The Nation: The Mafia: Back to the Bad Old Days?

IT was to be a celebrazione, a party, an old-fashioned T-shirt, hot-dog and straw-hat festival of ethnic pride. Manhattan’s Columbus Circle was roofed with plastic streamers in red, white and green, the colors of the old country. The guy wires hummed in the breeze as an organ on the bandstand piped out random tunes for the early arrivals. Vendors set up rows of gaily colored booths to sell buttons (WE’RE NO. l), pennants (ITALIAN POWER!) and other paraphernalia of prideful protest. Now, in the already shimmering morning heat, the buses came rolling in from Corona in Queens, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and all the Little Italys of the city. The occasion was the Italian-American Civil Rights League’s second annual Unity Day, and it was meant to be fun for everyone.

No one was looking to enjoy himself more than Joseph Colombo Sr., 48, the league’s burly founder, unofficial leader and chief promoter. The head of one of New York’s five Mafia families of organized crime, Colombo had discovered a double life through the league. Started casually, in one year it grew into a genuine vehicle of expression for thousands of Americans of Italian descent who had nothing to do with the Mafia or crime. Harnessing their honest sentiments, Colombo had helped Italian Americans to achieve new pride—and managed to do a few things for the narrower cause as well, like embarrassing the Justice Department and The Godfather film makers into dropping the words Mafia and Cosa Nostra from their vocabulary.

Thus, on his day, Colombo moved easily through the crowd, shaking hands, joking, posing for photographers. Suddenly shots rang out, barely audible above the noise of the happy crowd. Colombo crumpled to the ground, bleeding heavily from the head and neck.

Almost immediately, another volley sounded and his assailant, a black posing as a photographer who only seconds before had been filming Colombo, pitched forward face down, dead. Later identified as Jerome Johnson, 24, he had been silenced by a still unidentified league captain, Colombo bodyguard, or someone posing as part of Joe’s retinue. Johnson’s killer escaped as professionally as he had carried out his mission, shooting Johnson three times even as police clustered around.

Hysterical spectators either rushed to see what was happening or fled in fear of more gunfire. There were confused shouts of “They got Joe! Joe’s dead!” As word that the assailant was black rippled through the crowd, shock gave way to anger. Several blacks were roughed up. One, a musician who had been hired to entertain later in the day, was beaten by five or six men as onlookers shouted, “Kill him! Kill him!”

Life Follows Art

With blood streaming from the bullet wounds, Colombo was rushed to nearby Roosevelt Hospital. In a five-hour operation, surgeons removed the most damaging bullet, which had lodged in Colombo’s cerebellum. Placed under intensive care, Colombo failed to regain consciousness, and despite the resurgence of some vital signs, was given only a fifty-fifty chance to live. Still, a less robust man might have never made it to the operating table. Said one doctor: “He’s tough as hell.”

Soon after the shooting, telephoned threats were received that a man was going to “machine-gun the whole family.” Colombo’s wife Lucille and sons, Anthony, 26, Joseph Jr., 24, and Vincent, 21, quickly converted a second-floor waiting room into a battle center. Within hours, Roosevelt Hospital took on the look of a grim, almost surrealistic parody of a Godfatheresque scene from Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel.

In the book, Godfather Vito Corleone is shot down in the street by members of a rival Mafia family but survives, hovering near death. To guard against a feared second attack, his family stations private detectives and trusted caporegimes (lieutenants) throughout the hospital where he is recuperating. If anything, Colombo security within Roosevelt Hospital was even tighter, despite the presence of uniformed and plain-clothes New York City policemen.

At the hospital’s entrances, small groups of outsize, burly men, wearing tiny green-and-red Italian-American League pins, nervously watched the streets, quickly sizing up each approaching pedestrian. “You watch this stairway,” one bull-necked “captain” instructed a younger man. “If somebody goes into the hallway, you follow him. If he gets in the elevator, you get in with him. And if he gets off at the floor, you tell him he can’t go no further.”

