(2) The Story of the Mafia’s Most FEARED Mobster They Couldn’t Control | CRAZY Joe Gallo 

He smiled for the cameras. He toyed with the reporters. He sat in courtrooms pleading the fifth with a cigarette hanging from his lips, blowing smoke at the people who clung on to his every word. >> Are you also known as a racketeer and gangster? >> I respectfully declined to answer because I honestly believe my [music] answer might tend to incriminate me.

>> What labor organization or unions are you now associated with? I respectfully declined to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate. >> In the 1960s and 70s, no gangster in New York fascinated the public more than crazy Joe Gallow. He lied to judges, mocked prosecutors, and treated subpoenas like invitations to perform.

He was young, fearless, unpredictable, a man who didn’t just defy the mafia, he attacked it. From his base on President Street in Brooklyn, Gallo built a crew that behaved less like a neighborhood gang and more like a guerilla army. A crew that kidnapped made men, shot up social clubs, and dragged the Columbbo crime family into a civil war unlike anything the American mafia had ever seen before.

 A war that climaxed with the public shooting of his own boss at [music] Columbus Circle. A hit that stunned New York and humiliated the Kosa Nostra. To the press, he was a charismatic outlaw. [music] To the public, especially in Brooklyn, he was a hero. But to the mafia, he was a walking nightmare. This is the story of the war between the Italian mafia and Crazy Joe Gallow, the mobster who started a civil war.

 Crazy Joe was born Joseph Gallow on April the 7th, 1929 in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York. [music] A waterfront neighborhood on the western edge of the borough built on a peninsula that juts into the upper New York Bay. Bounded by the Guanas Canal to the east and the harbor to the west and south, Red Hook sat in the shadow of the Brooklyn docks.

 a maze of cargo peers, tugboats, freight terminals, and cavernous warehouses that made it one of the busiest and one of the most dangerous shipping districts in the city. Life here moved to the rhythm of the waterfront. The smell of salt water mixed with coal smoke, diesel, and the warm scent of bread drifting from corner bakeries.

 Ship horns echoed off the brick tenementss every morning, and long shoremen lined the peers, waiting for their names to be called by hiring bosses who could make or break a man’s week with a single gesture. For a boy like Joe, the harbor wasn’t scenery. It was the backdrop of daily life. But the docks were never peaceful.

 Only a few years before Joe’s birth, these same peers had been the battleground of a violent struggle between the old Irish White Hand gang and the rising Italian black hand gang led by Frankie Yale. The White Hand had controlled the waterfront since the 19th century. A [music] rough fraternity of long shoremen, saloon enforcers, and peer bullies under volatile leaders like Pegle Lonigan and Wild Bill Love it.

 men who fought brutally to keep the docks in Irish control. The Italians, though, were arriving in boatloads and gaining ground. Frankie Yale’s Blackhand operation was disciplined, ambitious, and increasingly well-connected. Through extortion, targeted assassinations, and pressure on shipping companies, Yale’s men slowly eroded that Irish control.

 By the mid 1920s, after the murder of Wild Bill Love in 1923 and Pegle Lonigan in 1925, the Irish stronghold finally collapsed. The White Hand vanished almost overnight, their legend becoming just another waterfront tale, and the Italians claimed the peers. This was the world that Joseph Gallow was born into. A waterfront still marked by the fading Irish grip, [music] the growing strength of the Italians, and a level of tension that never fully disappeared.

 Mornings smelled of saltwater and diesel. Afternoons could turn violent without warning. A fight on a pier, a knife in a bar, or a body turning up in the Gous Canal. But the end of the Irish Italian waterfront war didn’t end the violence or the extortion. The Italians had simply stepped into the vacuum that the Irish left behind.

 Just like their predecessors, they prayed on their own people, sending blackhand letters to Italian shopkeepers and laborers who refused to pay tribute. Threat stamped with the outline of a severed hand, hence their name. And the shakeddowns didn’t stop at storefronts. Most Italian immigrants in Red Hook worked on the docks, fresh off the boats, and [music] desperate for steady wages.

 Hiring bosses and Italian enforcers routinely skimmed 25% of a man’s pay. And refusal meant a beating, a broken arm, or worse. It was a world where poverty and fear walked hand in hand. Joe’s parents, Ombberto and Mary Gallo, were among the thousands of southern Italians who crossed the Atlantic searching for something better.

 They came from Tory Delg Greco, a fishing and coral crafting town near Naples that lived in the shadow of Mount Vuvius. Like so many families from the Italian South, they left behind poverty, overcrowded housing, and an economy that offered little more than seasonal work. and shrinking wages. They boarded a steam ship in Naples with everything they owned packed into a handful of trunks.

The journey took nearly 2 weeks across the Atlantic, cramped bunks, cold air, and the constant roll of the sea until at last the ship slipped into New York Harbor. From the deck they would have seen what millions saw before them, the Statue of Liberty rising out of the mist like a promise.

 and behind it the low skyline of Manhattan. And like the millions who had seen that same image before them, they had hope in their hearts. Their first steps in America were taken at Ellis Island, where they joined the long lines of hopeful immigrants being inspected, processed, and then given the chance to start again in the promised land.

 Once cleared, they followed the path so many Italians had taken before, across the East River and into Brooklyn, where friends, relatives, and familiar dialects crowded the tenementss of Red Hook and Carol Gardens. But when Ombberto arrived in Brooklyn and saw the reality of the docks, the kickbacks, the threats, the constant danger, he wanted no part of it.

 He wasn’t built to gravel for work or bow to a peer boss. And that stubborn streak would later show up in all three of his sons. So when an opportunity arrived in January 1920, he grabbed it with both hands. Prohibition had begun. The 18th amendment, the law that ushered in prohibition, outlawed the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol across the United States.

 But lawmakers hadn’t changed the country’s drinking habits. They’d simply pushed them underground and by doing so given organized crime the opportunity of a lifetime. Americans weren’t going to stop drinking just because the government told them to. And that meant that overnight liquor went from a legal commodity to a black market gold mine.

Every bar, club, and restaurants in New York needed suppliers willing to break the law. And the men who were prepared to step into that void could earn more in a single bootlegging run than a long shoreman could in months of backbreaking labor. To Alberto, the illegal liquor trade offered what the docks never could.

 Independence, money, and a chance to rise without answering to anyone. A man with a car, a connection to a smuggler, and the nerve to drive fast through Brooklyn’s darkened streets could build a small empire. And unlike the waterfront, where Italians were treated like secondclass workers, the bootlegging networks were wide open. Success went to whoever took the risk, and Ombberto stepped quietly into that world and never looked back.

 By the time that his first son, Larry, was born in 1927 at the family home in Red Hook, Ombberto Gallo, was making his living as a bootleger, supplying liquor to speak easys from Red Hook to Bensonhurst. He ran whiskey in from New Jersey, bought off beat cops when he could, and outran them when he couldn’t.

 By the time Joey was born in 1929, Ombberto controlled half a dozen trucks and was moving booze for several big hitters in Brooklyn and Manhattan. And when his third son, Alberta, arrived in 1930, Ombberto had made a small fortune, and he was going to need it. [music] Here’s the big moment. Acting Secretary [music] of State William Phillips is signing the 21st Amendment and Prohibition is repealed.

>> The government finally admitted the obvious, that banning alcohol had been a catastrophic mistake, one that handed organized crime the money, power, and structure it had never possessed before. It gave the underworld a blueprint that men like Joe Gallow would later inherit. And as politicians toasted the return of legal liquor, thousands of small-time bootleggers vanished overnight.

 But Ombberto did what the smart survivors did. He funneled what remained of his profits into lone sharking and small street rackets, keeping the money flowing and keeping himself useful. Still, the violence on the docks, the endless feuds, the killings, and the growing pressure from Italian crews who were replacing the old Irish system became too much.

 The waterfront was tightening, becoming more controlled, more political, more dangerous, and Ombberto had three young sons to raise. He didn’t want to raise them next to all of that. So, he did something rare for that era. He stepped back using what he’d saved from bootlegging. In 1934, he bought a modest restaurant in the quieter Kensington neighborhood, a greasy spoon called Jackie Charallet at 108 Beverly Road.

 It was the kind of place where laborers came for eggs and coffee, where neighborhood gossip flowed louder than the percolator, and where a man with the right connections could still run a quiet loan operation from a back booth, which of course did. The gallows lived nearby at 639 East 4th Street in a neighborhood that in the 1930s was still finding its identity.

Kensington sat at the crossroads of several immigrant enclaves, Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Each group carving out its own block, its own church, its own corner store. It was a place of narrow tenementss, candy shops, and smoky pull rooms where kids played stickball in the street and learned early how to fight for respect.

 It wasn’t glamorous, but it was safe, or at least safer than the docks. And it was there, against the backdrop of frying pans, cigarette smoke, and whispered deals that young Joey Gallow and his two brothers spent the earliest years of their lives. The Great Depression had hit Brooklyn hard.

 Work was scarce, and for many, the easiest money came from numbers games, petty rackets, or running errands for the local mobsters who seemed to command both fear and admiration. Kensington was rough, not in the cinematic sense of gangland warfare, but in the grinding day-to-day survival of families who had to make do with little.

There was a code on the streets, a mix of pride, toughness, and silence, and young Joe absorbed it all. The Gallow boys were close in age and temperament. Each one restless, quick with their fists, and even quicker with their tempers. Joe, with his pale blue eyes and light brown hair, stood out immediately. Neighbors began calling him Joey the Blonde, a nickname that followed him throughout his youth.

 By their early teens, Joe, Larry, and Albert had formed their own little crew on the streets. Joined by friends like Pete the Greek Diapulus and Frank Punchy Iliano, they turned the Ace Pull Room on Church Avenue into their unofficial headquarters. A smoky dimlit clubhouse where they ran smalltime rackets, pull sharking, petty robberies, and whatever else brought in a few dollars.

 In many ways, they were mirroring their father. At Jackie’s Charcoallet, Ombberto ran his modest diner like a neighborhood social club, just like the ones you’ve seen in the films. The front room served bacon and eggs, and the back room was where cash changed hands. I use was settled, and quiet business took place among men who kept one hand on their coffee and the other near their coats.

Joe grew up in that world surrounded by gamblers, hustlers, and the kind of workingclass wise guys who taught lessons with a look instead of a lecture. For the gallows, stepping into that back room when Alberto allowed it was its own kind of apprenticeship. Despite the little street operation the boys had going on, Joe’s intelligence was obvious early on.

 Teachers at public school 179, his elementary school on Avenue C, described him as sharp but undisiplined, clever, observant, interested in literature, arts, and quick to learn, but uninterested in rules or authority. He later enrolled at the Brooklyn High School of Automotive Trades in Williamsburg, but by 1945 at the age of 16, he dropped out entirely.

