Joe Gallo

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Gallo was shot dead at Umbertos Clam House in New York's Little Italy. It happened at around 4:30 in the morning on the 7th of April 1972, his 43rd birthday. Gallo, nicknamed "Crazy Joe", was a captain in the Colombo crime family of New York City. Reports over the years have named different killers, yet "the case officially remains unsolved." How does a Brooklyn kid end up at the center of two wars inside the same crime family? What did he do to earn the nickname, and what did it cost the people around him? Why do songs and films keep returning to him? And who actually fired the shots that night?

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• 2. Brooklyn Boyhood

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  Joe Gallo was born in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in 1929, to Umberto and Mary Gallo. Umberto had been a bootlegger during Prohibition and put his earnings into a loan-sharking racket. He did little to discourage Joe and his two brothers, Larry and Albert, from joining in local crime.

  South Brooklyn would claim Gallo in the popular imagination, but he was actually raised in Kensington, which was then usually counted as part of Flatbush. His family owned a greasy spoon there called Jackie's Charcolette, at 108 Beverley Road. A United States Senate dossier on organized crime from 1964 still listed the family home at 639 East 4th Street as his permanent residence. He finished primary school at P.S. 179 and dropped out of the Brooklyn High School of Automotive Trades in Williamsburg at sixteen.

  Soon afterward, a car accident left him with head trauma and what was described as a "nervous tic." By then he had started plotting schemes with two lifelong associates, Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas and Frank Illiano. They gathered at the Ace Pool Room on Church Avenue and at a candy store on 36th Street and Fourteenth Avenue in Borough Park.

  In 1949, Gallo watched the film Kiss of Death, released in 1947. He began copying Richard Widmark's gangster character, Tommy Udo, and reciting lines of movie dialogue. After an arrest in 1950, he was held for a time at Kings County Hospital Center, where doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Albert Seedman, who later headed the New York City Police Department's Detective Bureau, called him "that little guy with steel balls."

  Larry and Albert were his partners in crime from the start, and Albert had already earned the street name "Kid Blast." The three brothers would soon have a headquarters of their own.

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• 3. The Dormitory

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  A three-story brick tenement at 51 President Street, in what is now Carroll Gardens, served as Gallo's headquarters. He called it "The Dormitory." The building had previously housed the Gallo family's vending machine business, and he allegedly kept a pet lion named Cleo in the basement.

  Gallo began as an enforcer and hitman for Joe Profaci, boss of the Profaci crime family. He also helped manage his father's loan-sharking business. Larry ran vending machines and jukeboxes, an operation often seen as the crown jewel of the family's rackets. Joe personally oversaw floating dice games, high-stakes card games, extortion shakedowns and a numbers game. Within a few years he secretly owned several Manhattan nightclubs and two sweatshops in the Garment District.

  In 1957, Profaci allegedly asked Gallo and his crew to kill Albert Anastasia, boss of the Gambino crime family. Anastasia's own underboss, Carlo Gambino, wanted his job and had asked Profaci for help. On the 25th of October, Anastasia sat in the barber's chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Two men with scarves over their faces burst in, shoved the barber aside and shot him dead.

  The killers have never been conclusively identified. Carmine Persico later claimed that he and Gallo did it, joking that he was part of Gallo's "barbershop quintet."

  The following year, the Gallo brothers were summoned to Washington, D.C., to testify before the McClellan Committee of the United States Senate. While visiting Senate Counsel Robert F. Kennedy in his office, Gallo flirted with Kennedy's secretary. He also told Kennedy that his carpet would be excellent for a dice game. On the witness stand, none of the brothers offered anything useful.

  Three years later, in 1961, the brothers would try something far bolder than a joke about a carpet.

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• 4. Hostage War

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  On the 27th of February 1961, the Gallo brothers kidnapped four of Profaci's top men. They were underboss Joseph Magliocco, Profaci's brother Frank, captain Salvatore Musacchia and soldier John Scimone. Profaci himself eluded capture and flew to Florida for safety.

  While the hostages were held, Larry and Albert sent Joe to California. The brothers wanted a more favorable financial arrangement from the family in exchange for the release. Joe wanted to kill one hostage and demand $100,000 before any talks began, but Larry overruled him. After a few weeks of negotiation, Profaci and his consigliere, Charles "the Sidge" LoCicero, struck a deal. The hostages went free without violence.

  Profaci never meant to honor it. On the 20th of August 1961, he ordered the deaths of Larry and of Joseph "Joe Jelly" Gioielli, a member of the Gallo crew. Gunmen allegedly killed Gioielli after inviting him to go fishing. Larry survived a strangulation attempt by Persico and Salvatore "Sally" D'Ambrosio at the Sahara Club in East Flatbush, because a police officer intervened.