Inside the hospital, caporegimes and “button men,” or soldiers, the lowest-ranking Mafia family members, prowled the corridors near Colombo’s room. No one was allowed near the room without the O.K. of Vincent (“Vinnie”)

Vingo, a Colombo family loan shark with a fearsome reputation for violence.

Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., his wife, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, who recently concluded an alliance between his militant Jewish Defense League and Colombo’s league, were among the few nonfamily members to pass Vingo’s muster. Davis, who emerged from the hospital grim and tight-lipped after visiting with the Colombo family, refused to comment on the shooting, saying only that Colombo has “our prayers.”

The Traditional Mafia Way The brotherhood that is the Mafia has always operated in secrecy. Sworn to an omertd — the oath of silence — in a ceremony of blood and fire, the old-line Mafiosi cultivated their anonymity as the first line of defense against ar rest and prosecution. Despite the publicity caused by Prohibition gangland wars, the Mafia was still able to maintain a cloak of secrecy around its activities. Behind this shield, Mafia leaders gained control of gambling and narcotics, some labor unions and legitimate businesses. When the first systematic crackdowns by law-enforcement agencies started ten years ago, the bosses deemed their facelessness more important than ever.

Until Joe Colombo burst into headlines more than a year ago, the pattern of silence had never been broken. In an America now angrily aware of the Cosa Nostra, Colombo wanted to return to the omerta of turn-of-the-century Little Italys, where Mafia was a whispered word and bosses were not bad gered by grand juries, tax investigators and wiretaps. To accomplish his goal, Colombo tapped deepseated, legitimate grievances among Italian Americans and — shocking editorial writers and Mob capos alike—jumped into press conferences and picket lines. He sought to make Cosa Nostra private once more by turning any derision of Italian Americans—Mafiosi or not—into a cause for public censure. It was a radical notion that more traditional Mafia leaders could not have imagined and, in the end, could not countenance.

Ironically, Colombo’s deviation from old-line Mafia methods resulted from his adherence to the traditional code of family loyalty (see box, page 21). When his son Joseph Jr. was arrested in April 1970 on a charge of melting coins into silver ingots, Colombo acted at once. He took the usual steps of putting up bail and hiring a top lawyer to look for irregularities and loopholes. Then he did something new. He began picketing the FBI, claiming that he and his family were being harassed. After several months of daily demonstrations, the Italian-American Civil Rights League was formed.

The league’s first major action was to sponsor Italian-American Unity Day last year. The rally conspicuously closed stores in neighborhoods controlled by the Mafia; New York’s waterfront was virtually shut down when many longshoremen took the day off for the ethnic celebration, and almost every politician in the city joined the 50,000 celebrants in Columbus Circle. Nelson Rockefeller was offered honorary league membership and accepted.

Not only did the league persuade the Justice Department and some moviemakers to ban the term Mafia, but its campaign against corporations that used Italian stereotypes in their advertising led to cancellation of television commercials, including a prizewinning Alka-Seltzer ad, “Spicy Meatballs.” The Ford Motor Co. assured the league that in television series it sponsored the FBI would not track down criminals belonging to something called the Mafia. Plans for a $3.5 million hospital were announced; recently the league set up a children’s summer camp. A year after the first pickets marched in front of FBI headquarters, Colombo was honored as league man-of-the-year. Thirteen hundred people came to the dinner marking his “undying devotion to the Italian-American people and all humanitarian causes.”

There were articles in magazines (TIME, April 5) and newspapers on Colombo; a lengthy story in a recent issue of New York analyzed Colombo’s role as a catalyst for ethnic pride and an influence in New York City politics. To some observers, Colombo appeared to change as a result of the heady publicity: he started to view himself as a civil rights leader just as misunderstood by cops in New York as black leaders were by rural sheriffs in the South. Each of his successes—and some were formidable, even laudable—underscored his determination. But those same successes were writing his own contract.