By then his education had already shifted from classrooms to the streets, from textbooks to pull halls, racetracks, and the backroom of Jackie, where he learned more about human nature, leverage, and loyalty than any teacher could ever offer him. That same year, Joe was involved in a serious car accident that left him with a head injury and a permanent nervous tick.

Doctors later described him as suffering from severe restlessness and mood swings, symptoms that made him unfit for consistent work. They said for a young man already inclined towards rebellion, the diagnosis only pushed him further to the edges of society. And for boys like Joey, those edges were exactly where they seemed to thrive.

 Because Brooklyn in the late 1940s was a world of its own. A patchwork of small-time gamblers, lone sharks, book makers, and political fixes who operated under the quiet but unmistakable influence of the Preface crime family. The dominant mafia power in South Brooklyn. At the top sat Joseph Preface, a man as wealthy as he was feared.

 He ruled not with street swagger but with the calm authority of a dawn. The kind of presence cinema would later capture in Don Corleion from the Godfather movies. Preface was the realworld model of that kind of Dawn. Dignified, deeply Catholic, softspoken in public and utterly ruthless behind closed doors. They called him the olive oil king because he was the largest importer of olive oil in America.

 a legitimate empire that provided the perfect cover for his criminal one. He had ruled South Brooklyn since the 1930s, building a mafia family that prized obedience above everything. Preface demanded strict discipline from his soldiers. And he also demanded a tax on every racket, a tribute on every dollar earned, a cut of every operation.

In the old Sicilian expression, he insisted on wetting the beak, taking his share from anyone doing business on his territory, whether they liked it or not. Preface was a greedy boss, and the gallows were on his radar, but Joey the Blonde wasn’t ready to fully succumb to the life of organized crime just yet.

 In 1946, he briefly joined the US Navy, perhaps out of a desire for purpose, or maybe just to escape the monotony of Brooklyn life. But the structure of military life didn’t suit him. During the induction, he refused to answer key questions and within months, he was discharged after psychiatrists at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital declared him unfit for service due to a nervous restlessness and instability.

Back in Brooklyn, [music] Gallows seemed to drift, but the drifting was deceptive because beneath the surface, there was a deeper current carrying him forward. It was a mixture of imagination, restlessness, [music] and a fascination with the mythmaking world of American crime.

 See, young Joey was by nature a dreamer. And for a boy raised in a neighborhood that was quite literally shaped by hustlers, dock workers, and fugitives. Dreaming often meant reinventing yourself as, well, someone larger than the narrow streets around you. And as [music] teachers noted, he loved music, movies, and art and spent hours in local theaters studying the way that gangsters were portrayed on screen.

And there was one [music] film in particular that stood out to him. When Joey saw Richard Whidmark’s chilling portrayal of Tommy Udo in the 1947 film Kiss of Death, it wasn’t simply entertainment. It became a blueprint. With Mark’s unhinged laugh, that eerie childlike cruelty, the unnerving charisma that made violence feel theatrical, Joey absorbed it all.

 He practiced the laugh, mimic the dialogue, and slipped the mannerisms into everyday conversation. Friends later said that he didn’t just imitate Tommy Udo. He seemed to be studying him, trying him on like a suit. For Joe, the line between performance and identity had already begun to blur.

 He wasn’t imagining himself as a thug. He was rehearsing for his future role as the charismatic outlaw. The gangster who didn’t just commit crimes, but performed them. [music] And whilst Joey was building this internal mythology, his older brother Larry, two years his senior, was carving out a far more practical path on the streets of South Brooklyn.

 He had stayed at the Ace pull room building the burglary rackets with the crew and had caught the eye of one man in particular, Francesco Arbitarco, known as Frankie Shots [music] and one of the most well-connected figures in Brooklyn’s underworld and a man who frequented Jackie Sharklet. Frankie Shots was an old school gangster in the truest sense.

a man who had earned his position through the gold mine of prohibition and kept it through a mix of charm, violence, and business sense. His numbers racket alone, a kind of illegal lottery on the streets generated nearly $2 million a year, which in 1947 is nearly $30 million today. His lone sharking and gambling operations stretched across bars, candy stores, and social clubs from Bensonhurst to Carol Gardens.

 He had a reputation for treating his men well, for maintaining discipline without unnecessary brutality, and for understanding which young recruits were worth grooming. Frankie Shots wasn’t just a neighborhood tough. He was a cappo regime in the Preface crime family, a title that carried considerable weight. In the structure of the Kosan Nostra, the Sicilian American Mafia, the hierarchy resembled a pyramid.

 At the top sat the boss, beneath him the underboss, and beneath them the capo regimes, men who were entrusted to run entire crews, territories, and revenue streams. They commanded soldiers, managed rackets, and answered only to the family’s highest leadership. And the reason Frankie held such a prominent position was simple. His operation produced exactly the kind of steady, dependable money that attracted the eye of the greedy Joe Preface.

 Every profitable racket in South Brooklyn eventually found its way onto Preface’s books and Frankie Shots was one of his biggest earners. In a family where greed flowed downhill, Frankie delivered and Preface rewarded earners. Larry Gallo impressed Frankie shots immediately. He was loyal, steady under pressure, and crucially came with two brothers and his own small crew who shared his fearlessness and appetite for risk.

 Frankie Shots’s decision to take Larry under his wing pulled the other two Gallow brothers with him. Joey and Albert committed themselves to the life, and together, the Gallow boys began to flourish inside the world that had once been just background noise. Under Frankie Shots’s guidance, the Gallow brothers began stepping deeper into the Preface family’s Brooklyn operations, they became known simply as the Gallow Boys, three inseparable brothers who moved through South Brooklyn as a single unit, gaining a reputation for reliability, nerve, and an uncommon

willingness to take on the jobs that other young soldiers would have avoided. Whether it was beating up borrowers who fell behind on Frankie Shots’s loans or reminding numbers runners not to skim from the bank, the gallows handed the work quietly, efficiently, and without hesitation.

 Their growing presence did not go unnoticed and before long Frankie Shots recommended them to a far more powerful figure, Anthony Tough Tony Anastasia, the man who controlled the Brooklyn waterfront and not to mention the brother of one of the most feared and influential mobsters in the whole of the United States, Albert Anastasia. For the Gallow boys, three young street operators who’d grown up watching the docks from a distance, this was something entirely different.

 This wasn’t just an introduction, it was an ascension. Because Albert Anastasia wasn’t simply another gangster. By 1949, he stood near the top of American organized crime. As one of the architects of Murder, Inc., He helped oversee the mafia’s nationwide enforcement arm, the syndicate of contract killers who carried out hits for families from New York to Chicago.

The newspapers called him the Lord High Executioner. And for once, the headlines were not exaggerating. His name carried weight everywhere, whispered in barber shops, muttered in police precincts, and spoken cautiously in political circles. Even other mobsters watched their tone around him because they knew exactly what he was capable of.

 When Albert walked into a room, conversations dropped to a murmur. He was regarded as one of the most dangerous men of his generation. Unpredictable, ferocious, and utterly indifferent to public opinion. His influence extended far beyond Brooklyn. He had ties to the National Commission, the governing body of the American Mafia, long-standing relationships with figures like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, and a reputation for swift, uncompromising violence that intimidated entire cities.

 Over the two decades since the final blows of the old whiteand blackhand conflict, tough Tony and Albert Anastasia had transformed the Brooklyn waterfront into their own private empire. After crushing what was left of the Irish controlled white hand gang in the 1930s, Tony and Albert consolidated power with an iron grip, turning the docks into one of the most profitable criminal operations in New York.

 the hiring halls, the unions, the Steve door companies, the unloading crews, the kickbacks, the rackets. Every dollar that passed through the waterfront passed through the Anastasia first. Nothing moved on the docks unless they allowed it to. And anyone who challenged that near total monopoly, paid dearly. The clearest example of this came in 1939 when Italian long shoreman Pete Panto rallied nearly a thousand dock workers against the corruption that was squeezing him and his colleagues dry.

For a brief moment, it looked as though the workers might finally break free of the mafia’s grip. But Panto’s courage lasted only a few months. One summer night, he vanished without a trace. Strangled on Albert Anastasia’s orders and buried in a lime pit in New Jersey. His death sent a message that echoed across Brooklyn, the waterfront did not belong to the unions or the workers.

 It belonged to the Anastasia. This was the world the Gallow brothers stepped into. A world where a recommendation from Frankie Shots now placed them under the direct patronage of the Preface Crime Family. a family whose influence stretched from Red Hook to Midtown and all the way to the commission itself.

 And once the Gallow Boys walked onto those docks, there was no turning back. Their steady work running errands and handling the rough jobs for Tough Tony soon earned them something more permanent on the waterfront. Together, the brothers were placed in charge of collecting the daily tribute from Long Shoreman, the quiet but relentless flow of cash that moved up the chain to Tough Tony himself, and ultimately to Albert Anastasia.

It was a bitter irony. These were exactly the kind of men that their father, Ombberto, had refused to kneel to. the very reason he had turned to bootlegging during prohibition rather than spending his life on the docks handing over his wages to enforcers. To ensure no Long Shoreman slipped past without paying tribute, they set up their base inside the Longshore Restroom Room at 77 President Street, a shabby but strategically placed building just a few doors down from their grandmother’s tenement building at 51 President

Street. The restroom [music] quickly became their unofficial headquarters, a place where they gathered information, collected payments, and established themselves as permanent fixtures on the Brooklyn waterfront. And the waterfront in turn shaped them. Tough Tony must have had a hundred scams running at any given moment, ranging from kickbacks to counterfeit union [music] fees.

 One of his most notorious operations was the mandatory barbershop racket where long shoremen were required to pay for haircuts in advance at a union backed barber shop which was also on President Street even if they never walked through the door. The scam was simple, brazen, and [music] wildly profitable. And the gallows were put in charge of this racket as well.

 With money coming from both Frankie Shots and Tough Tony, the brothers began branching into rackets of their own. From the back room of the Long Shore restroom, they pushed juke boxes into bars and restaurants across Brooklyn and Manhattan, including Frankie and Johnny’s steakhouse on West 45th Street, the Luna Restaurant on Malbury Street, Red’s Pizzeria in Bora Park, and Cardiello’s Tavern on 4th Avenue.

 They expanded into blinking pinball machines rigged to swallow coins without ever paying out. And they began hijacking trucks, a job Joe embraced with a mixture of enthusiasm and mischief. Hijacking made him feel alive. Fun and money, he’d later say that was the appeal. And then came the move that showed just how ambitious the Gallow operation had become.

 By the early 1950s, jukeboxes weren’t just a decoration. They were one of the most dependable cash businesses in New York. A single machine could pull in hundreds of dollars a week and in the right bar, thousands of dollars a month. All of it arrived in loose coins. None of it was recorded.

