Nation: Death in the Afternoon

Mafia Don Carmine Galante is gunned down in Brooklyn

On a hot, muggy afternoon last week, four men sat at an oilcloth-covered table shaded by grapevines behind the Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant in Brooklyn. Over pasta and red wine they were ostensibly celebrating the departure next day of the restaurant’s owner, Giuseppe Turano, 48, on a vacation trip to Sicily. Suddenly a blue Mercury sedan drew up outside, and five ski-masked men rushed into the restaurant. Six feet from the table, they opened fire with shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. In a litter of rolls, half-eaten salad and .45-cal. shells sprawled the body of short, balding Carmine Galante, 69, shot in the left eye and chest, his teeth still clenching his familiar black cigar. Galante was one of the Mafia’s most powerful and feared bosses. Killed with him were a bodyguard, Leonardo Coppola, 40, and Turano, reputedly an adviser to Galante’s crime family. The restaurant owner’s son John, 17, was wounded. The execution had been carefully set up in advance. While the gunmen blazed away, Caesar Bonventra, 28, a Galante recruit who a Mafia insider said had set up his boss for the slaying, stood quietly by. Then he walked calmly out of the restaurant and disappeared.

According to law enforcement officials, the murder was the latest round in a gangland struggle to succeed Carlo Gambino, who died in 1976, as the top boss of New York’s five Mafia families.

The chief competitors were the pushy and aggressive Galante, who in 1974 shot his way into control of the criminal clan once run by Joseph (“Joe Bananas”) Bonnano, and Aniello Dellacroce, 65, the treacherous head of the Gambino family.

The bespectacled Galante, nicknamed “Lillo” or “Cigar,” looked more like a grandfather than a godfather. Nonetheless, a Mafia source once told TIME: “Lillo would shoot you in church during High Mass.” Galante spent almost half of his life behind bars, starting at ten when he was sent to reform school as an incorrigible delinquent. At 17 he was sentenced to Sing Sing prison for assault. By 1952 he had become a high-ranking enforcer for Bonnano. Because Galante spoke French, Spanish and several Italian dialects, he often acted as the family’s emissary in overseas assignments to arrange multimillion-dollar drug deals. He was also involved in pornography, loan sharking and labor rackets.

Soon after Gambino’s death, Galante seemed destined for the mantle of capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses). By 1977, however, it was apparent that Galante, who was back in prison for parole violation, had failed to unite the other New York dons behind him. While Gambino had shied away from drugs because of the heavy penalties involved, Galante pushed for increased Mafia trafficking in heroin and moved in on black and Hispanic cocaine rings.

That policy, and the resulting publicity when the Drug Enforcement Administration targeted him as organized crime’s top man, began to alienate the other Mafia bosses. While Galante was still in prison, he was stalked by killers.

For his own protection, federal officials kept him in solitary confinement at Danbury Prison and then secretly moved him to the federal prison in San Diego. Freed in March, Galante returned to New York.

According to FBI officials, Galante then asked the Mafia’s governing commission for permission to retire after putting his affairs in order. The commission approved his request. But within a short time the dons discovered that Galante had secretly built up a force of 30 “greenies,” hardened young recruits from Sicily.

Afraid that Galante was about to double-cross them, and angered by his greed in muscling in on other families’ rackets, New York’s most powerful Mafia commissioners met early in July to determine Galante’s fate. At that meeting, Dellacroce convinced the others that Galante should be retired more permanently.