Blacks v. the Mob

Beyond Johnson lie several fascinating theories about the motives for the assassination attempt. An hour after the shooting, in a telephone call to the Associated Press, a group calling itself the Black Revolutionary Attack Team claimed credit for the shooting and vowed further assaults on figures who exploit the black community. Two days later they warned that an apartment house owned by a white Harlem drug pusher would be bombed; it was. The group had never been heard of before the first phone call, and authorities were unable initially to determine the identity or strength of its members. The rhetoric of black militants has recently become increasingly abusive of the Cosa Nostra, accusing Mob heroin traffickers of committing narcotics genocide in black neighborhoods.

Less altruistic motives could have been at work in New York’s black communities: black mobsters eager to gain control of Mafia narcotics and gambling operations in the ghettos would have had reason to have Colombo shot. Black gangsters have become impatient to move out of the lower-echelon, dangerous jobs traditionally assigned them by, Syndicate leaders.

Colombo’s career as a gangster also could provide a plausible motive—revenge. One product of his years as a member of the assassination team of Joseph Profaci, head of a New York family, is a list of victims’ relatives—young men orphaned by contract, brothers bound to avenge a family murder—who would like to see Colombo killed. His rise in the Mob hierarchy has also earned him the bitter enmity of former comrades, notably Joseph (“Crazy Joe”) Gallo, onetime Profaci triggerman whom Colombo opposed during a bloody gang war in the early ’60s (see box).

But the most likely explanation for the Columbus Circle attack is as old as the Mafia itself and as new as Joe Colombo’s vision of his role of Mafia chieftain. The New York families, or tribes, of the Cosa Nostra are on the edge of a classic power struggle, precipitated by Colombo’s refusal to rule as Mafia bosses have always ruled — quietly and privately, in the tradition of the Sicilian dons. The Mafia that he insists is nonexistent almost surely tried to kill Joe Colombo.

A Cruel Dilemma On successive nights, 50 Colombo faithful marched in a prayer circle outside the hospital’s emergency-entrance parking lot. Propped against a wall was a floral display of wilting red, green and white carnations. Small plaster statues of saints were mounted on the display’s legs, and candles in various stages of use were piled beneath it. Their candles flickering in the warm evening wind, the marchers chanted, “St. Jude, help Joe Colombo” or joined in the Lord’s Prayer.

The assassination attempt posed a cruel dilemma for Italian Americans, who regard the league as a voice for their frustrations and have attempted to overlook Colombo’s Mafia life. Father Louis Gigante possesses a unique in sight into this moral tug of war: he is both the league chaplain and the younger brother of a man who was accused of trying to assassinate Frank Costello in 1957. Father Gigante was among those keeping vigil outside Roosevelt Hospital. Said he: “The league is definitely a positive thing, but all they talk about in the papers is the crime thing.

We are coming together to combat problems. All I know about Joe’s past is what I read in the papers. He pulled us together. The people weren’t there Monday for Joe Colombo, but because their pride had been excited.”

Hospital authorities were understandably nervous about Colombo’s presence and the activity that accompanied it. Executive Vice President Peter Terenzio refused to discuss the matter at all. One hospital guard, however, voiced a common fear. “If this guy dies,” he said, “they’ll probably turn the hospital upside down. These kind of people—it’s a pleasure to stay away from them. They are ready to explode at the drop of a hat. They are really touchy.”

Troubled Assassin

Fearing just such an explosion, New York City police worked feverishly to determine who wanted Colombo dead. The trail began with Johnson. By matching spent bullets with the pistol, a 7.65-mm. automatic of foreign manufacture, taken from Johnson’s body, police established with some certainty that Johnson had shot Colombo. A film made at the time of the attack showed Johnson photographing Colombo just seconds before the shooting, and partly confirms eyewitness reports that he had an accomplice. In one sequence, Johnson walked over to an Afroed black woman with a shoulder bag and handed her his movie camera.

From relatives, friends and police records, investigators pieced together a sketch of Johnson as a deeply troubled character, part sadist, part con man, part dreamer. To coeds at Rutgers University’s campus in New Brunswick, N.J., where he was a frequent drop-in in recent months, he was known as “Pisces Man” because of a fascination, bordering on obsession, for astrology. He could be a spellbinding talker, pleasant to be around—for a while.

