Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (37 page)

Mario Puzo’s youth was spent in the crime-ridden Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. Although he never associated with or knew an authentic mobster, he drew upon his knowledge of the area, research, and his imagination to fashion a compelling tale of Mafia life and death, centering around the fictional Don Vito Corleone, played memorably in the movie by Marlon Brando, and his “family.”

Although the book and the movie are rife with murders, brutality, betrayals, and mayhem, an underlying subtext appears to rationalize the virtues of Mafia or “family” loyalty. Criminal acts, including murder, can be interpreted in the story line as necessary expedients to enable early Italian immigrants and their descendants to obtain a measure of equal justice, financial success, and dignity in a hostile American culture and environment. Michael Corleone, the returning World War II hero and central figure, is compelled by fate and through belated realization of the honorable values of ethnic tradition and blood ties to commit and authorize murders. Finally, he accepts the role of Mob boss as his inherited duty to protect himself and to enlarge the criminal corporation created by his father.

A conspicuous theme of the novel and the movie revolves around Puzo’s characterizations: the scrupulous, well-intentioned mafiosi (the Corleones) versus their nefarious adversaries, the devious drug-trafficking villains. In the end, like an old-fashioned Western, the anti-drug, white-hat mafiosi good guys conquer the cruel and wicked Mob desperadoes. In reality, the Mafia was chiefly responsible for flooding America’s inner cities with heroin in the 1960s, and every family was enriched by drugs.

No group was more fascinated, appreciative, or proud of
The Godfather
theme than the Mafia. It mythologized mafiosi as men of honor and, perhaps unwittingly, preached that even in a criminal society loyalty and dedication to principles would triumph. Many wiseguys rejoiced in viewing the original film multiple times. Federal and local investigators on surveillance duty saw and heard made men and wannabes imitating the mannerisms and language of the screen gangsters. They endlessly played the movie’s captivating musical score, as if it were their private national anthem, at parties and weddings. The film validated their lifestyles and decisions to join the Mob and accept its credo. Moreover, it apparently justified a warped belief that mafiosi were members of a respected, benevolent society of deserving superior people.

After seeing the picture in 1972, a young wannabe, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who one day would acquire Mafia fame, was exultant. “I left that movie stunned,” Gravano reminisced. “I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, everybody, who felt exactly the same way. And not only the Mob end, not just the mobsters and the killing and all that bullshit, but that wedding in the beginning, the music and the dancing, it was us, the Italian people!”

Joey Gallo blended easily into this newly spun, naive cocoon of tolerance and admiration of the Mafia. Dinner party acquaintances might easily misjudge mobsters like Gallo as posing no threat to ordinary citizens, viewing him as an entertaining anti-establishment buccaneer. Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman thought otherwise. The yearlong investigation into the shooting of Joe Colombo unearthed information about Gallo’s friendly relationships with black prison inmates, and his dispatching them upon their release to his Brooklyn crew. Detectives were unable to establish a clear bridge between the dead gunman Jerome Johnson and Joey Gallo or any of his associates, but Seedman was convinced that Gallo had used an African-American prison chum to enlist the penniless Johnson, probably enticing him with the prospect of a huge payoff. The hit on Colombo, detectives theorized, was intended to clear the way for Gallo’s comeback. A pariah in the Colombo family, Gallo had much to gain from the boss’s elimination, and Seedman believed that the assassination attempt bore Crazy Joey’s peculiar trademark. “Gallo had earned his nickname by striking when his victims least expected,” Seedman stressed. “He was also right in character by going for the top of the same family he had attacked in 1960, when Joe Profaci was the don.”

For added confirmation, detectives knew from informers and from unguarded remarks by Joe Colombo’s soldiers that the family was thinking along the same lines. They also had Gallo in their sights as the secret hand behind the trigger that paralyzed their boss. Stopped for traffic violations or interrogations, Colombo soldiers would angrily demand, “Why don’t you pat down and get that scum bag Gallo?” Called in for police questioning, Gallo maintained he had no knowledge about Johnson or about the shooting, insisting that he had straightened out his life. While appearing carefree, Gallo nevertheless kept a bodyguard close by, usually the burly Peter “Pete the Greek” Diapoulas, a crony since their schoolboy days.

