Joe Gallo | |
|---|---|
 Gallo mugshot taken by theNew York City Police Department, 1961. | |
| Born | Joseph Gallo (1929-04-07)April 7, 1929 New York City,New York, U.S. |
| Died | April 7, 1972(1972-04-07) (aged 43) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Gunshots |
| Other names | "Crazy Joe" |
| Occupation | Mobster |
| Spouse(s) | Jeffie Lee Boyd (m. 196?;div. 196?), |
| Children | 1 |
| Relatives | Albert Gallo (brother) Larry Gallo (brother) |
| Allegiance | Colombo crime family |
| Conviction | Extortion (1961) |
| Criminal penalty | Seven to 14 years imprisonment; served 10 years |
Joseph Gallo (April 7, 1929 – April 7, 1972), also known as "Crazy Joe", was anItalian-Americanmobster and acaptain in theColombo crime family ofNew York City.
Diagnosed withschizophrenia in his youth, Gallo became an enforcer in theProfaci crime family and formed his own crew with his brothers,Larry andAlbert. In 1957,Joe Profaci allegedly asked the Gallo crew to murderAlbert Anastasia, the boss of what was to become theGambino crime family; Anastasia was later murdered at a barbershop inMidtown Manhattan. In 1961, the Gallo brothers kidnapped four of Profaci's top men:underbossJoseph Magliocco, Frank Profaci (Joe Profaci's brother), captain Salvatore Musacchia andsoldier John Scimone, demanding a more favorable financial scheme for the hostages' release. After a few weeks of negotiation, Profaci and hisconsigliere, Charles "the Sidge" LoCicero, made a deal with the Gallos and secured the peaceful release of the hostages. This incited theFirst Colombo War.
In 1961, Gallo was sentenced to seven-to-fourteen years' imprisonment forconspiracy andextortion. During his incarceration, Magliocco took over the family in the wake of Profaci's death, leading to a murder attempt againstCarmine Persico by the remaining Gallo brothers in 1963.Patriarca family bossRaymond L.S. Patriarca negotiated a peace agreement between the two factions, but Gallo later refused to abide by the agreement, citing his imprisonment. After Gallo's release from prison in 1971, a peace offering of $1,000 was made by bossJoseph Colombo, but Gallo demanded $100,000; Colombo refused. On June 28, 1971, at anItalian-American Civil Rights League rally inColumbus Circle, Colombo was shot three times by anAfrican-American gunman, who was immediately killed by Colombo's bodyguards; Colombo survived the shooting but wasparalyzed. Although many in the Colombo family blamed Gallo for the shooting, police eventually concluded that the gunman acted alone after they had questioned Gallo.
The Colombo family leadership was convinced that Gallo ordered their boss' murder after his falling out with the family, inciting the Second Colombo War. On April 7, 1972, around 4:30 a.m., Gallo was shot dead atUmbertos Clam House in New York'sLittle Italy while celebrating his 43rd birthday. Although differing accounts of who the killer or killers were have been reported by various sources over the years, "the case officially remains unsolved."[1]
Joe Gallo was born on April 7, 1929, in theRed Hook section ofBrooklyn inNew York City. His parents were Umberto and Mary Gallo. Abootlegger duringProhibition, Umberto invested his earnings into aloan-sharkingracket and did little to discourage Gallo and his two brothers,Larry andAlbert, from participating in local criminal activity.[2]
Although he would remain deeply entwined withSouth Brooklyn in the popular imagination, and often frequented the area as a youth because of familial ties, Gallo was actually raised inKensington (then customarily characterized as a subsection ofFlatbush), where his family owned and operated Jackie's Charcolette, agreasy spoon at 108 Beverley Road. As late as 1964, aUnited States Senate dossier onorganized crime identified the family's home at 639 East 4th Street as Gallo's permanent residence.[3][a] Gallo completed his primary education at P.S. 179 in Kensington before dropping out of the Brooklyn High School of Automotive Trades inWilliamsburg at the age of sixteen.