  The Gallos had been allied with Persico against Profaci and his loyalists. After the betrayal, they began calling him "the Snake." The war that followed brought nine murders and three disappearances. Gallo's crew retreated to the Dormitory. Persico was indicted that year for trying to kill Larry, but the charges were dropped when Larry refused to testify.

  In November 1961, a jury convicted Joe Gallo of conspiracy and extortion for trying to squeeze money from a businessman. On the 21st of December, he was sentenced to seven to fourteen years in prison. The war would go on without him.

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• 5. Prison Years

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  Green Haven, Attica and Auburn were the three New York state prisons that held Gallo during his sentence. In 1962, while he was at Attica, Larry and Albert led five other members of the crew into a burning Brooklyn tenement near their hangout, the Longshore Rest Room. They rescued six children and their mother. The press briefly celebrated the crew.

  At Green Haven, Gallo befriended Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, an African-American drug trafficker. Gallo predicted that power in the Harlem drug rackets would shift toward black gangs. He coached Barnes on how to upgrade his criminal organization.

  On the 29th of August 1964, Gallo sued the New York Department of Corrections. He said officers at Green Haven had inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on him because he let a black barber cut his hair. The prison commissioner described him as a belligerent inmate and an agitator.

  At Auburn, Gallo took up watercolor painting and became an avid reader. He also worked as an elevator operator in the prison's woodworking shop. During a prison riot there, he rescued a badly wounded corrections officer from angry inmates. The officer later testified for him at a parole hearing.

  Donald Frankos, a fellow inmate at Auburn, said Gallo was "articulate and had excellent verbal skills." He could describe "gouging a man's guts out with the same eloquent ease that he used when discussing classical literature."

  In May 1968, with Joe still inside, his brother Larry died of cancer. When Joe finally walked out in 1971, the family he had left behind had changed beyond recognition.

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• 6. Colombo Feud

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  On the 7th of June 1962, Joe Profaci died of cancer after a long illness. Joseph Magliocco took over the family and kept up the fight with Gallo's brothers. On the 19th of May 1963, Persico survived an attack by a Gallo hit team, though he was shot several times. Later that year, Raymond L.S. Patriarca, boss of the Patriarca family, brokered a peace agreement between the two sides. Gallo later said it did not apply to him, because he was in prison when it was negotiated.

  The Commission, the governing body of the American Mafia, forced Magliocco to resign after learning he had helped plan a plot to overthrow it. Joseph Colombo, an ally of Gambino, became the new boss, and the family took the name Colombo. Colombo soon alienated Gambino by founding the Italian-American Civil Rights League. The media attention it drew was part of the problem.

  Gallo was released from prison on the 11th of April 1971. Sina, the woman who became his wife, later described how frail and pale he looked. "He looked like an old man. He was a bag of bones." She still saw the remnants of a strikingly handsome young man, with piercing blue eyes.

  Gallo soon moved into New York high society. The connection began with the actor Jerry Orbach, who played an inept mobster named Kid Sally Palumbo in the 1971 film The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. The role was based loosely on Gallo.

  Colombo and Joseph Yacovelli invited Gallo to a peace meeting and offered him $1,000. Gallo told them he was not bound by the 1963 agreement and demanded $100,000 instead. Colombo refused.

  On the 28th of June 1971, at a League rally in Columbus Circle, a gunman named Jerome A. Johnson shot Colombo three times, once in the head. Colombo's bodyguards killed Johnson immediately. Colombo survived but was paralyzed until his death in May 1978. Many in the family blamed Gallo, but police questioned him and eventually concluded that Johnson acted alone. The Colombo leadership stayed convinced that Gallo had ordered the shooting after his falling out with the family.

  Jeffie Lee Boyd, a Las Vegas showgirl, was Gallo's first wife. He married her around 1960 and divorced her in the mid-1960s. They remarried in July 1971 and divorced again later that year. They had one daughter, Joie. In March 1972, he married a 29-year-old actress, Sina Essary, and became stepfather to her daughter, Lisa Essary-Gallo, born in 1962. Sina would be a widow within three weeks.

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• 7. Night at Umbertos

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  Before Umbertos, Gallo's party had spent the evening at the Copacabana with Jerry Orbach and his wife, Marta. They watched a performance by the comedian Don Rickles and the singer Peter Lemongello. At the clam house, the group took two tables. It included Gallo's sister Carmella, his wife Sina, her daughter Lisa, his bodyguard Pete the Greek Diapoulas and Diapoulas' girlfriend. Gallo and Diapoulas sat facing the wall. Rickles and Lemongello had declined Gallo's invitation to come along, possibly saving their lives.

  Joseph Luparelli, a Colombo associate, later told a vivid story. He said he was sitting at the bar, unnoticed, when Gallo walked in. He claimed he left at once for a Colombo hangout two blocks away and contacted Yacovelli. He then recruited Philip Gambino, a Genovese soldier named Carmine "Sonny Pinto" DiBiase, and two men reputedly from the Patriarca family. The group believed the Colombos had a contract on Gallo's life.