Ten months after Colombo was shot, on April 7, 1972, Gallo threw a forty-third birthday party for himself at the Copacabana nightclub, always a chic watering place for mobsters. Besides his relatives, Gallo invited Marta and Jerry Orbach, other entertainers, and the
New York Post’s
Broadway columnist Earl Wilson, for champagne toasts. When the Copa closed at 4:00 A.M., a restless and hungry Gallo drove downtown in his Cadillac for a late snack. Accompanying him were his bride of three weeks, Sina; her ten-year-old daughter, Lisa; his sister, Carmella Fiorello; Pete the Greek; and Pete’s girlfriend, Edith Russo. Unable to find an open restaurant in Chinatown, the party meandered a few
blocks south to Little Italy’s Mulberry Street. At the corner of Hester Street, they found a brightly lit, Italian-style restaurant, Umberto’s Clam House.

Without realizing it, Gallo had stumbled into a recently opened restaurant run by relatives of Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello, a barrel-chested capo in the Genovese family, and a Little Italy Mob enforcer. (Umberto’s was a minor diversion and cover for Ianniello; his main duties were extorting kickbacks from topless bars in Times Square and gay bars on the West Side and in Greenwich Village.) Gallo’s party seated itself at one of the butcher-block tables in the otherwise empty restaurant, and Gallo ordered huge helpings for all of them of conch, clams and shrimps. The carefree group was eating and laughing when a balding man in a sports jacket flung open the restaurant’s side door on Mulberry Street and blasted away at the party with an automatic revolver. As the women screamed and dishes clattered to the floor, Gallo bolted for the main door on Hester Street. The gunman pegged at least five shots at Gallo; two missed, one hit him in the buttocks, another in an elbow, and the last smashed through an artery in his back. Staggering outside, he collapsed a few feet from the door.

The shooter, with a slight smile of satisfaction, backed out of the side door to a waiting car. Gallons bodyguard, Pete the Greek, who had also been shot in the buttocks, finally managed to draw his pistol, firing a volley at the getaway car as it sped north on Mulberry Street. Within minutes, a police patrol car arrived and rushed Gallo to a hospital five minutes away. It was too late. He died in the emergency room from loss of blood before surgery could begin.

Suspicion immediately fell on Matty the Horse, the Genovese capo, who was in the restaurant when the bullets began flying. “I don’t know nothing,” Matty told detectives. “You think I’m crazy to let this happen in this place?” Ianniello’s story that he dived to the floor in the kitchen, kept his head down, and was uninvolved in the gangland execution was true. Two weeks later, detectives had a vivid picture of Gallo’s end—an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment hit, triggered by a wannabe’s hankering for a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder.

The details came from an eyewitness and an admitted participant in the killing, Joseph Luparelli. A seedy, bottom-level Colombo flunky from Brooklyn’s Bath Beach section, Luparelli never applied for a Social Security number because he had never held a legitimate job. An aging wannabe in his late thirties, he supported himself as a gofer and small-time fence of stolen property for Colombo soldiers, sycophantically performing menial chores.

On that fateful morning, Luparelli had been in Little Italy, trying to ingratiate
himself with several made Colombo men, playing cards and making small talk with them at one of the gang’s storefront hangouts. Shortly before 5:00 A.M., requiring a pre-breakfast snack, he stopped in at Umberto’s, the only Italian restaurant in the neighborhood still open at that hour, for a bowl of red clam chowder. Refreshed, he was chatting outside the restaurant with Matty the Horse when the jubilant Gallo party pulled up.