Shortly thereafter, Gallo sustainedhead trauma in an automobile accident, resulting in the manifestation of a "nervous tic"; by this juncture, he and lifelong associates Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas andFrank Illiano had begun to contemplate various criminal schemes while frequenting the Ace Pool Room on Church Avenue and a candy store on 36th Street and Fourteenth Avenue in nearbyBorough Park.[6] In 1949, after viewing the filmKiss of Death (1947), Gallo began mimickingRichard Widmark's gangster character "Tommy Udo" and reciting movie dialogue.[2] After a 1950 arrest he was temporarily confined toKings County Hospital Center, where he was diagnosed withschizophrenia.[7]Albert Seedman, the head ofNew York City Police Department'sDetective Bureau, called Gallo "that little guy with steel balls."[8] Gallo's brothers Larry and Albert (the latter of whom had by now gained the street moniker "Kid Blast") were also his criminal associates.[9]
Gallo's first wife – whom he married around 1960, divorced in the mid-1960s and then remarried in July 1971 – wasLas Vegasshowgirl Jeffie Lee Boyd. Later in 1971, Jeffie divorced Gallo again. The couple had one daughter, Joie.[10][11] In March 1972, three weeks before his death, Gallo married 29-year-old actress Sina Essary. He became the stepfather of Sina's daughter, Lisa Essary-Gallo (born 1962).[12]
Gallo started as anenforcer andhitman forJoe Profaci in theProfaci crime family. In addition to helping to manage his father's loan-sharking business and Larry'svending machine andjukebox operations (with the latter often perceived as the "crown jewel" of the family's rackets), Gallo directly oversaw a variety of enterprises, including floating dice and high-stakes card games,extortion shakedowns and anumbers game. He maintained his headquarters at "The Dormitory," a three-story bricktenement at 51 President Street (within the boundaries of Brooklyn's contemporaryCarroll Gardens) that previously housed the Gallo family's vending machine interests; there, he allegedly kept a pet lion named Cleo in the basement. Within a few years, Gallo secretly owned severalManhattannightclubs and twosweat shops in theGarment District.
In 1957, Profaci allegedly asked Gallo and his crew to murderAlbert Anastasia, the boss of theGambino crime family. Anastasia'sunderboss,Carlo Gambino, wanted to replace him and asked Profaci for assistance. On October 25, Anastasia entered the barbershop at thePark Sheraton Hotel inMidtown Manhattan. As Anastasia relaxed in the barber's chair, two men—scarves covering their faces—rushed in, shoved the barber out of the way and killed the Gambino boss in a hail of bullets.[13] Anastasia's killers have never been conclusively identified, butCarmine Persico later claimed that he and Gallo had shot Anastasia, joking that he was part of Gallo's "barbershop quintet."[8]
The following year, Gallo and his brothers were summoned toWashington, D.C., to testify before theMcClellan Committee of theUnited States Senate on organized crime. While visiting Senate CounselRobert F. Kennedy in his office, Gallo flirted with Kennedy's secretary and told Kennedy his carpet would be excellent for a dice game. On the witness stand, none of the brothers provided any useful information.[14]
On February 27, 1961, the Gallo brothers kidnapped four of Profaci's top men:underbossJoseph Magliocco, Frank Profaci (Joe Profaci's brother),caporegime (captain) Salvatore Musacchia andsoldato (soldier) John Scimone.[15] Profaci himself eluded capture and flew to sanctuary inFlorida.[15] While holding the hostages, Larry and Albert sent Joe toCalifornia. The Gallos demanded a more favorable financial scheme for the hostages' release. Gallo wanted to kill one hostage and demand $100,000 before negotiations, but his brother Larry overruled him. After a few weeks of negotiation, Profaci and hisconsigliere, Charles "the Sidge" LoCicero, struck a deal with the Gallos and secured the peaceful release of the hostages.[16][17]
However, Profaci had no intention of honoring this peace agreement. On August 20, 1961, he ordered the murders of Larry and Joseph "Joe Jelly" Gioielli, a member of the Gallo crew. Gunmen allegedly murdered Gioielli after inviting him to go fishing.[15] Larry survived astrangulation attempt by Persico and Salvatore "Sally" D'Ambrosio at the Sahara Club inEast Flatbush after a police officer intervened.[15][18] The Gallos had been previously aligned with Persico against Profaci and his loyalists;[15][18] they then began calling Persico "the Snake" after he had betrayed them.[18] The gang war continued, resulting in nine murders and threedisappearances.[18] With the start of the war, the Gallo crew retreated to the Dormitory.[14] Persico wasindicted later that year for the attempted murder of Larry, but the charges were dropped when Larry refused to testify.[19]
