Crime: Crazy Like a Clam

One of the meanest mobsters in the U.S. is a small, tight-lipped hood from Brooklyn named Joseph (“Crazy Joey”) Gallo. In 1959, when he met Robert Kennedy, then counsel for Senator John Mc-Clellan’s rackets-investigating committee, Crazy Joey examined Kennedy’s office rug and offered his professional opinion: “It would be nice for a crap game.”

With the same sneering aplomb, Gallo last week went on trial in Manhattan on charges of trying to muscle in on a Brooklyn restaurant owned by one Theodore Moss. Not only did Gallo try to sell him $48,000 worth of stolen liquor, testified Moss, but he had demanded a cut of the business. As a persuader, said a detective, Gallo had threatened: “I’ll put you in the hospital for a couple of months if you don’t cut me in.”

Throughout the three-day trial, Gallo refused to say a word in his defense, although he did allow himself a Cagney-like snarl at a haggle of assistant district attorneys. “Ya dirty rats!” he observed. The jury quickly found Gallo guilty of attempted extortion and conspiracy. The finding, his first major conviction, could get Gallo up to 14½ years in Sing Sing when he is sentenced next month.

While Crazy Joey was on trial, the cops rounded up 14 members of the vending-machine racketeering mob that he had organized in Brooklyn, including his father, Albert Gallo, his two brothers, Larry Gallo and Albert Gallo Jr., and such assorted fish as Joseph Musumeci, Larry (“Big Lollypop”) Carna, Joseph (“Little Lollypop”) Carna and Frank (“Punchy”) Illiano. The cops made the arrests—the technical charge was consorting with criminals, that is, each other—after word got around that the Gallo mob was about to declare a shooting war on a rival Brooklyn gang headed by an olive oil distributor named Joseph Profaci, who stands high enough in the underworld to have attended the convention of hoods in Apalachin, N.Y., in 1957. True to their leader’s image, the Gallo mobsters laughed off their arrests (see cut).

Crazy Joey Gallo’s imminent trip up the river leaves unsettled two puzzling attacks on members of his mob: Who tried to garrote Larry Gallo in a Brooklyn tavern in August, and who shot a Gallo lieutenant, Joseph Magnasco, in October? If the Gallo gangsters know, they are not talking. As an explanation to the boys about why Crazy Joey had clammed up before the jury, the Brooklyn headquarters of the mob is festooned in locker room fashion with inspirational signs: “Don’t talk—the life you save may be your own.”