Sensing a golden opportunity, Luparelli hurried along Mulberry Street until he found four Colombo soldiers in a Chinese restaurant. “The
ubazze
is eating over at Umberto’s right now,” he excitedly informed them; the Italian word
ubazze
means “crazy person,” an obvious reference to Gallo. One of the men went to a phone booth and came back with orders from Joe “Yak” Yacovelli, the capo of their crew, to get Gallo. According to Luparelli, he drove with one of the men to a spot outside of Umberto’s, stationing themselves in the “crash car” to block any police or other vehicles from pursuing the getaway car. The three other Colombo hoods parked on Mulberry Street near the restaurant’s side door. Luparelli said he saw the shooter slip into Umberto’s, heard the gunfire, and watched as Gallo fell mortally wounded onto the sidewalk.

After the shooting, the three men in the getaway car ditched the auto and all five drove uptown in Luparelli’s car to Yacovelli’s East Side apartment, where the capo congratulated them for a well-done job. The five then drove to an apartment in suburban Nyack, where Yacovelli told them to hide out until it was safe to surface. Luparelli emphasized to detectives that his motive for fingering Gallo was his hope that it would help him become a made man and make the kind of money that he craved. “They got books just like unions, you know,” he said enviously. “They don’t let you in for nothing. They don’t care if they never let you in. They got to keep it exclusive or it gets loose.”

But Luparelli’s close contact in the safe house with the four Colombo soldiers made him increasingly jittery and paranoid. Their awkward behavior toward him—mainly cold stares and hushed conversations—convinced him they had decided he was untrustworthy and planned to whack him. After five days in the hideout, he lit out, drove his car to Newark Airport, and caught the first available flight to Southern California. Holed up in California with relatives, Luparelli became even more wildly paranoid. Certain that the Mob would track him down as a suspected rat, he turned himself in to the FBI, and was flown back to New York protected by detectives. Luparelli’s account of the Nyack hideaway was verified, and detectives trailed and tried unsuccessfully to wiretap the four Colombo soldiers who were still encamped there. Seedman
and other detectives on the case found Luparelli’s story of the Gallo ambush credible. Without corroborative evidence, however, under New York State law prosecutors had no murder or conspiracy case against the four soldiers or Yacovelli. With Luparelli’s sleazy background, his testimony alone was too thin for an indictment, let alone a conviction. Rewarded and aided by the authorities for his snitching, Luparelli disappeared into a witness-protection program, never to be heard from again.

Seedman was certain that his detectives had solved or found the answers to two important Mafia crimes: the shootings of Joe Colombo and Joey Gallo. The slaying of Gallo in front of innocent women relatives and a child violated Mafia protocol, but Mob rules justified it as retaliation for dishonoring Colombo and for committing the most grievous of Cosa Nostra sins: a hit on a boss without authorization by the Commission.

The shooting of Joe Colombo, and the murders of the assassin Jerome Johnson and Joey Gallo, are listed as unsolved. The only person involved in the incidents who was arrested and went on trial was Gallons wounded bodyguard, Pete the Greek Diapoulas. He was convicted of the relatively minor charge of possession of an illegal firearm. By receiving a suspended one-year sentence, he avoided spending a single day in jail. Diapolas’s six shots, which missed the fleeing killer and the escape car, became part of Mafia history. The errant bullets pockmarked the masonry of an apartment building across the street from Umberto’s Clam House. The restaurant and the bullet holes became enshrined as Little Italy landmarks for Mob cognoscenti.

Joe Colombo’s injuries were eventually fatal. Lingering on for seven years, unable to speak and only capable of moving two fingers of his right hand, he died in May 1978, a month short of his fifty-fifth birthday. Upon retiring as the head of New York’s detective bureau, Albert Seedman reflected that a singularly colorful and audacious mobster was responsible for issuing Colombo’s death warrant and, unintentionally, one for himself. “That little guy with steel balls,” Seedman added with a touch of admiration, was Joey Gallo.

Gallo’s ability to intrigue show business luminaries continued after his death. In 1975, the iconoclastic Bob Dylan composed and recorded the music and lyrics for a paean to the slain mobster. In Dylan’s hit song, “Joey,” Gallo was a misunderstood, unappreciated nonconformist who died too soon.