CRIME: Death of a Maverick Mafioso

THE scene could have been lifted right out of that movie. First, a night of champagne and laughter at Manhattan’s Copacabana as Mobster Joseph (“Crazy Joe”) Gallo, one of New York’s most feared Mafiosi, celebrated his 43rd birthday. Then on to a predawn Italian breakfast at a gleaming new restaurant in the city’s Little Italy area. Seated at his left at a rear table in Umbertos Clam House was his brawny bodyguard, Pete (“The Greek”) Diopioulis; at Gallo’s right, his sister Carmella. Across the table sat Gallo’s darkly attractive bride of just three weeks, Sina, 29, and her daughter Lisa, 10. Quietly, a lone gunman stepped through a rear door and strode toward the table.

Both Gallo and Diopioulis were carelessly facing the wall instead of the door. The triggerman opened fire with a .38-caliber revolver. Women screamed. Joey and Pete were hit instantly. The Greek drew his own gun, began shooting back. So did one Gallo ally, seated at the front clam bar. Within 90 seconds, 20 shots ripped through the restaurant. Tables crashed over, hurling hot sauce and ketchup across the blue-tiled floor to mix with the blood of the wounded. The gunman whirled, ran out the same rear door and into a waiting car.

Gallo, wounded in a buttock, an elbow and his back, staggered toward the front of the café. He lurched through a front door and collapsed, bleeding, on the street. Carmella’s screams attracted officers in a passing police car. They rushed Gallo to a hospital, but he died before reaching it.

Muscling. That melodramatic end to the short, brutal life of Joey Gallo surprised no one in New York’s increasingly fratricidal underworld. There had been a contract out on his life ever since Mafia Boss Joe Colombo had been shot at an Italian Day rally in New York last June (TIME cover, July 12). Police do not believe that Gallo plotted that murder attempt, but friends of Colombo, who remains unable to talk or walk, thought he had. Gallo had been counted among the walking dead ever since he also aroused the anger of the biggest boss of them all, aging Carlo Gambino. Told to stop muscling into Gambino’s operations, including the lucrative narcotics traffic in East Harlem, the cocky Gallo hurled the ultimate Mafia insult at Gambino: he spat at him.

If that act seemed foolhardy, it was nevertheless typical of Gallo, who never had the sense to play by the rigid rules of the brotherhood. He grew up with his brothers Larry and Albert in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach, where mobsters often dumped their victims. One of his neighbors recalled Joey as “the kind of guy who wanted to grow up to be George Raft. He would stand on the corner when he was 15, flipping a half-dollar, and practice talking without moving his lips.”

Joey first witnessed a gang murder in his early teens. After the victim was hauled away, he studied the scene, counted the bullet holes and took notes on how the killing must have been done. He began packing a pistol about the same time. Later, he affected the black shirt and white tie of Killer Richard Widmark in the movie Kiss of Death. He saw the movie so many times he knew all its lines. He spent hours in front of a mirror, trying to look as tough as Widmark—and he succeeded. He had a mercurial temper and acted out his movie fantasies as the crudest of the Gallo brothers.

By the time Joey was 21, he was in trouble with the law, and a court-appointed psychiatrist found him insane. Other mobsters started calling him “Crazy Joe” but never to his face. He was too mean. Joey took pleasure in breaking the arm of one of his clients who was sluggish about paying protection money. He punctured an enemy with ice picks. He had gained his status by serving as one member (Colombo was another) of a five-man execution squad of Mafia Boss Joe Profaci in the late ’50s. Police claim they had scored 40 hits. By then he and his brothers had carved out a chunk of the Brooklyn rackets; they turned against Profaci, touching off a gang war in which nine mobsters died and three disappeared.

Over the years, Gallo developed a wise-guy kind of humor that led some naive acquaintances to consider him a sort of folk hero. He was summoned to Robert Kennedy’s office in 1959 when Kennedy was counsel to a Senate rackets investigating committee, looked at the rug and said, “Hey, this would be a great spot for a crap game.” He once told a courtroom: “The cops say I’ve been picked up 15, maybe 17 times. That’s junk. It was 150 times. I been worked over for nothing until my hat sits on my head like it belongs on a midget.” Someone in 1961 overheard him trying to shake down a Brooklyn restaurant owner for a share of the profits. The proprietor asked for time to think about it. “Sure,” said Gallo, “take three months in the hospital on me.”

That quip cost Gallo nine years for extortion. In Attica state prison, Gallo earned a reputation as a civil rights leader of sorts. He helped lead an inmate drive to force white prison barbers to cut the hair of blacks; he had his own hair cut by a black barber to show his lack of prejudice. Actually, his motive seemed to be to recruit black toughs for his gang. When he got out of prison in March of 1971, he began hiring blacks as “button men” (musclemen)—pricking the ethnic sensibilities of other Mafiosi. He had openly toured Little Italy with four black henchmen a few days before he was hit. Some officials think that may have hastened execution of the contract.

Hearty Hood. Gallo’s defiance of Mafia tradition did not mark him as particularly savvy. Neither did his open claim that he was about to write his memoirs. Other gangsters do not appreciate such literature. There was, for example, a $100,000 contract—for his death, not his papers—out on Joseph Valachi, who wrote in detail of his life with the Mob (he died of natural causes in prison). But Author Marta Curro, the wife of Actor Jerry Orbach, eagerly agreed to help write the book because she had discovered that Joey was “a great person, brilliant, absolutely charming” (see box, page 22).

It was at the Orbach apartment that Gallo married Sina Essary, a dental assistant he had met eleven years ago, before he went to jail. He and his first wife Jeffie Lee were divorced a few months ago. Joey and Sina, whose young daughter opened in the Broadway play Voices last week, soon became a part of the theatergoing, nightclubbing celebrity set. Crazy Joe, the killer, had become Pal Joey, the hearty hood. That, too, did not go down well with various godfathers.

Scripts. Gallo kept telling his newfound friends that he had gone straight. He told Celebrity Columnist Earl Wilson: “I’ll never go back there—I think there is nothing out there for me but death.” Police insist that Gallo was gulling others; that he actually was as much involved in the rackets as ever.

The truth seems to be that Gallo was leading a schizophrenic life in those last days: a steel-tough gunman in racket circles; a philosophic, warm conversationalist outside the Mob. Whether he was really at home in both roles, or just a good actor, he was clearly convincing. Actress Joan Hackett found him fascinating well before she knew of his Mafia connections. “I liked him completely apart from any grotesque glamorization of the underworld,” she recalls. “I thought his attempt to leave that life was genuine. He was the brightest person I’ve ever known.” But Gallo also conceded that “I’ll never make it in the straight world.”

With the slaying of two other lesser mobsters in New York last week, full gang warfare seemed imminent. The new image of Mafiosi as softspoken, smart-dressing businessmen, who shun such crudities as murder and torture as oldfashioned, seemed to be fading. Perhaps the Mob was taking those gory movie scripts about itself too seriously. At any rate, it was exposing the cruelty and ruthlessness of racketeering. Offscreen, murder is brutally final. Indeed, Gallo did not like parts of The Godfather. He told a friend that he thought the death scenes seemed “too flashy.”