 And because every neighborhood bar, diner, lunchonet, and pizzeria needed one, the fight to control those machines became a quiet turf war across the city. Whoever controlled the jukeboxes controlled a river of untraceable cash, and the gallows understood this instinctively. So in 1950, instead of getting involved in that turf war and fighting over each machine one location at a time, they did something far smarter.

 They institutionalized their rackets. They paid roughly $90,000, about $1.1 million today, to charter Jukebox Union Local 266, a supposed labor union organization for jukebox operators. In reality, it was a mob made cartel designed to give the Gallow brothers total control over the jukebox trade.

 Membership to the union became mandatory for any business that they targeted in Brooklyn and New York. And once you joined, you were bound to follow the union’s rules. Rules written entirely by the gallows. Only union approved juke boxes could be installed, which obviously meant only machines belonging to the Gallow brothers. contracts promised a neat 50/50 split of the profits.

 But in reality, the brothers took whatever percentage that they wanted that day. And if a bar owner refused to join or tried to operate independently, the message arrived quickly. their machine was smashed up, their windows suffered a similar fate, or a late night visit from Larry, Joey, or Albert delivering a warning that the business might accidentally go up in flames tended to ensure compliance.

Even rival crews knew better than to test Gallow turf. If another gang tried to place their machines in Gallow territory, Union representatives, which simply meant Gallowin forces in Union jackets, removed them by force. The brilliance of the scheme was its simplicity. By disguising extortion as a labor union, the gallows transformed a street level shakedown into something that looked on the surface like regulated commerce.

 To an outsider, it was just business. to the gallows. It was a gold mine. Bars got music. The brothers got a constant reliable flow of money. And because the income arrived coin bycoin, night after night, it left almost no trace. A perfect racket for a crew that understood the value of cash that never made its way onto a ledger.

It was elegant, profitable, and perfectly suited to the brothers’s style because it was half legitimate, half criminal, but completely effective. That union alone made the Gallow crew one of the most profitable young outfits operating under either Frankie Shots or Tough Tony Anastasia. And beyond hijacking street shakedowns and the theatrics Joe Gallow loved so much, it showed something deeper.

 It showed that the Gallows were thinking long term, that they weren’t just muscle. They were actually building an empire. And to build that empire, the brothers needed some help. By the end of 1950, the Gallow gang boasted around 25 members. Most notable of which alongside the brothers were longtime enforcers Pete the Greek Diapulus Frank Punchi Iliano and his cousin Armando Iliano or Mondo the Dwarf as the crew called him.

Larry’s bodyguard Joe Gioelli though the crew just called him Joe Jelly and he was the most trusted hitman of the crew after the brothers. Also filling the ranks was Nicholas Biano, Bobby Boreelloo, Vic Muso, Michael Ritzello, Joe Magnusco, Tony Ortalano, Lewis Marani who was known as Cadillac Louie, and even Hassan Waffer, Joe’s Egyptian bodyguard who was known as Ali Barbar.

They were a young, volatile, and dangerous coalition, the next generation of Brooklyn gangsters. Around this time, Frankie Shots paired Larry with another promising young gangster, Carmine Persico, to help manage his expanding numbers and lone sharking rackets, and the Gallow crew gained another valuable member.

 Persico and the Gallows formed an immediate bond, hijacking trucks together, robbing book makers, shaking down rivals. They were reckless, ambitious, and brutally efficient. And by the early 1950s, they were widely considered the top enforcers in Frankie Shots’s crew. Joe, however, remained the strangest out of all of them. It was around this time that he earned the nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life, Crazy Joe.

 President Street was quickly becoming their fortress, where the whole Gallow crew were omniresent night and day. This picture shows Mondo the dwarf, Ombberto Gallow, and Tony Bernardo outside the Longshore restroom. And truth be told, the restroom was becoming a little small for the whole gang. So in 1955, the brothers opened a quieter headquarters a few doors down at 51 President Street, establishing the direct vending machine company on the ground floor of their grandmother, Nunziarta’s threestory tenement.

 It was a clever front, a fully legitimate business that allowed them to funnel mob profits into real contracts. Larry personally negotiated distribution rights with the vendor company of Glen Cove, securing exclusive South Brooklyn and Long Island placement for their new premix soda machines. Within a few years, the gallows controlled everything from the juke boxes that played the neighborhood’s music to the soda machines that served its workers, and the cash flowed constantly.

 At the same time, Frankie Shots’s numbers business was booming. Albert, now known as Kid Blast, not for his marksmanship, but his reputation and performance with the ladies, ran the racket with Carmine Persico, enforcing collections with an iron fist. The brothers also oversaw Frankie Shots’s lone sharking operation, and it was here that Joey the Blonde would become Crazy Joe Gallow.

 Joe purchased a female mountain lion from an exotic animal cellar in Manhattan and kept her in the basement of his grandmother’s tenement building on President Street. I mean, you can see why this guy got the nickname Crazy Joe. So, he named the lion Cleo and she’s photographed here with Tony Ortano inside a police station.

 I mean, it’s a surreal image that captures the bizarre charm and menace of Joe Gallow and his crew. Mondo the [ __ ] which was his name on the streets, not what I’m calling him, was put in charge of looking after Cleo, feeding her nothing but raw meat on Crazy Joe’s strict instructions. But Cleo wasn’t a pet. She was a message.

 When debtors stalled or refused to pay Frankie shots, Cleo [music] was brought out as a reminder of who they were dealing with. And if anyone in Brooklyn doubted the stories, he’s pictured holding a young Cleo here with Mondo as they’re walking it through Brooklyn. Joe would walk the lion through the streets himself, making it clear that whatever he kept in the basement of 51 President Street wasn’t myth or folklore. He really had a lion.

People started calling him Crazy Joe at this point. And for once, the mob nickname didn’t need explaining. The laugh, the violence, the theatrics, the lion, it all fit because word spread fast that when Crazy Joe came looking for money, you paid immediately. Understandably, repayment shot up and Crazy Joe became the single most infared enforcer in the entire crew.

 With a choke hold on the long shore men for tough Tony and a booming jukebox gambling, vending and lone sharking racket, the money was pouring in. And that kind of steady cash flow always attracted the attention of Joe Preface. Inside the Preface family, Kappos debated whether the Gallow brothers were suitable to become made men.

 Some admired their nerve, their discipline, and the sheer money that they were generating. But others were deeply unsettled by Joe’s odd quirks, his intense stare, his unpredictable humor, his eccentric mannerisms. He was brilliant, fearless, and to certain old-timers, unnerving. They were also concerned about the interracial nature of the gallow crew.

 Preface was old school. He had ruled the family since the end of the Castella Morz war in 1931. And he had been raised in the era of the mustache pets. The rigid traditionalist who believed only Sicilians belonged anywhere near the mafia. The Gallow brothers and Joe in particular didn’t care about any of that. They judged recruits on one thing and one thing only, loyalty.

 If you could earn and you stood with the gallows, you were welcome in the crew. Despite their unusual circle of friends and questionable fits with mafia tradition, reputation wins wars, and the Gallow reputation was impossible to ignore. In early 1956, both Larry and Joe were finally given their buttons. They took the ancient blood oath of oma and were formally inducted into the American mafia.

 They were now what the underworld called made men, protected, respected, and untouchable. Two of the three brothers had climbed from Kensington street kids to sworn members of the preface crime family. For Larry, it was the fulfillment of everything the brothers had worked towards. They were still only soldiers, the lowest formal rank on the mafia pyramid, but soldiers with money, influence, manpower, and a growing network that stretched across Brooklyn.

The Gallow brothers were no longer just neighborhood toughs. They were a force in New York City, and they were about to be given their very first task. That task arrived in October 1957 when the criminal underworld trembled with the news that someone had murdered Albert Anastasia, the feared Lord High executioner of Murder Inc.

 while he sat in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheritan Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Two gunmen in scarves stormed the shop and cut him down in a hail of bullets, leaving one of the most powerful figures in American organized crime dead on the floor. The killing shocked the city and sent ripples through every mafia family.

 And in the weeks that followed, rumors began circulating that the Gallow crew had been part of the hit. One story repeated so many times it became folklore claimed that Joe Gallow bragged about it to Sydney Slater, a Gallow gang member saying with a grin, “You can call us the barbershop quintet.

” Whether said in jest bravado or not at all, the rumor caught wind and it was largely accepted that the gallows carried out the hit. The truth is still debated and as you know I try to remain unbiased because I see my job as just a document not to offer opinion but I don’t think Crazy Joe did it.

 What is accepted commonly is that Steve Aone known as 14 Street Steve was involved. So he was a member of Anastasia’s family and Carlo Gambino and Veto Genevves had been plotting to assume their control in their respective families. So 14th Street Steve got the go-ahad. So whether he oversaw the hit and the gallows were involved or whether he carried out the hit with the alleged hit squad of Steven Grammar and Arnold Wittenberg is a debate for another day.

But either way it marked a turning point because now the Gallow brothers had [music] stepped out of the shadows and into mafia history and their name was known across the whole of New York City. Immediately after the Anastasia hit, the Gallo brothers shot onto the radar of Robert Kennedy.

 Practically overnight, they went from neighborhood toughs to national headlines and Washington took notice. The Mlelen Senate Committee on Racketeering, the same committee grilling Jimmy Hoffer, summoned them to Washington to testify. Joe, of course, treated the whole thing like theater. When he met Robert Kennedy for the first time, he glanced down at the elegant rug in Kennedy’s office, then looked up with that slow, mischievous grin he was famous for. “Nice rug,” he said.

 “It’d be perfect for a crap game.” Kennedy didn’t laugh, but everyone else in the hallway did. It was pure Crazy Joe, disrespectful, fearless, and playing to the cameras like he’d been born for the stage. And in true Joe Gallow fashion, he treated the whole hearing itself like a stage performance.

 He blew cigarette smoke at the reporters crowding around him and strutted into the hearing room with a smirk, playing the part of the unbothered gangster. His brother, Albert, sat beside him, rolling his eyes, knowing exactly how this would go. When the questioning began, Joey leaned into the microphone, kept his voice low and cold, and pleaded the Fifth Amendment again and again.

>> I respectfully declined to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me. >> Are you also known as a racketeer and gangster? >> I respectfully declined to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate [music] me. What labor organization or unions are you now associated with? >> I respectfully [music] declined to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate.

>> It was pure theater. Crazy Joe straight out of central casting, giving America exactly the kind of gangster they feared and secretly loved to watch. Joe treated Washington like theater. But once he stepped off the train in Brooklyn, the tension waiting for him was real. Now embedded into the Preface crime family, the boys from President Street, as they were now known, began to grow tired of their boss, Joe Preface.