To others, he was darkly sinister. One woman told police of meeting Johnson at Rutgers. Not much later he appeared at her apartment, she said, and that was the beginning of “three months of torture.” The woman alleged that she was periodically beaten and raped by him while being threatened with a machete or sword. She also told of Johnson’s talking far into the night, contending that he was God and praising Italians. When she heard that Colombo had been shot by a man named Johnson, she said, she knew instantly who it was.

Born in Waycross, Ga., Johnson was raised by his maternal grandmother until, at nine, he moved to New Brunswick to join his mother. After high school graduation in 1964, he moved to California and from there drifted through a patchwork of odd jobs, wanderings and scrapes with the law. Police records list at least seven arrests on charges ranging from burglary and rape to grand larceny and narcotics possession. He was last arrested in New York City on June 4, on charges of possessing hashish and marijuana, but the charges were dropped.

Johnson’s last known address was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Among the belongings found there was a box of 7.65-mm. bullets. The remainder of his worldly goods consisted of a monkey, a curved 3½ sword and sheath, a flute, a solid wooden cane, a riding crop, a bottle of English Leather lotion in a wooden box, stolen blank checks, a book titled Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, a scrape and a crimson, gold-threaded cape.

Decline of the Commission

Colombo’s new celebrity status attracted attention to men who decidedly opposed public scrutiny—the bosses of the other New York families. A great deal of the scrutiny came from law-enforcement agencies. Mafia bosses, who had built careful layers of insulation around themselves—never dealing directly with button men, trusting only a few close lieutenants—found their protective covering being stripped away. Grand jury subpoenas were issued to men convinced they were safe from such summonses. The high-rolling lifestyle they enjoyed was sharply straitened by Internal Revenue Service agents, who carefully checked any discrepancies between reported income and visible spending. Most of the scrutiny was the result of a growing public clamor for a curb on Mob activity—not Joe Colombo’s public posturing. But Mafia chieftains blamed him nonetheless, and at least one prominent Mafioso believed that Colombo and the league had netted him a grand jury subpoena.

Moreover the five New York families are just emerging from a decade that left their tight paramilitary structure shaken and disorganized. The bitterness of past Mafia wars still lingers, especially between Colombo and Joseph Gallo, the volatile former Profaci triggerman whose defection sparked the 1961 war. He once kept a wildcat in his basement and, for luck, a dwarf on his payroll. Released last March after serving nine years for extortion, he returned to New York with a grudge against Colombo and heretical ideas about recruiting blacks into Mafia ranks. These have made him the subject of speculation regarding the shooting.

Of the five dons in power a decade ago, only one—Carlo Gambino—retains his position today. In the four other slots, the old bosses have not been officially replaced or the men who succeeded them—including Colombo—were not considered their equals. A measure of the scorn in which Colombo was held is revealed in the wiretap transcripts of a conversation between New Jersey Boss “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante and his underboss, Frank Majuri:

DeCavalcante: Joe Colombo. Where’s a guy like that belong in the Commission? What experience has he got?

Majuri: This is ridiculous.

The all-powerful Commission, which dominated Mob affairs across the country for decades, has likewise fallen into disarray. After the disastrous Apalachin meeting in 1957, where 58 mobsters were arrested, the Commission abandoned full-scale gatherings. For a while, its members met in twos and threes to conduct Cosa Nostra business—sometimes on Sunday morning when, they assumed, FBI agents would be in church. When these arrangements failed, the dons were left to communicate with one another from outdoor phone booths—a far cry from the grand council meetings in luxury hotels. The vacuum in leadership and logistical planning opened the way for the sole cagey survivor of the old days—Carlo Gambino, 68, head of the largest family in the U.S.