In November 1961, Gallo was convicted ofconspiracy andextortion for attempting to extort money from a businessman.[14] On December 21 of that year, he was sentenced to seven-to-fourteen years in prison.[20]
While serving his sentence, Gallo was incarcerated at three New York state prisons:Green Haven Correctional Facility,Attica Correctional Facility andAuburn Correctional Facility. In 1962, when Gallo was serving time in Attica, his brothers Larry and Albert, along with five other members of the Gallo crew, rushed into a burning Brooklyn tenement near their hangout, the Longshore Rest Room, and rescued six children and their mother from a fire. The crew was briefly celebrated in the press.[21][22]
While at Green Haven, Gallo became friends withAfrican-Americandrug traffickerLeroy "Nicky" Barnes.[23] Gallo predicted a power shift in theHarlem drug rackets towards black gangs, and coached Barnes on how to upgrade his criminal organization.[24] On August 29, 1964, Gallo sued theNew York Department of Corrections, stating thatcorrections officers inflictedcruel and unusual punishment on him at Green Haven after he allowed a black barber to cut his hair. The prison commissioner characterized Gallo as a belligerent inmate and an agitator.[25]
At Auburn, Gallo took upwatercolor painting, became an avid reader and worked as an elevator operator in the prison's woodworking shop. During aprison riot there, Gallo rescued a severely wounded corrections officer from angry inmates. The officer later testified for Gallo at aparole hearing.[2] According to Donald Frankos, a fellow inmate at Auburn, Gallo was "articulate and had excellent verbal skills, being able to describe gouging a man's guts out with the same eloquent ease that he used when discussing classical literature."[26]
In May 1968, while Gallo was still in prison, his brother Larry died ofcancer.[27]
The Profaci family went through a period of change during Gallo's incarceration. On June 7, 1962, after a long illness, Profaci died of cancer.[28] Magliocco took over the family and continued the battle with Gallo's brothers. On May 19, 1963, Persico survived an assault by a Gallo hit team, although he was shot multiple times.[29] Later that year, through negotiations withPatriarca family bossRaymond L.S. Patriarca, a peace agreement was reached between the two factions.[15] Gallo later stated that the peace agreement did not apply to him because he was in prison when it was negotiated.[30]
The Commission, the American Mafia's governing body, forced Magliocco to resign as boss after they discovered he helped formulate a plot to overthrow them.Joseph Colombo, an ally of Gambino, was named as the new Profaci family boss; the family was renamed theColombo crime family.[31] However, Colombo soon alienated Gambino with his establishment of theItalian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL) and the media attention that it entailed. Gallo was released from prison on April 11, 1971.[32] His second wife, Sina, described him shortly after his release, saying he appeared extremely frail and pale,
He looked like an old man. He was a bag of bones. You could see the remnants of what had been a strikingly handsome man in his youth. He had beautiful features—beautiful nose, beautiful mouth and piercing blue eyes.[12]
Gallo soon became a part of New York high society. His connection started when actorJerry Orbach played the inept mobster Kid Sally Palumbo in the filmThe Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), a role based loosely on Gallo.[8] Following his release, Colombo and Joseph Yacovelli invited Gallo to a peace meeting with an offering of $1,000.[33][32] Gallo reportedly told the family representatives that he was not bound by the 1963 peace agreement and demanded $100,000 to settle the dispute, which Colombo refused.[34][32] On June 28, 1971, at an IACRL rally inColumbus Circle, Colombo was shot three times, once being in the head, by anAfrican-American gunman named Jerome A. Johnson; Johnson was immediately killed by Colombo's bodyguards.[35] Colombo survived the shooting but wasparalyzed[36] until his death in May 1978.[35] Although many in the Colombo family blamed Gallo for the shooting, police eventually concluded that Johnson was a lone gunman after they had questioned Gallo.[30] The Colombo leadership was convinced that Gallo ordered the murder after his falling out with the family.[37]