 They saw him as a weak, greedy, and outdated figure. Preface’s empire stretched across Brooklyn and Queens, combining legitimate olive oil and real estate holdings with a network of numbers, gambling, and labor rackets. He was a millionaire several times over, but still demanded tribute. A high tax on virtually every racket from lone sharking to vending machines, and anyone operating in his territory was expected to pay. At first, the gallows complied.

But as their profits grew, Joe began to chafe under the weight of Preface’s greed. Any leader who taxes his men too heavily, Joe once said, creates the conditions for rebellion. And by 1959, the Preface family was rotting from within. And the conditions for rebellion were fertile. Soldiers grumbled about excessive tribute, and Kappos whispered about favoritism.

 Preface promised lower ranking members of the family like the gallows of whom Joe and Larry were soldiers of progression to capos and cappo regimes. But then he only promoted relatives and childhood friends, keeping profits close and denying advancement to the men [music] who had well been carrying out his dirty work. And his greed would soon mean that tension was about to reach a boiling point within the preface crime family.

 Frankie Shots was one of, if not the biggest earner in the Preface family. We don’t know the exact figures outside of his 2 million a year numbers racket, but it was suspected the lone sharking business wasn’t far behind that number. And despite paying up the weekly tribute to Preface, Preface demanded more. Frankie Shots quite rightly argued that he was paying enough and refused to cough up more to the greedy dawn and that sealed his fate.

 On November the 4th, 1959, Frankie Shots was ambushed outside the Cardiello lounge at 2564th Avenue in Brooklyn, a tavern owned by his cousins, the Cardiellos, and a place that is still a restaurant and bar now. He was shot multiple times and later died in hospital. No witnesses came forward. Even the Cardiello brothers claimed they’d seen nothing, knowing what defying Preface meant.

 But when the smoke cleared, Joe Preface handed control of Frankie Shots’s lucrative rackets not to the gallows, who in the event of Frankie’s death had expected them, but to his brother-in-law and current family under boss, Joseph Magio. To Crazy Joe, it was the ultimate insult. Preface had whacked the very man who took the boys from street level to the level they were at now.

 And not only that, Preface had taken the rackets for himself. From that moment on, rebellion was inevitable. By March 1960, the tension had reached its breaking point. Joe, Larry, Albert, Joe Jelly, and Carmine Persico gathered one evening at the Longshore Restroom Room. They were the rising stars of the underworld, known collectively as the barberhop quintet for their rumored involvement in the Anastasia hit.

 But they were still treated like errand boys by their superiors. The conversation that night was quiet but dangerous. They spoke of a revolution, a coupe within the Preface family that would free them from the old man’s taxes. Larry, always the realist, warned it couldn’t work. Even if they killed Preface, the commission would never allow a crew as young and as unstable as theirs to take over a family.

 But Joe, restless and angry, wasn’t thinking politically. He wanted freedom and he wanted power. Larry told him to wait to buy their time. That one day they will kill Proface and claim what is theirs, but for now it would be suicide. The rest of the crew agreed, and to calm his anger, Crazy Joe began to spend more time away from Brooklyn.

By the dawn of the new decade in 1960, Joe Gallo was living in a different world from most mobsters. His own establishment, the Arpeggio Club at 144 East 52nd Street, which is still an ery today, became a gathering place for beatnicks and gangsters alike, where Gallow would sit in the corner smoking hash with his Egyptian bodyguard and arms dealer, Hassan Waffer, or Ali Barbar as he was known, and debating philosophy with writers and jazz musicians.

 It was clear that Joe was not just another violent hoodlm. Now in his early 30s, there was something strangely cultured about him. He was drawn to the night life of Greenwich Village, where jazz, poetry, and rebellion blended into the pulse of the early 1960s. He devoured books, loved music, and had a deep affection with art. One night, Alibaba took Joe to the San Ramo Cafe, a smoky bohemian coffee house at the corner of Bleecker and McDougall Streets, the epicenter of the 1960s beat generation.

 The clientele there included Jack Carowak, Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, and the rest of the restless new thinkers of the postwar counterculture. For Joe, it was intoxicating. A world of ideas and rebellion that felt strangely familiar. One night at the San Ramo, Gallo met Jeffy Lee Boyd, a former showgirl with dark skin, a taste for jazz, and a passion for books.

 Joe was instantly drawn to her. They shared long nights talking about nature, the psychology of Wilhelm Reich, and the blurred line between morality and survival. For Joe, who had always lived by instinct and danger, Jeffy represented something rare, understanding. She offered the kind of companionship he had never found in the underworld.

 [music] Friends and mob associates were uneasy about the relationship. Tony Bender, who controlled much of the vill’s protection rackets, warned Joe not to marry Jeffy. “Keep her as your mistress,” Bender said. But Joe ignored the advice. He was infatuated with her. The two married in late 1960 and almost immediately took off on a road trip to Miami, driving south through a changing America.

 A world of diners, neon signs, and roadside motel that symbolized a country on the edge of cultural revolution. As 1961 approached, the city of New York itself was changing. The jazz clubs of Greenwich Village hummed with new music. Civil rights marches were beginning and the mafia’s old codes were starting to show cracks.

 But inside the Preface family, the mood was anything but modern. Preface still ruled like a feudal lord. Rich, isolated, and increasingly paranoid. He had grown more reclusive, rarely leaving his massive estate in Long Island, protected behind iron fences and layers of loyal relatives. To the boys from President Street, Preface was a dinosaur, clinging to power through greed and nepotism.

 To Preface, the gallows were reckless punks who needed to be reminded on who ruled New York’s underworld. [music] The clash was inevitable and it would become one of the bloodiest internal wars in mafia history. And as the spring of 1961 dawned, tensions within the Preface crime family had reached [music] a point of no return.

 Tribute payments had stopped. Meetings were refused. Joe Gallow, once the golden boy of Brooklyn’s underworld, had declared open defiance. And in the smoky bars and quiet alleys of President Street, the whispers began to spread. [music] The gallows were going to war. Larry had agreed, and now was the time for them to revolt.

 On the morning of February the 27th, 1961, in a move that stunned New York’s underworld, the Gallow crew kidnapped four of the Preface family’s top figures. under boss Joseph Majlio, Preface’s own brother Frank Preface, Capo Salvatore Mousakia, and soldier John Shimoni. The plan had been to seize Joe Preface himself. But the old Dawn slipped away, fleeing to his Florida estate before the gallows could reach him. And that detail mattered.

 Larry and Joe were soldiers, the lowest formally initiated rank in the mafia hierarchy. Yet they had just forced the boss of a mafia family to run the length of the country to avoid them. Preface commanded roughly 120 men. It was a fully developed crime family with decades of structure behind it. The gallows had 25 men, most of them in their 20s and 30s.

Yet the Preface organization with all its size, tradition, and supposed discipline was the side running scared. No one in the underworld had ever seen anything quite like it. The idea that two soldiers could shake an entire crime family, paralyze its leadership, and send its boss into hiding was something veteran mobsters openly struggled to explain.

 It said everything about how dangerous the Gallow brothers had become and how much fear Joe Gallow in particular inspired. And now that new nickname, Crazy Joe, didn’t just suit him. It suddenly felt like an understatement. The hostages were taken to the Gallow Stronghold at 51 President Street in Brooklyn, the same building where the brothers had built their vending and jukebox empire.

 Inside the cramped apartment under flickering lights and the smell of cigarette smoke, the gallows held their captives at gunpoint while demands were sent up the chain and Cleo licked her lips at the thought of dinner. They wanted a larger cut of the family profits, control over Frankie Shots’s $2 million policy bank and $150 in cash to settle what they had considered years of unfair tributes.

 For the first time in mafia history, a crew had taken its own hierarchy hostage. Preface, now hiding in Florida, turned to his allies on the commission, including Carlo Gambino, who was now the head of the commission, to mediate the crisis. The message was clear. There would be no bloodshed, at least not yet.

 The commission ordered a truce and promised that the dispute would be resolved peacefully, reluctantly. The gallows released their hostages, but weeks passed and in typical Preface fashion, the promises went unfilled. The money never arrived. The reforms never came. Instead, Preface bided his time and plotted revenge. Negotiations were reopened through John Shimoni, one of the men previously held hostage.

 Shimoni, a trusted Preface loyalist, reached out to Larry Gallo with the pretense of reconciliation. He claimed to have good news, a peace offer in a suitcase full of cash. He invited Larry to meet him in South Brooklyn to discuss the deal. Larry agreed. He met Shimone and accepted the suitcase, which indeed contained money. Shimoni then suggested they celebrate the renewed friendship with a drink at the Sahara Lounge, a dim bar at 1201 Utaker Avenue in East Flatbush, and a known Proface hangout.

 The two men sat at the bar. The place was quiet, only a bartender polishing glasses at the far end. They ordered drinks. Then Shimone excused himself to use the restroom. Moments later, a garrett slipped around Larry’s neck. The cord tightened, biting into his skin as he thrashed in his chair. His attacker was Salvatore Dambrosio, known as Sally D, a Proface enforcer sent to finish the job.

Standing nearby, watching the struggle, was none other than Carmine Persico. Once Larry’s protetéé, now his betrayer. It might have ended there. Larry strangled to death in a Brooklyn bar if not for pure chance. A patrolman unexpectedly entered the lounge just as the attack was underway. Sally D and Persico bolted, punching the officer and shooting his partner outside before vanishing into the night.

 Miraculously, both Larry and the wounded policeman survived. At the 76th precinct, Inspector Raymond Martin tried to persuade Larry to name his attackers, but Larry refused. “Nobody tried to kill me,” he said flatly. It was an act of defiance that both honored the code and deepened the blood feud. From that day forward, Carmine Persico was branded with the nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life, the snake.

 And that summer, the killings began. In August 1961, one of the gallows’s closest confidants and most feared enforcers, Joe Jelly, vanished without a trace. Joe Jelly was Larry’s bodyguard and one of the most efficient, unflinching hitmen operating on the streets. A man whose name alone could clear a room.

 For several days, the gallows heard nothing. There was no phone call, no sighting, no word. Then one afternoon, a car slowed to a crawl outside Jackie’s Charcoallet, the Gallows Family Diner. A rear door opened just long enough for someone to toss a brown paper parcel onto the pavement before the car sped off. Inside the package was Joe Jelly’s neatly folded clothes, and wrapped inside them was a dead fish. The message was unmistakable.

Joe Jelly sleeps with the fishes. A scene that was immortalized in the Godfather movie. Joe Jelly simply hadn’t been murdered. He’d been dismembered. [music] His arms and legs removed and his remains stuffed into a large barrel before being dumped into Sheep’s Head Bay. The barrel floated back to the surface, forcing his killers, led by Sally D, to haul it up again and weigh it down further to ensure [music] that it sank. The brutality was unmistakable.

This wasn’t just a murder. It was a message. And the gallows, who already lived in a world where violence was the currency, suddenly understood that the Preface were [music] willing to escalate the war to levels that even Brooklyn wasn’t accustomed to. The Gallow Preface War, which would later become known as the First [music] Colo War, had begun.