The Boss of Bosses

In the past year, Gambino has assumed wide-ranging control of the organization as no one had done since the Commission was created in the mid-’30s. He has become the boss of bosses and as his power has grown, so has his disapproval of Colombo. Commission members, who had taken such care to dissociate themselves from each other, were appalled to discover the contents of a plastic briefcase that Colombo was carrying when he was picked up by the FBI. Colombo had often patted the brief case and informed his listeners: “God is in this briefcase.” What concerned his fellow Mafiosi was the presence not of a bigger being, but of a roster of contributors to the league’s benefit show at Madison Square Garden. When the case was opened, it was found to contain such names as Al (“Alley Boy”) Persico, John (“John Wop”) Caeca-mo, Frank (“Beast”) Falanga, Albert (“Blast”) Gallo and Carlo Gambino. Furthermore, Colombo’s distinctly high-profile leadership conflicted with Gambino’s ideas of how a Mafia chief should conduct himself.

While some observers considered Colombo the prototype of the new Mafia leader, the public relations-oriented businessman needed to run the growing list of legitimate Mafia-controlled enterprises, to Gambino he was a recklessly visible member of a society that still needed invisibility in order to function properly. There is speculation that Gambino and other Colombo associates were unhappy over their failure to share in the estimated $2,000,000 the league has raised since its founding. Gambino be came convinced, as were law-enforcement officials, that Colombo was using the league for his own benefit.

As Colombo worked on preparations for what was to have been the triumph of the second Italian-American Unity Day, opposition was solidifying within the Mob. Tommy Eboli, acting boss of Vito Genovese’s New York family, let his disgust with Colombo be known in Mob circles. Gallo’s soldiers went among Brooklyn merchants, telling them not to close for Unity Day, tossing league buttons into trash cans, burning Colombo’s signs and asserting that Colombo was using poor Italian people’s dues to help him fight the FBI. Longshoremen, who had swelled the previous year’s crowds, withheld their support this year, partly accounting for the fact that only 8,000 showed, a drop of more than 40,000 from last year’s rally.

The Word Was Out When Colombo pressed on, the pressure — and the signals — increased. In mid-May, league officials were assaulted in Brooklyn, and Colombo was shoved and slapped when he tried to break up the fight. On June 11, Gambino lieu tenants sent word for Colombo to ease up on Unity Day preparations, but he refused. A week later, Colombo was beat en once more. A golf partner reported that when a golf -cart tire blew out with a bang, “Colombo dove for the ground and crawled under the cart.”

Two weeks before the Unity Day Rally, some gangsters suspected that Colombo was a murder target.

For nearly a week, police investigators could establish no direct connection between Jerome Johnson and the Mafia. By week’s end they had settled on the theory that Johnson had been chosen precisely because such a connection was difficult to prove. Johnson, police asserted, was a hired killer who had been silenced by a second triggerman at the rally. Colombo associates meanwhile continued to insist that the murder attempt was an isolated attack. “It seems like shooting civil rights leaders is ‘in’ in recent years,” explained a league official.

The Colombo family’s public pronouncements constituted a weak, improbable case. As Colombo lay in a coma, Mafia and law-enforcement officials awaited developments in what was certainly the opening round of a new Mob conflict. In the past, the emergence of a boss of bosses like Gambino has usually resulted in a war. The modern Mafia was reorganized in the 1930s, and the Commission was established after bloody battles to curb the power of a single leader. Gambino’s assertion of leadership—quite apart from the Colombo family’s need for revenge—makes it possible that a full-scale battle may erupt. Beyond doubt, the attempt to murder Joe Colombo has profoundly affected the Cosa Nostra. Gallo blocked off the street where he lives the night after the attack, and that same night, only twelve hours after Jerome Johnson fired three bullets into Colombo, business in a small Italian restaurant outside New York City began to pick up. A group of well-dressed men sat around tables near the kitchen having a late-evening snack and coffee. They chatted for an hour, then left. For the first time in years, the Mafia’s high Commission had been driven out of the anonymity of phone booths and into a public meeting. Unwilling though they might have been to admit it, the new-style leader Colombo had forced them into the oldest of their ways.