  Luparelli said he stayed in the car while the four men went in through the back door. They opened fire with .32- and .38-caliber revolvers. Gallo swore and tried to draw his handgun, but twenty shots were fired at him. He was hit in the back, elbow and buttock. He overturned a butcher block dining table and staggered toward the front door. Witnesses said he was trying to draw fire away from his family. Diapoulas was shot once in the hip.

  Gallo stumbled into the street and collapsed. A police car took him to Beekman-Downtown Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at around 5:30 a.m.

  Police met Luparelli's account with skepticism. Joe Coffey, the New York City Police Department homicide detective who inherited the case, said eyewitness testimony and a reconstruction of the scene pointed to a single attacker. He also said police spread a false story about three shooters. Anyone who repeated it was immediately treated as unreliable.

  The author Charles Brandt notes that Luparelli's statement "was never corroborated in a single detail." Brandt suspects it was disinformation ordered by the Colombo family to cool tensions. Associates of the Genovese crime family owned Umbertos, which would normally suggest the Genoveses had approved a killing on their ground. Luparelli's version, a spontaneous act without approval from senior mobsters, took pressure off the feuding Colombo and Genovese families.

  Frank Sheeran, a hitman and labor union boss, offered a different story shortly before his death in 2003. He claimed he was the lone gunman, acting on orders from the mobster Russell Bufalino, who felt Gallo drew too much attention with his flashy lifestyle. Coffey and several other police investigators are confident Sheeran did it. An eyewitness at Umbertos, later a New York Times editor who spoke only on condition of anonymity, also identified Sheeran. Jerry Capeci, a journalist who reached the scene as a young reporter for the New York Post, wrote that if he were "forced to make a choice" he would pick Sheeran.

  Bill Tonelli challenged Sheeran's claim in a Slate article titled "The Lies of the Irishman." Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith did the same in The New York Review of Books, in a piece titled "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" Michael Franzese, a former Colombo family captain, watched the assassination scene in the film The Irishman and disputed it. He said he knows "for a fact what happened there."

  Sina remembered several attackers, all short and apparently Italian. Sheeran was of mixed Irish-Swedish descent and stood 6'4". What followed in the days after the shooting would show how Gallo's own family answered.

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• 8. Aftermath and Afterlife

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  Gallo's funeral took place under police surveillance. Over the open coffin, his sister Carmella declared, "the streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!" Albert, looking for revenge, sent a gunman from Las Vegas to the Neapolitan Noodle restaurant in Manhattan. Yacovelli, Alphonse Persico and Gennaro Langella were dining there. The gunman did not recognize them and shot four innocent diners instead, killing two.

  Yacovelli fled New York, leaving Persico as the new boss. The Colombo family sank into a second internal war that lasted several years. A 1974 agreement finally allowed Albert and his remaining crew to join the Genovese family.

  Luparelli grew increasingly paranoid and fled to California. He then contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and agreed to become a government witness, naming the four gunmen. No one was ever charged in Gallo's murder. He entered the witness protection program in 1972, and his current location is unknown. Carmine Persico, the man Gallo's crew called the Snake, died in 2019 while serving a 139-year prison sentence.

  In October 1975, the New York City Department of Water Resources began replacing the sewer on the "Gallo block" of President Street. On the 3rd of December 1975, a house at 21 President Street collapsed, and one man died. All work stopped for more than eighteen months. A pump failure left an open trench in the middle of the street, braced with steel and filled with stagnant water. That damaged the foundations of every building on the block and of the remaining buildings on an adjoining stretch of Carroll Street. It compounded probable earlier harm from the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on nearby Hicks Street.

  Frank DiMatteo, a former Gallo crew member, speculates that lawyers and corrupt politicians let the block rot to drive out the remaining Gallo associates. The area had become convenient to the gentrifying enclaves of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. By his account, only four buildings on the block belonged to the crew. The rest were owned by innocent families who had held them for generations. "The Law didn't care. They got what they wanted." As many as 33 buildings were condemned and replaced with new housing, and none of the Gallo-era buildings survive.

  Jimmy Breslin's 1969 book, also titled The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, was a fictionalized and satirical take on Gallo's war with the Profaci family. After Gallo's death, the producer Dino De Laurentiis made a more serious but still fictionalized drama, Crazy Joe, released in 1974. Carlo Lizzani directed it, and Peter Boyle played Gallo. It drew on newspaper articles by the reporter Nicholas Gage.

  Bob Dylan made Gallo the subject of "Joey," a 12-verse ballad on his 1976 album Desire. Critics said Dylan romanticized him too much.

  In 2019, Sebastian Maniscalco played Gallo in Martin Scorsese's film The Irishman, and Kyle Stefanski played him in Mob Town. In 2022, Joseph Russo played Gallo in the Paramount+ series The Offer, so the screen has kept returning to him into the 2020s.

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