 A few days after Joe Jelly’s clothes were found dumped outside of Jackie’s, the message still hanging in the air like a threat, Crazy Joe, Larry, and Albert summoned every man they had to 51 President Street. No excuses, no delays. Once inside, the orders were absolute. No one was to leave the building without their permission.

 No one was to make a phone call. And no one was to be seen alone on the street. The tenement building became a fortress overnight. They stockpiled weapons until the rooms looked like an armory. Rifles, shotguns, pistols, and more than 15 Thompson submachine guns stacked against the walls. The Gallow crew was armed to the teeth, preparing for a siege they believed could come at any moment.

Inside that cramped President Street building, Joey’s grandmother and father cooked vast pots of spaghetti to feed the men while neighbors slipped in with extra bread, blankets, and information. Kids on the block acted as lookouts, darting between stoops with word of soldiers cruising the neighborhood in dark Cadillac.

 When a reporter spotted the 20 odd men clustered outside the tenement, Joe didn’t bother hiding what was happening. “Yeah,” he said casually. There’s a war on. We’re hitting the mattresses. It was a throwaway line, but it stuck. From that moment on, hitting the mattresses became the phrase for mob crews going to ground, sleeping on floors, living side by side until the danger passed.

 Inside 51 President Street, which they began calling the dormatory. That’s exactly what they did. The entire crew slept shoulderto-shoulder on bare mattresses laid across the floorboards. [music] Some men dozed, some polished weapons, others stared out cracked windows, keeping watch over a street where every parked car, every unfamiliar [music] face could mean an ambush.

 They lived on coffee, cigarettes, and the spaghetti that Joey’s grandmother kept ladling out of enormous pots while the youngest kids in the neighborhood ran updates up the stoop like wartime couriers. Joey was right. There was a war on. And to be honest, calling it a war was almost an understatement.

 In early October 1961, Joseph Magnasco, known as Joey Mags, the only other made man in the Gallow crew besides Joe and Larry and a former soldier under Profo, Harry Fontana, made a fatal mistake. Against the gallows’s explicit orders to stay inside the dormatory, he slipped out to meet his mother at the college restaurant at 224 4th Avenue.

 As he stepped out of the diner and onto the sidewalk, a gunman was waiting. It was Sally Fontana, the brother of Harry. Sally raised his weapon and fired three times. Joey Mags collapsed in the street, gravely wounded, but still alive. When police arrived, a priest was summoned to administer the last rights on the pavement.

 Moments later, Joseph Magnasco, just 36 years old, died where he fell. The second major casualty in a war that was only just beginning. The retaliation came swiftly. In November 1961, Preface hitman John Guarelia and Paul Richishi were killed at the hi-fi lounge at 72013th Avenue in Benenhurst, shot dead by Gallow members Michael Rizatello and Punchy Alano.

 Then a month later, a Proface gunman disguised as a woman opened fire on Larry Gallow’s car. Larry survived unscathed and then days later Carmine Persico found a bomb under his car. But fortunately for him, not for the gallows, it didn’t go off and was sorted out by the authorities. The war raged on and now the gallows who were no longer collecting on tough Tony due to the fact that well they claimed they killed his brother or Frankie shots his numbers business as Persico and Profi had claimed that for themselves.

 The gallows were in need of cash. While Larry built vending routes where Preface hitmen would not find them and balanced the ledgers, Joe looked to shake down a local businessman, a man named Teddy Moss, of whom no photographs have survived of. But basically, Moss was the owner of a small check cashing service and three Brooklyn taverns.

 And when Joe tried to extort him, Moss went to the police. In the middle of a gang war, Joe was arrested. and now faced a potential 14-year sentence. In court, Moss testified that Joe had tried to seize his check cashing business, [music] and the judge handed down the maximum sentence, 7 to 14 years in Attica prison.

 As the verdict was read, Jeffy Gallow, who was heavily pregnant at that point and already worn thin by months of the gang war, broke down in tears. Joe slipped an arm around her and murmured, “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” But nothing about the moment was all right. Because while Brooklyn simmered in a gang war and his brothers fought one of the most powerful mafia families in America, the Gallow crew had just lost their most feared enforcer.

 And Crazy Joe was now headed to prison for a long stretch, leaving his brothers to survive without him. By the end of 1961, the Gallow Preface War had left Brooklyn shaken. The mafia commission was furious. Preface’s greed had created a rebellion. And Joe Gallow’s defiance had turned it into a spectacle. Newspapers ran daily updates and for the first time, the American public saw organized crime as a messy, human, and violent civil war.

 Then on January the 31st, 1962, something happened that no one could have predicted. Smoke was seen pouring from a thirdf flooror window at 73 President Street just a few doors down from the dormatory. A mattress had caught fire inside the top floor apartment, quickly filling it with a thick black smoke. Without hesitation, Larry and several of the crew sprinted towards the building.

 Inside the choking heat, they dragged out six children, the youngest an infant, the oldest no more than six. Larry carried a 5-year-old girl whose hair had already begun to singe. Albert wrapped the naked baby in his jacket and shielded her from the smoke. Others tore the burning mattress apart, dowsing it with water from pots, pans, and buckets they grabbed from neighbors.

 By the time three fire trucks screeched onto the block, the blaze was already out, extinguished not by firefighters, but by the very men the newspapers had spent years calling killers. The children’s mother, Sea Star Baz, returned from the grocery store to find her home ruined, but her children alive. She dropped her shopping bags right there on the sidewalk and began to cry.

 They saved my children, she told the reporters gathering around her. They’re wonderful boys. God bless them. When the cameras turned towards the gallows, Albert tried to push the attention away. Don’t make heroes out of us, he said. We’re not heroes. We just did what any red-blooded American boys would do. You see any horns here? I ain’t got no horns. We’re not animals.

We’re just human beings trying to get along. The story made national headlines within hours. Housewives sent cookies and handwritten letters. Church groups thanked the gallows for their bravery. Even the FBI in a memo to J. Edahoo warned that considerable favorable publicity concerning the Gallow brothers is expected to result.

 Subject should be considered armed and dangerous. Life magazine ran a piece with the headline, “All righty already. The mob is heroes. In the middle of a brutal mafia war, the gallows had accidentally become household names. The gangsters who pulled children from a burning building. They were no longer just villains. They were something stranger, something the public couldn’t resist.

 The outlaw brothers of President Street. The charming killers who saved six kids from a fire. The crew who defied their own boss in the law and somehow walked away looking like legends. But behind the headlines, the war was far from over. Preface’s health was failing and new alliances were forming in the shadows. The truce was temporary.

 The wounds were deep. And Joe Gallo, now behind the walls of Attica, was already planning his next move. By the spring of 1962, South Brooklyn was worn thin. After a year of kidnappings, attempted hits, ambushes, and disappearances, the whole neighborhood carried itself differently. People talked a little quieter. Shopkeepers closed earlier.

 Priests kept an eye on who lingered outside the church steps. Even traffic on Colombia and President Street seemed to slow, not because the lights changed, but because drivers were afraid of ending up between two passing cars full of gunmen. Nobody knew who would get hit next. Nobody wanted to be standing near them when it happened.

 The Gallow Preface feud had turned daily life into a kind of strange routine. Open your shop, mind your business, keep your head down, and hope today wasn’t the day that bullet started flying again. The Gallo Preface conflict had divided families, emptied corner bars after dark, and taught children to identify the sound of a 38 against the echo of a car backfiring.

In March 1962, a sedan on a Brooklyn Avenue took a sudden burst of shots. The target was Salvatore Proface, son of Joe. The bullets missed, but the message reached its destination. If the old man would not step down, the young would bleed in his place. Finally, the commission intervened. The bosses could see that the war was drawing heat, and heat crushed business.

 Quiet emissaries moved between apartments and back rooms, and the word came down that there would be peace. Not reconciliation, not forgiveness, merely the absence of gunfire long enough for Brooklyn to breathe. If peace required humiliation, then the younger men would swallow it, at least in public. Larry Gallow would have to sit across from Carmine Persico, and their handshake, however brittle, would be accepted as binding by the men on the rooftops and the men waiting in Cadillacs.

 The brothers complied, but Larry refused to leave President Street. He didn’t trust truce or ceremony. He felt the wire bite his throat and he’d watched the garrett tighten in a dim lounge. He understood that with Preface, peace meant nothing, so he stayed. The dormatory is fortress and family hearth. His father Ombberto cooking spaghetti in the kitchen.

 His brother Albert drifting between front stoop and upstairs windows. The neighborhood children still slipping in to relay information. President Street continued to be their fortress. While Larry watched the street lights from Brooklyn, Joe Gallo sat behind the walls of Atica and remade himself into something the newspapers could not easily file.

 He read with the hunger of a man who had finally been permitted to be alone with his own mind. The nights ran long under weak bulbs, and the books he chose sharpened him. Kant and Spinoza for the structure of thought, nature for the terrible romance of will, Voltater and Wild for the wit that could cut without drawing blood.

 He filled the margins with thoughts on philosophy and kept a notebook where ideas about life sat beside notes on street strategy, part reflection, part practical [music] guide for the world that he lived in. For his own safety, he chose solitary confinement over the yard. Larry warned him never to [music] accept outside food because men who could not reach him with a pistol might yet reach him with a poisoned sandwich and Preface had men everywhere.

 But isolation does not last forever and Atica reabsorbed him into the general population where decisions had to be made carefully and survival depended on reading the room. At however was a minefield of its own. The Irish stuck with the Irish. The Puerto Ricans stuck with their own and many Italian inmates looked at the name Gallow and saw only a blood debt against Joe Preface.

 Joey read the geography of the yard and went a very different way. He got close with black inmates, partly for safety, but mostly because he’d always been the kind of man who talked to whoever he wanted to, no matter what the rules were. At the barber shop, the black and white chairs stood side by side, but white prisoners refused black barbers, leaving men idle while others waited.

 Joe sat without fuss. He let a black barber cut his hair, and in a place where small gestures are magnified into banners, that was noticed. The Ku Klux Clanmen inside Attica noticed it, too. The first attack came out of a blind spot between routine and spite. A clansman who was locked for using a crowbar on another inmate suddenly had a door that did not latch.

 And the story that Joe told was simple and ugly. A guard with Nazi sympathies had left it open. The clansman came at him in the corridor and Joe fought the way that men fight when there is nothing left to negotiate. He bit off the clansman’s ear and flushed it down the toilet to deny any trophy to the men who would have made one of him. For that, he was sent to reception B, the prison’s version of limbo.

 And he learned the choreography of humiliation there, a bucket that was used for waste and also one that he had to wash his pots in. A cell that turned the man inward until he was ready to be considered again. If paranoia is a sane response to certain structures, Joe’s paranoia enlarged under that discipline. He believed with cause and without that everyone was out to engineer his death.