On April 7, 1972, around 4:30 a.m., Gallo and his family enteredUmbertos Clam House in Manhattan'sLittle Italy to celebrate his 43rd birthday with sister Carmella, wife Sina, her daughter Lisa, his bodyguard Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas and Diapoulas' girlfriend.[38] Earlier that evening, the Gallo party had visited theCopacabana with Orbach and his wife, Marta, to see a performance by comedianDon Rickles and singerPeter Lemongello.[39] Once at Umbertos, the Gallo party took two tables, with Gallo and Diapoulas facing the wall.[9] Rickles and Lemongello declined Gallo's invitation to join them at Umbertos, possibly saving their lives.[40]
Colombo associate Joseph Luparelli claimed he was sitting at the bar, unbeknownst to Gallo. When Luparelli saw Gallo, he claimed he immediately left Umbertos and walked to a Colombo hangout two blocks away. After contacting Yacovelli, Luparelli said he recruited Colombo associate Philip Gambino, Genovese soldier Carmine "Sonny Pinto" DiBiase[32] and two other men – reputedly members of the Patriarca family – to kill Gallo due to their belief the Colombos had a contract on Gallo's life. Upon reaching Umbertos, Luparelli claimed he stayed in the car while the other four men went inside through the back door.[38]
Between seafood courses, Luparelli asserted that the four gunmen walked into the dining room and opened fire with.32- and.38 caliberrevolvers. Gallo swore and attempted to draw his handgun, but twenty shots were fired at him and he was hit in the back, elbow and buttock.[9] After overturning abutcher block dining table, Gallo staggered to the front door. Witnesses claimed that he was attempting to draw fire away from his family. Diapoulas was shot once in the hip.[9] The mortally wounded Gallo stumbled into the street and collapsed. He was taken in a police car to Beekman-Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at around 5:30 a.m.[9][38]
Luparelli's account earned wide publicity but was met with skepticism by police. NYPD homicide detective Joe Coffey, who inherited the Gallo case from the original investigators, reported that eyewitness testimony and crime scene reconstruction led police to believe that Gallo was killed by a lone assailant.[41] Coffey also asserted that police circulated a false story about three shooters to help screen information from supposed witnesses or informers: anyone who reported three gunmen rather than one was immediately deemed unreliable.[41] AuthorCharles Brandt notes that "[Luparelli's] statement was never corroborated in a single detail" and resulted in no arrests.[41] Brandt further speculates that Luparalli's confession was most likelydisinformation ordered by the Colombo family with the intention of defusing tensions after the Gallo shooting. Umbertos was owned by associates of theGenovese crime family, which would normally imply the Genoveses had given their blessing to a killing on their territory, but Luparelli's account, that the shooting was a spontaneous unplanned act without approval from high-rankingmafiosi, took pressure off the feuding Colombo and Genovese families.[41]
A differing but equally disputed[42] account of the murder was offered byFrank Sheeran, a hitman andlabor union boss. Shortly before his death in 2003, Sheeran claimed that he was the lone triggerman in the Gallo hit acting on orders from mobsterRussell Bufalino, who felt that Gallo was drawing undue attention with his flashy lifestyle.[41][43] Coffey and several other NYPD investigators are confident that Sheeran killed Gallo.[41] Furthermore, an eyewitness at Umbertos on the night of the incident, later aNew York Times editor who spoke on condition of anonymity, also identified Sheeran as the man she observed shooting Gallo.[41]Jerry Capeci, a journalist and Mafia expert who was at Umbertos shortly after the shooting as a young reporter for theNew York Post, later wrote if he were "forced to make a choice" about who shot Gallo, Sheeran was the most likely culprit.[44]
