lead them on a false trail.

Investigators did piece together a portrait of Jerome Johnson as a petty con man, check forger, burglar, and lothario who drifted around college campuses trying to seduce women students. Somehow, Johnson, without experience as a news photographer, had wangled press credentials to cover the Columbus Circle rally from the league’s chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With an expensive $1,200 Bolex camera slung over his shoulder and a statuesque black woman assistant by his side, who also displayed a press card, Johnson threaded his way toward Colombo. As they approached Colombo, detectives believed, the woman passed a pistol to Johnson, an untraceable .32 caliber Menta automatic manufactured in Germany during World War I. At the opportune moment, the woman maneuvered alongside Colombo, shouting, “Hello, Joe.” Halting, Colombo, turned to look through his horn-rimmed spectacles at the woman. Smiling, he responded to her with a “Hi ya.” It was Johnson’s opportunity. Almost at pointblank range, he fired three rounds before being knocked to the ground by a swarm of bodyguards and policemen. In the melee, Johnson’s killer pumped three .38 caliber slugs into his back; the weapon, also untraceable, was found near the assassin’s body.

Johnson’s female accomplice darted away in the pandemonium that engulfed the crowd. Despite months-long, intensive searches, and running down scores of tips, detectives failed to identify or locate the mystery woman. Sifting through clues and intelligence reports, Albert Seedman, now chief of detectives, catalogued Johnson as a fall guy “whose head was somewhere in outer space.” Johnson’s lackluster criminal record led the city’s sharpest detectives to conjecture that he had been inveigled, probably by the prospect of a large pot of money and false promises of an escape route, to mow down Colombo. He seemed too gullible and motiveless to have conceived and carried out the assignment without sophisticated outside guidance. Seedman’s investigators reasoned that conspirators who knew how to acquire press credentials and how to determine when Colombo would be most vulnerable, must have choreographed the job for Johnson. Seedman and his detectives concluded that the plotters most likely were highly motivated mafiosi. Though lacking clear proof, Seedman firmly believed that circumstantial and logical evidence pointed in only one direction: the pilot behind Johnson’s kamikaze attack was Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo.

Ubazze and Lilo

C
razy Joey” Gallon underworld nickname was appropriate. As a young recruit, he epitomized the predatory hoodlum who carried out the Mob’s routine scut work, a thug without the brains for complex rackets, whose specialty was extorting victims through terror. Along with his brothers, Albert and Larry, he got his start as an enforcer and hit man for Joe Profaci’s gambling and loan-sharking capos in Brooklyn. With Joey as their honcho, the brothers established their headquarters in a building on President Street, near the waterfront in Red Hook. A blue-collar neighborhood, the area was later gentrified by realtors, and became the more pleasant-sounding and higher-rent district of Carroll Gardens.

Gallons reputation soared when the Mob grapevine credited him with being the lead gunsel in the barbershop execution of Albert Anastasia in 1957. Modeling himself after the 1940s George Raft film version of a suave gangster, Gallo took to wearing dark suits, dark shirts, and white or bright-colored ties. To impress his foes and underlings with his courage, he once quartered a chained pet lion in the basement of his President Street hangout.

But after a decade of loyal service to Profaci, the ambitious Gallo boys began griping that their ungrateful boss was skimming the cream from their plunder and refusing to reward them with some of the gang’s gambling and loan-sharking monopolies. Open rebellion was their solution. The Gallos, in
one day in February 1961, kidnapped Profaci’s brother-in-law and underboss, Joe Magliocco, and four Profaci capos. Their ransom demand was a heftier share of the borgata’s multimillion-dollar take. Profaci responded in a meek manner, agreeing to be more generous. The concession was a ruse. As soon as the captives were released, Profaci gathered his forces, lured away several Gallo supporters, and began bumping off Gallons troops. The rebellion flared on and off for more than a year, and most of the twelve slain casualties were from Crazy Joey’s outgunned crew. On the day in 1961 that Larry Gallo barely escaped being murdered, Gallo’s crew got a crude message that one of their ablest killers, Joseph “Joe Jelly” Gioiello, was “sleeping with the fishes.” Gioiello’s clothing, stuffed with fish, was tossed from an auto in front of a restaurant where the Gallos frequently dined.

While the conflict raged, Gallo’s movements were limited, but Joey still had to earn money to pay his minions and to feed his lion. One gambit was enlarging a primitive extortion scheme he had cooked up. Before battling Profaci, Gallo had established on paper a phantom union of bartenders and used it to shake down tavern owners in Brooklyn. To avoid violence and vandalism, the victims had to pay $30 a week as dues for each employee, none of whom knew they belonged to Gallons sham labor organization. Looking for more easy shakedowns, Gallo’s crew branched out to Manhattan, using the same terror tactic there by suggesting to proprietors of small bars that they might meet with “unfortunate accidents” or their places might be wrecked if they failed to pay bartender “dues.” One defiant owner resisted, cooperated with detectives, and secretly tape-recorded an incriminating meeting with Gallo in Luna’s, a Little Italy restaurant. The evidence pinned Crazy Joey to an extortion conviction in 1962 and a maximum ten-year prison sentence. With his departure and Profaci’s natural death that same year, a truce was soon arranged, and the Gallo Wars ended with Joe Colombo’s enthronement as boss.

Eight years in state prison coated Joey Gallo’s personality with a new patina—at least on the surface. Like many unschooled convicts, he discovered books as an antidote to the numbing boredom of confinement and became an avid reader of literature and philosophy. Upon his return to Brooklyn in 1971, Gallo could quote and discuss the nuances of Balzac, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Flaubert, and having taken up painting while behind bars, he began visiting museums. His pseudo-intellectual trappings were a con man’s camouflage.

Brother Larry Gallo had died of cancer, but Albert Kid Blast Gallo and remnants of the old crew knew that Joey was as ambitious and determined as ever to carve himself a large slice of Mafia pie. While in prison, Gallo had planned for his comeback. He cultivated African-American inmates as potential muscle to secretly reinforce his depleted Brooklyn brigade when the time came for a showdown. He arranged for selected black recruits released from the penitentiary to link up with his brother and other crew wiseguys, who helped them with money and jobs.

Soon after his parole, Gallo made a move, demanding from Colombo $100,000 and a sizable portion of the borgata’s rackets. The payments, he contended, were reasonable because he had been in prison and had never signed on with his brothers to the family’s peace pact. It was an implied threat that Gallo could launch another violent campaign. Fully in control of the crime family and riding high with his civil-rights league, Colombo contemptuously brushed off Gallo as an insignificant has-been.

Exhibiting his new highbrow persona—and perhaps to lull Colombo and other old enemies—Gallo moved from dingy Red Hook to Greenwich Village, began attending the theater, and struck up relationship with the actor Jerry Orbach and his wife, Marta. Orbach had played a gangster in the movie adaptation of Jimmy Breslin’s
The Gang that Coulan’t Shoot Straight
, a comic novel about an incompetent Mafia crew that resembled Gallo’s own second-rate outfit. Boasting that he had reformed and was writing his memoirs, the former Crazy Joey of the police blotter was lionized as a celebrity guest at show business and New York café society dinner parties.

Gallons supposed transformation from violent reprobate to misunderstood adventurer was encouraged by mounting feeling in the country and among the intelligentsia that widespread bigotry had hobbled and forced many Italian-Americans into crime. Sympathy ran high for the Italian-Americans. This concept stemmed partly from the success of Joe Colombo’s anti-discrimination league, and from the universal popularity of Mario Puzo’s bestseller
The Godfather
novel and the Academy Award-winning movie version.