The Preface faction, the guards, the KKK inmates, and the prison officials who preferred quiet explanations. He understood that the most practical escape was not a hole in the wall, but a transfer order. So he sued. He wrote what the law required and what the headlines wanted, that his rights were being violated, that he was being targeted for associating with black inmates, that he had the right to talk to whomever he wished.

 After 5 months in Attica with his name in more files than most, a prison psychiatrist helped secure his transfer to Green Haven Correctional Facility, 2 hours from Brooklyn and a significant upgrade on the battlefield that was Attica. In those years, Green Haven’s Yard was a small version of the outside world. The Black Panthers, the Muslims, the Young Lords, all had their corners.

 Most white inmates kept their distance. Joe didn’t. He drifted between groups, listened to their arguments, asked questions, and shared what he had. The care packages he requested from home. Camel cigarettes, cigars, Swiss cheese, pickles, tins of fish, weren’t luxuries so much as a way to hold onto a sense of control.

 He passed food around when it made sense. Generosity bought safety. But it also bought him the time to talk, to build friendships, to imagine alliances that reached beyond prison walls. Joe told men from every group that when they got out, they didn’t need to return to the old rules, the racism, the boundaries, the ideas that each neighborhood had to stay in its own lane.

 He’d say that there was money to be made by working together by tearing up the script that the mafia and the city had been using for 50 years. And the man he bonded with the most was Nikki Barnes, the rising heroine kingpin from Harlem. Sharp, disciplined, [music] and ambitious. The two of them talked about power, about networks, about what the streets might look like if black and Italian crews ever decided to cooperate instead of compete.

 But for now, those streets of Brooklyn and the uneasy peace that rested on it were about to be shattered. On the evening of June the 7th, 1962, the man who had ruled one of New York’s oldest mafia families for more than three decades, finally lost his empire to something more relentless than ambition, cancer.

 Joseph Preface, the olive oil king, died quietly at his Long Island estate. The liver disease that had been eating at him for years did what the Gallow brothers never could. The newspapers that once printed his name in whispers now ran it in bold. His reign had stretched from the last days of prohibition through the entire postwar boom.

 A period in which he transformed a Brooklyn street gang into one of the five organized crime families of New York City. For the gallows, the timing was poetic. They hadn’t managed to kill him, but nature had done the work for them. After his death, control of the family typically passed to Preface’s brother-in-law, Joseph Marleyoko.

 The the loyal underboss who had survived the Gallow kidnappings the year before. Malio was cautious, understated, and illquipped to lead a family fractured by paranoia. His first task was to hold the peace that the commission demanded. But beneath the silence, the vendettas kept breathing. The Gallo Proface War didn’t end with Preface’s funeral.

 It only lost its figurehead. Within weeks, blood returned to the Brooklyn pavement. The gallows, convinced that Carmine, the snake Persico, as they were now calling him, had betrayed them during the 1961 strangling attempt, prepared a carbon, the old underworld solution for problems that could not be solved face to face. Persico was the target and by all rights should have died on March the 17th, 1963.

But he left the car only moments before it exploded. A twist of chance that reinforced his reputation for being a mortal, which was a nickname along with the snake that he would have for life. But the gallows didn’t let up. In May 1963, the war hit one of its most critical points when Carmine Persico and Alons Don Broio known as Funsy D, the brother of Sally D, were ambushed on Bond Street while getting into a car outside a Brooklyn bar.

 Another car pulled up alongside them and opened fire without a word. Bullets tore through the windows. Funs D was hit in the hand and shoulder. Persico survived the wounds to his hand, shoulder, and neck, but any of the shots could have killed him. Both men dove to the pavement and managed to crawl to safety as the shooters sped off.

 The attack made headlines immediately. Newspapers ran front page stories about mob gunmen firing in broad daylight, and detectives publicly acknowledged that the Gallo Preface conflict was no longer a contained feud. It had become a fullscale war spilling onto Brooklyn’s streets. The shooting underscored two things.

 The gallows were still willing to take direct shots at the Preface leadership and the Preface leadership would return fire. The bloodletting became relentless. On the 13th of June, Vincent Duchi, a Preface soldier, was shot five times with a pistol and died instantly. Police detained Gallow crew member Jinaro Jerry Bashiano, but released him for lack of evidence.

 6 days later, on June the 19th, Alfred Mandela, a 41-year-old retired Long Shoreman of whom no photograph survived, was sitting outside his home in a beach chair when a man walked up, leveled a gun, and fired. Mandela had supplied weapons to the gallows and now he was the latest casualty of the war and the summer heat brought no relief.

 On July the 24th, Joe Gallow’s old bodyguard Ali Barbar was gunned down on the Haboken docks in New Jersey. Three bullets to the stomach as he stepped off a cruise ship. The suspects were Joseph Joe Yak Yakaveli and Carmine Debi known as Sunny Pinto and both of them were aligned to the Preface crew. Then came August the 9th, 1963.

Joseph Bascardiello, a veteran soldier who had shifted allegiances too many times, was driving through Brooklyn when his car was riddled with bullets. He died instantly. That same day, Preface loyalists struck back on route 347 in Port Jefferson. Lewis Cadillac Louie Marani was driving down on what is now the Nes concert highway in front of the Nescon shopping center in Long Island when Anthony Fat Tony Regina and John Moose Batista, two Profi crew members, opened fire on his car.

 The shooting left Cadillac Louie dead at the age of 26. Regina and Batista were later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Brooklyn newspapers began to call it the year of the guns. By now, the FBI and NYPD had counted over 30 killings linked to the Profi Gallow feud. Every few weeks, a new name appeared in the papers, each accompanied by the same pattern.

 A car, a flash, a scream, a quote from the police about underworld tensions. No one outside the families knew precisely who was winning. And inside the families, everyone had lost something. As 1963 waned, the war’s momentum slowed, not because anyone had triumphed, but because both sides were absolutely exhausted.

 Too many shooters were dead. Too many soldiers in hiding or behind bars. By the end of 1963, Joseph Mario’s control of the old Proface family was collapsing. His health was failing, his grip on the crew was weak, and he was increasingly isolated. In that vulnerability, he made the worst decision of his career. Malio secretly aligned himself with Joseph Banano, who was facing his own decline and growing resentment toward the commission.

 Together, they devised an extraordinary plan to assassinate several commission members, Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucesy, Stefano Magadino, and Frank D. Simone, and reshape the mafia’s hierarchy in their favor. Malio was assigned the job of killing Gambino and Lucesy and he passed the contract to one of his top men, Joseph Columbbo. But Columbbo had absolutely no intention of carrying out the hit, which would have been suicide.

 Instead, he quietly went to Gambino and Lu Kesi and exposed the entire plot. He understood immediately that Malio would take the blame, but Banano, the true architect, would be the real target. The commission moved fast. Banano ignored the summons and fled to Montreal, leaving Malio alone to answer for the conspiracy.

 Shaken and in poor health, Malio confessed. Commission spared his life, but he was forced to step down as boss and pay a $50,000 fine. He retired quietly and within months, December 28th, 1963 to be exact, he died of a heart attack on Long Island. Columbbo, meanwhile, was rewarded for his loyalty. Gambino elevated the 41-year-old to boss of the former Preface family, becoming the first Americanborn boss of a New York crime family.

 A move that shocked New York and effectively ended the old order of mustache pets. What had begun as a desperate power grab instead created the Columbbo crime family and set the stage for the next chapter of the Gallow war. For Columbo, it was a remarkable rise from mid-level Kappo to mafia boss in a single conversation.

 But it also signaled a generational shift. The cautious, calculating Gambino wanted stability, and Columbbo, at least on the surface, offered that. For the Gallo brothers, it meant that their oldest enemy had been replaced by a younger, more pragmatic one. But for now, the war fizzled out. Because by the mid 1960s, Brooklyn had changed.

 The docks were no longer the empire that they had been under the Anastasia, and the neighborhoods that once supplied soldiers to both sides were now feeding the city’s new youth movements. The Gallow crew, or what was left of it, had aged, scattered, or adapted. Larry, increasingly introspective and quietly ill, kept his routine simple.

 Albert Kid Blast handled what little business remained and Joe, still behind bars, watch it all unfold through headlines and letters. Two years later, tragedy came quietly. On May the 17th, 1968, Larry Gallo died at Nassau Hospital after a long fight with cancer. He was 41 years of age. For all his volatility, Larry had been the axis of the brother’s loyalty, the calmst in the storm, the first to take a fall, and the last to truly believe in peace.

 When the news reached Green Haven, Joe Gallow arranged for a temporary leave from prison to see his brother one final time. The reunion in the funeral home was brief, wordless, and devastating. Whatever illusions Joe still had about immortality died with Larry. That day, back in prison, Joe’s transformation deepened.

 By the end of the 1960s, he was a man halfway between criminal legend and philosopher. Quoted in magazines and studied by criminologists who didn’t quite know what to make of him. His paintings, dark, surreal, and full of caged animals, were occasionally displayed in small galleries. Journalists called him the thinking gangster, the underworld intellectual, and the poet of President Street.

 The commission, meanwhile, was reorganizing itself under Gambino’s quiet empire. Joe Columbbo began to consolidate power. He was everything that Preface had not been. He was approachable, modern, and a man who understood the value of public image. He would soon found the Italian American Civil Rights League, turning himself into a celebrity and ironically paving the way for the reemergence of the one man the underworld thought it had buried. Crazy Joe Gallow.

 The war that had started with kidnappings and garretts was giving way to something stranger. A battle over perception. The old bosses ruled from the shadows and the new ones smiled for the cameras. And the man who had once terrified Brooklyn now read philosophy under prison lights, waiting for the world outside to forget just long enough for him to rewrite the script.

 When Crazy Joe walked out of Green Haven Correctional Facility in April 1971, he wasn’t the swaggering young killer who’d gone in. He was a man 9 years older, sharper, and infinitely more dangerous in silence than in noise. The old world he’d left behind, the one ruled by the rackets, the waterfront, and the whisper of garretts, had long become something else entirely.

 America in 1971 was talking about revolution, civil rights, and power in the streets. Joe had spent his sentence studying those very words. During his sentence, New York’s prisons were primed for racial violence. Overcrowding, poor conditions, and openly biased treatment from mostly white guards created constant friction between black, Puerto Rican, and white inmates.

 Small disputes could explode into full-scale riots with almost no warning. During one of these outbreaks at Green Haven, a guard was stabbed and left on the floor as inmates closed in. Joe stepped in, pulled the wounded officer behind him, and held the crowd back until help arrived. The guard later testified that Joe could have killed him, but chose not to.