Bill Tonelli disputes the truthfulness of Sheeran's claim in hisSlate article "The Lies of the Irishman," as doesHarvard Law School professorJack Goldsmith in "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" which appeared inThe New York Review of Books.[45][46] Former Colombo family captainMichael Franzese also disputes that Sheeran was the killer when reviewing the scene depicting the assassination inThe Irishman, claiming that he knows "for a fact what happened there" based on his personal involvement with the Mafia at the time.[47] Gallo's widow later stated that she remembered the attack involving multiple men, all of whom were short and appeared to be Italian. Sheeran, on the other hand, was of mixed Irish-Swedish descent and 6'4".[42]
Gallo's funeral was held under police surveillance; his sister Carmella declared over his open coffin that "the streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!"[48] Looking for revenge, Albert sent a gunman fromLas Vegas to the Neapolitan Noodle restaurant in Manhattan, where Yacovelli,Alphonse Persico andGennaro Langella were dining. However, the gunman did not recognize the mobsters and shot four innocent diners instead, killing two of them.[49] After this assassination attempt, Yacovelli fled New York, leaving Persico as the new boss.[50] The Colombo family, led by the imprisoned Persico, was plunged into asecond internecine war which lasted for several years, until a 1974 agreement allowed Albert and his remaining crew to join the Genovese family.
An increasingly paranoid Luparelli fled to California, then contacted theFederal Bureau of Investigation and reached a deal to become a government witness. He implicated the four gunmen in the Gallo murder. However, police could not bring charges against them; there was no corroborating evidence and Luparelli was deemed an unreliable witness. No one was ever charged in Gallo's murder.[8]
In October 1975, theNew York City Department of Water Resources began to replace the sewer on the "Gallo block" of President Street with a system designed to connect to a newsewage treatment plant in Red Hook. When a house at 21 President Street collapsed on December 3, 1975 (resulting in the death of one man), all work on the project stopped for more than eighteen months, leaving an "open trench in the middle of the street [...] braced with steel and filled with stagnant water" due to an ensuing pump failure; this compromised the foundations of every building on the block and the remaining buildings on an adjoining stretch of Carroll Street, compounding the effects of probable earlier damage stemming from the construction of theBrooklyn–Battery Tunnel and the depressed alignment of theBrooklyn–Queens Expressway on nearby Hicks Street.[51] Gallo crew member Frank DiMatteo has speculated that "lawyers and corrupt politicians [...] decided to turn the whole block into a stinking shithole until no one could live there anymore" in an effort to rid the area — by now convenient to thegentrifying enclaves of Carroll Gardens andCobble Hill — of remaining Gallo associates.[52] According to DiMatteo, only four buildings on the block were owned by the Gallo crew: "The rest were all owned by innocent people who'd had those buildings in their families for generations. [...] The Law didn't care. They got what they wanted."[53] As many as 33 buildings on the block were subsequently condemned and replaced with new housing, with none of the Gallo-era buildings extant today.[54]
AuthorJimmy Breslin's 1969 bookThe Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight was a fictionalized and satirical depiction of Gallo's war with the Profaci family. It was made into a 1971feature film withJerry Orbach playing Kid Sally Palumbo, a surrogate for Gallo.
After Gallo's murder, producerDino De Laurentiis produced a more serious, but still fictionalized drama about Gallo titledCrazy Joe, released in 1974. Based on newspaper articles by reporterNicholas Gage, the movie was directed byCarlo Lizzani and starredPeter Boyle as the title character.
Gallo is the main character inBob Dylan's biographical, 12-verse ballad "Joey".[56] The song appears in Dylan's 1976 albumDesire. Dylan was criticized for overly romanticizing his life in the song.
Gallo was portrayed bySebastian Maniscalco in the 2019Martin Scorsese filmThe Irishman.
Gallo is portrayed in the 2019 filmMob Town byKyle Stefanski.[57]
In theParamount+ 2022 TV SeriesThe Offer, Gallo is portrayed by Joseph Russo.
Joe Gallo.
Joseph Colombo.
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