 A single act of restraint that played a major role in securing Joe’s early parole. So when the gates opened and the cameras waited, Joe didn’t play the part of the bitter X-Con. He played the philosopher returning from exile. He stepped into the daylight in a tailored suit, silver showing at the temples, eyes bright behind dark glasses.

 To the journalists who shouted his name, he smiled. I’m a new man now. I’m in the construction business. But everyone in Brooklyn knew that meant anything but construction. Joe wasted no time making his intentions clear. The old 1963 peace deal didn’t apply to him. Almost immediately, a message derived from Joe Colombo, the current boss of the former Profi family.

Columbo extended what he called a gesture of goodwill. $1,000 in cash meant as a token of peace and welcome. It was both symbolic and practical, an acknowledgment that Columbbo didn’t want another Brooklyn war. Joe laughed. He sent the money back, demanding instead $100,000 if Columbbo wanted real peace. Tell him, Joe said, “That’s the price for quiet.

 Otherwise, I’ll turn this town into a fireworks show.” He made it clear he despised what Columbbo had become. a boss who appeared on television collecting money in the name of the Italian American Civil Rights League selling flags, patches, and pins while pretending to be a crusader against discrimination. >> Mr.

 Columbo, are you a boss of the mafia? No, I am not. Is there a mafia? No, there is not. >> To Joe, it was hypocrisy of the worst kind. a gangster pretending to be a saint while still shaking down contractors. Columbbo’s men were stunned by Joe’s arrogance. Every messenger sent to reason with him came back humiliated. Joe insulted them one by one, laughing at their diplomacy.

 Tell your boss, he said once that I don’t salute handkerchief salesman. Joe was a made man, but neither him or his brother Larry had ever climbed higher than the rank of a soldier. For someone so low in the mafia hierarchy to threaten the boss of the family, well, that was almost unthinkable. Inside the Columbbo crime family, men muttered that Gallo must have taken leave of his senses.

 But them same men seemed to forget who they were talking about. This was Crazy Joe. The same fire brand who had once put so much heat on Joe Preface that the old Dawn fled to Miami to hide. The same man who had publicly boasted that he was behind the most sensational gangland killing of the century.

 The barbershop execution of Albert Anastasia. People called him Crazy Joe for good reason. Defying a boss wasn’t madness to him. It was familiar territory. But outside the underworld, Joe Gallow’s comeback was met with fascination. America had fallen in love with its outlaws again. The Godfather novel dominated the bestseller lists.

 The movies again romanticized gangsters as tragic figures with codes and charm. And here came Crazy Joe, articulate, magnetic, unrepentant, walking straight into that cultural moment. He returned to Greenwich Village to the San Ramo Cafe and Joe sat among actors, artists, and writers who couldn’t resist the spectacle. He talked about freedom, fate, and survival with the same casual tone he’d once used to discuss gunmen.

 To the Bohemians, he was irresistible, a real outlaw who could hold his own in conversation with poets. Playwright Jean Jane hearing of his story called him the most dangerous poet that Brooklyn ever produced. Not long after his release, Joe befriended actor Jerry Orbach, who was preparing for the film The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a comedy loosely based on Joe’s own gang wars that you would have seen clips of throughout this documentary.

 Orbach played a character named Kid Sally Palumbo modeled after Gallo. The film also featured a young Robert Dairo and by all accounts, Joe found it hilarious. Orbach admired Joe’s charisma and intelligence. Joe in turn was flattered by the actor’s respect. Soon Joe and his wife Jeffy was socializing with Orback and his wife Martr, attending Broadway openings and Manhattan parties.

 At one premiere, Joe sent actress Joan Hackit a bouquet of flowers with a note attached that read, “Dear Joan, you’re a good broad.” Hackit later said, laughing, “Bro is a word I’d never accept from anyone but Joe.” For the first time ever, the city’s intellectual elite treated a gangster as if he were a novelist. And Joe loved it.

But prison had changed more than Joe’s mind. It had also began to change his marriage. Whilst he was incarcerated, Jeffy had left him. Tired of the isolation and scrutiny. After his release, they reunited briefly, but the old chemistry was gone, and Joe’s attention had wandered. He met Cena, a 29-year-old dental nurse, lively, fearless, and drawn to the peculiar glamour of his legend.

 With her, he seemed softer, almost domestic in quiet moments, though everyone around them sensed that any piece he found would only be temporary. He and Cena settled in Greenwich Village, on streets where musicians, painters, poets, and drifters moved freely, and where fame and obscurity often lived on opposite sides of the same hallway.

 Joe lived only a short walk from Bob Dylan, whose rise had transformed the village into a kind of bohemian capital. And Joe longed to step into that world. He wanted to write, to paint, to create something that wasn’t defined by violence or vendetta. And in the spring of 1971, he took a serious step towards that reinvention.

 When Viking Press offered him a book deal to tell the story of his life, he and Cena spent long afternoons in the Eighpook shop, browsing through poetry and philosophy in the latest village literary obsessions, building a life that teetered between romance, reinvention, and escape. Crazy Joe Gallow, the gangster who had once walked the streets of Brooklyn with a mountain lion and a grin, was now trying to carve out a place in the artistic world.

 Still dangerous, still unpredictable, but reaching for something more than the mythology that he had created. For a while, Brooklyn stayed eerily still, watching his every move, every weird move that Crazy Joe took. As Joe Colombo and the rest of them saw it, he was quieter now, more deliberate, and therefore, in some ways, more unnerving to Columbbo and the rest of the family.

But that illusion of calm didn’t last long. Word spread through social clubs and cafes that Joe was recruiting again. Not just Italians from the old neighborhood, but black and Puerto Rican hoodlams who saw him as a hero and wanted in on the action. What unsettled the old guard mobsters even more was the rumor behind it.

 That Gallow had stayed close with Nikki Barnes, the Harlem drug kingpin he’d befriended in prison, and that the two men were quietly discussing a business arrangement of their own. To the mafia, it looked like something close to treason. The idea of a white mob figure aligning himself with a rising black drug organization, especially one as ambitious and organized as Barnes’s was unheard of.

And the whispers grew darker that Gallow planned to flood Brooklyn with heroine, build an army of young recruits who didn’t care about old rules, and used the money he made to challenge the mafia power structure itself. For the old guard mafia, this was a nogo. Regardless of whether he planned to overthrow the mafia, no family boss had ever mixed races in his crew. Joe didn’t care.

Money doesn’t know color, he told one reporter. And neither do bullets. Within months, he reportedly had a hundred or more new men orbiting him. Hustlers, stickup kids, smalltime dealers. a new kind of street army that scared the traditional mob. They didn’t understand his loyalties, his humor, or his unpredictability.

They only knew that the man they tried to bury was alive again and building something that didn’t follow their rules. Among the upper ranks of the Columbbo crime family, some whispered that maybe it would be better if someone, anyone, took Joe Gallow off the board for good. Others quietly hoped for open war, the kind that could finally erase the myth.

 By the spring of 1971, Joe Gallow had become a paradox. A man both inside and outside the mafia, a celebrity who dined with actors while threatening bosses. Reporters followed him from restaurants to art galleries, fascinated by his ease with fame. He would charm a journalist one moment and terrify a gangster the next.

 He was back where he always wanted to be, at the center of attention. But this time, it wasn’t the gun that gave him power. It was the story. He once told Jerry Orback that he felt like an actor who’d been written out of his own movie. And now he was writing himself back in it. And as Crazy Joe Gallow sipped espressos in Greenwich Village, laughing with movie stars, the men he’d insulted were already whispering about how to bring down the curtain on his second act.

 The stage was set, the audience was waiting, and somewhere in the distance, Columbus Circle was already being prepared for the next scene. By the spring of 1971, the uneasy peace between Crazy Joe and the ruling Columbbo family had already begun to crack. Joe Colombo had spent the past few years transforming himself from a quiet raketeer into one of the most publicly visible men in America.

His vehicle for that transformation was the ItalianAmerican Civil Rights League, an organization he created in 1970 after his son’s arrest. Publicly framed as a fight against discrimination and the FBI’s use of the word mafia. We feel that the people have had it and the Italian people in particular in the United States which number 38 million have been losing its identity as time has been going on more and more and more so.

>> What began as a calculated publicity stunt quickly swelled into a mass movement. Columbbo was everywhere smiling for cameras, shaking hands with city officials, and leading marches under the bright tririccolor banners of the league. >> YOU ARE ONE. NOBODY COULD TAKE YOU APART ANYMORE. [cheering] >> Thousands of workingclass Italians filled the streets at his rallies, waving flags, singing the national anthem, shouting that they were tired of being portrayed as gangsters.

 The irony was lost on most of them. Columbbo, the man protesting the stereotype, was himself the head of one of New York’s five families. To the press, he was a folk hero. To the FBI, a hypocrite, and to Crazy Joe Gallo, he was a joke. Gallo despised everything Columbo represented. The smiling hypocrisy, the moral speeches delivered from a podium built on extortion money, the phony respectability of a man who could order a beating at breakfast and bless a crowd by lunchtime.

>> GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU. >> To him, Columbbo was soft, vain, and dangerously loud. By early June, the whispers were moving through Little Italy and Bensonhurst that Joe Gallow was now ready for war. But Columbbo seemed too distracted to notice. The success of his league had gone to his head.

 He taken to staging massive public rallies, giving speeches surrounded by American flags and inviting politicians to stand beside him. He told his followers that the FBI’s use of the term mafia was a slur against Italians and that the league would fight it in court. Privately, many of his peers on the commission were appalled. The mob’s power had always come from secrecy, and Columbbo’s television appearances and endless interviews violated everything that they’d built.

 His open courting of the press brought heat to all of the five families. And even Carlo Gambino, the quiet puppet master of New York’s underworld, had started to grumble that Columbbo’s antics were bad for business. And then came Italian Unity Day, June the 28th, 1971. A day which was to be Columbbo’s grandest spectacle yet.

 Columbus Circle in mid Manhattan was transformed into a festival ground with crowds spilling out towards Central Park South and down Broadway as the city gathered to celebrate. There were marching bands, children’s carrying signs, vendors selling league souvenirs, and thousands of supporters waving both American and Italian flags.

 The sun was high, the crowd loud and jubilant. Columbbo was scheduled to speak just afternoon. Security was nominal, more ceremonial than real. The league had issued hundreds of laminated press passes to photographers, volunteers, and self-proclaimed journalists. Among them was a slight well-dressed black man known as Jerome Johnson, carrying a camera, and wearing one of those official badges. No one questioned him.

He mingled easily with the crowd, moving closer to the stage as the speeches began. A few minutes before noon, Columbbo stepped up from his limousine and began walking towards the podium. He smiled broadly, waving to the crowd, shaking hands with local officials and parish priests. To his followers, he was the embodiment of Italian success.

 A man who had tamed the mafia and turned it into a cause. >> [groaning and screaming] >> As he reached for the microphone, a single shot rang out. Columbo collapsed instantly, blood erupting from his temple. Two more shots followed in quick succession. Panic tore through the crowd. Screams, running feet, flags trampled underfoot.

Jerome Johnson dropped his camera and tried to flee, but was tackled by Columbbo’s bodyguards. One of them brandished a revolver and fired five times at point blank range. Johnson died on the way to the hospital, still clutching his fake press. The main speaker was fatally shot. >> Television cameras caught everything.

The chaos, the screaming, the sound of a band still playing a halffinish march while people ducked for cover. For a moment, it was unclear whether Columbbo was alive. Then medics swarmed the stage. He was still breathing, barely. An ambulance took him away, sirens slicing through the noise. Newspapers would later call it the day the mafia went public. and got shot for it.

 Within hours, rumors were spinning in every direction. The obvious suspect, whispered in every [music] precinct, house, and barroom, was crazy Joe Gallo. He had motive, and most importantly, people believed he now had an army behind him. Black gunmen drawn to him through his friendship with Nikki Barnes.

 The idea that an Africanamean shooter had taken down Joseph Columbbo, a man who’d wrapped himself in Italian pride, was too poetic and too symbolic for anyone to ignore. And everyone remembered that Joe had spent years in prison building friendships with black inmates, talking about alliances, revolution, and tearing down the old way of [music] doing things.

 Reporters devoured the theory. Now you hear the gangland theory being pushed that Gallow did make a hit on Columbbo. >> This is merely conjecture and rumor, but there is no >> newspapers claimed Gallow had outsourced vengeance, that he’d used his new black and Puerto Rican recruits to strike at Columbbo in the most humiliating way possible. Overnight, the myth hardened.

Crazy Joe had sent a black hitman to publicly execute a mafia boss in front of his own cheering supporters. Columbo never recovered. The bullet had severed part of his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed and unable to speak. He lingered for another 7 years in a vegetative state before dying in 1978, aged 54.

 The league collapsed almost immediately after the shooting. Its bank accounts were frozen, its officers raided, and its followers scattered. The same crowds that had once chanted Columbbo’s name now whispered it in embarrassment. His movement, once hailed as the dawn of Italian empowerment, was exposed as what the FBI had claimed all along, a front for his extortion and political manipulation.

 For the Mafia Commission, the problem had been solved neatly without a formal war. But for New York, the spectacle had burned itself into public memory. The city had watched a mob boss gunned down on live television. His crusade ending in screams beneath the statue of Christopher Columbus. As the smoke cleared, the name that lingered was gallows. But he denied any involvement.

“Why would I shoot a cripple?” he smirked and told reporters. It was the perfect quote. Insolent, cruel, and magnetic. Like the Anastasia hits, whether people believed him or not didn’t matter. The legend had already written itself. To the public, Joe Gallow had become the dark star orbiting the chaos.

 He represented everything Columbbo wasn’t. Unpredictable, streetorn, authentic. One had courted the cameras and been shot for it. The other now stepped into that empty spotlight. The shooting made Gallow’s celebrity explode. Newspapers plastered his face across front pages again. Journalists compared him to John Dillinger, to Al Capone, to a folk hero who’d survived his own age.

 The intellectuals who met him in Greenwich Village spoke of him with fascination, saying he was misunderstood, that he had transcended the criminal code. Actors and musicians whispered that they’d known him, that he’d quoted poetry over dinner. Inside the mafia, fear replaced gossip. Some believed Gallow had orchestrated the assassination with clinical precision.

 Others thought he was too reckless for such a clean execution. But even those who doubted his guilt couldn’t ignore the symbolism. The man who’d spent a decade defying bosses had once again turned the city upside down. Whether by design or coincidence, for Crazy Joe, the event was validation, he saw himself not as a fugitive from the old order, but as a figure of destiny, chosen to outlive it.

The newspapers called him the last gangster of the old world and the first of the new. He liked that phrase, and it was one he repeated often. In the weeks that followed, Columbbo’s organization fragmented. His son Anthony Colombo tried to hold things together, but rival Kappos circled like vultures. The families quietly rearranged their alliances and Gallow moved freely through Manhattan, dining in Little Italy, laughing in clubs, smiling for photographers who now treated him like a celebrity. Every article, every

whispered conversation added another layer to the myth. The gangster who’d survived the old ways. The intellectual criminal who quoted poetry. The man who might or might not have brought down a mafia boss in broad daylight. He had become what he always wanted to be, a living legend. But legends attract attention, and attention in New York’s underworld always carried a price.

 For Joe Gallow, that price was already waiting on Malbury Street, written quietly into fate. By the spring of 1972, Crazy Joe had become a figure that existed somewhere between myth and man. He had always believed he was untouchable. His enemies had either died, gone to prison, or lost their nerve.

 He had survived solitary confinement, street wars, betrayals, and insanity. And now he was living what he thought was the third act of his life. Fame, money, and respectability. He spent his nights at Broadway openings, gallery events, and jazz club. Journalists wrote about his clothes, his manners, his intellect. In the eyes of a curious public, he had almost become respectable.

 On April the 7th, 1972, Joe turned 43 years old. He was three weeks into his new marriage with Cena, the young dental nurse who’d given him what looked from the outside like peace. The wedding was intimate and improvised, held inside Jerry and Martr Orback’s apartment in Chelsea with the comedian David Steinberg, one of Joe’s closest village companions, standing proudly as his best man.

 And now with his new wife by his side, he wasn’t spending his birthday hiding or in a cell, he planned to celebrate properly. Not in Brooklyn, where ghost still lingered on President Street, but in Manhattan, where celebrities gathered and cameras flashed. The night began at the Copa Cabana Nightclub, the legendary East 60th Street Supper Club that for decades had been the beating heart of New York’s night life.

 A place where mobsters, celebrities, politicians, and Broadway stars sat side by side. And tonight, Don Rickles was performing his usual sharpedged act. Joe was the supposed owner of the Copa Cabana at this time, which wouldn’t surprise me, but I couldn’t find anything concrete, which is all too typical with mob ties. Joe sat near the front with Cena, her 10-year-old daughter Lisa, his sister Carmela, and his lifelong friend and bodyguard Pete the Greek.

 The atmosphere was relaxed and full of laughter. Rickles, known for mocking everyone in the room, even teased Gallow lightly. I see Joey Gallows here tonight. Don’t shoot Joey. I’m only kidding. The audience roared, and Joe grinned, enjoying the attention. He’d become so much a part of New York’s mythology that even the city’s biggest comedians could joke about him without fear.

 After the show, Joe went backstage to meet Rickles, shaking his hand warmly and inviting him to join the group for a late night meal. Rickles declined, saying he had an early flight in the morning. Joe smiled and said, “Next time then, I’ll hold you to it.” >> Now, when you played the Copa, who was in the house? What kind of a crowd would come in there when you played the copa back? >> You ever hear Joey Gallow? >> Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

>> Hold it down. Huh? My mother rest. She was great. Joey Gallow one night said, “Come on, sit with us.” And we sat down at the table and there were guns around. You know those days gun. And I said to my to my mother, I said, “Mom, these guys got guns.” She said, “They’re wonderful people.

 These are the people that are going to make you a star.” Which a star. >> Star. The group left just after midnight and climbed into a Cadillac parked out front. The city lights reflected on the windshields as they drove downtown. The radio low, Sinatra playing on the airwaves. They were looking for a place to eat, something simple.

 Open late, away from the noise of Midtown. Driving through Little Italy, they turned onto Malbury Street, a narrow archery of neon and cobblestone that still smelled of garlic and cigarette smoke. They stopped near the corner of Hester Street where a new seafood restaurant had just opened, Ombberto’s Clam House.

 The neon sign glowed blue and red, and inside the last few tables were still occupied by locals, finishing plates of linguini and white wine. Joe leaned out the window and called to a man standing in the parking lot, asking [music] if the food was good. The man, tall and heavy set, smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s the best in the neighborhood.

” That man was Matty the horse Yanniello, a Colombo associate who owned the restaurant. And someone who wouldn’t have been too happy with the fact that Crazy Joe shot Joe Columbbo 10 months earlier, though whether Joe recognized him or not is unclear. The Gallow party went inside and took a table near the wall. They ordered clumsili calamari and bottles of keianti.

 [music] Joe was in high spirits. He was joking with the waiters, teasing Cena’s daughter, soaking in the small pleasures of an ordinary meal. He had no reason to think that the night would end any differently than how it had begun. But across the room, another diner recognized him. Joseph Luparelli, a smalltime Columbbo associate.

 He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The man the family had recently marked for death sitting casually in a restaurant just a few blocks from their own territory. Luparelli slipped out the door quietly and headed towards a nearby club where several Columbbo gunmen were drinking.

 Among them were Philip Gambino and Sunny Pinto, the man who had killed Ali Barbar in Haboken 9 years earlier. Luparelli told them who he’d just seen and where. Within minutes, they were on their way to Ombberto’s, weapons hidden under their coats. Inside, the gallow table was loud with laughter. Joe, facing the wall, raised the glass to his wife, his sister, and Pete the Greek.

 to better years, he said. The hit team entered through the side door a few minutes after 4:30 in the morning. They moved fast, almost silently. In the dim light of the restaurant, only the sound of plates and silverware broke the stillness. Then the first shot cracked through the room. Joe jerked forward, hitting the back.

More shots followed. A staccato of thunder echoed off the tile walls. Diner screamed, diving under tables. Joe spun around, pulling his 38 from his jacket. Blood was already soaking through his shirt. He grabbed the heavy wooden table and flipped it on its side, shouting for his family to get down.

 Cena pushed her daughter under the table. Carmela screamed as glass shattered around them. Pete the Greek returned fire, but the gunmen were already retreating. Joe staggered to his feet, pressing a hand to his wound. His revolver slipped from his grip as he stumbled towards the door, leaving a trail of blood across the floor.

 He made it outside onto Mulbury Street. The early morning air cold against his face. He tried to reach the Cadillac, but collapsed beside a fire hydrant, breathing shallowly. Within moments, the street was chaos. flashing lights, sirens, shouting. Carmela ran outside, fell to her knees beside him, and cradled his head in her lap.

 He was still alive, eyes open, lips moving, but no words came out. She held him there until the police arrived. Go [screaming] away. >> Joe Gallo died on the pavement outside Alberto’s clam house a few feet from the restaurant door in the heart of Little Italy on his 43rd birthday. Despite countless theories, the murder was never officially solved.

>> We don’t know for sure who fired the shots back. Uh there was somebody in the restaurant who was sitting at the counter who started to shoot back. Uh we found a gun uh on the street uh right next to Joe, but uh we don’t think that that was his gun. >> Years later, men like Frank Sheeran, a Philadelphia hitman and self-proclaimed associate of Jimmy Hoffer, would claim responsibility, saying he’d been sent to do the job.

 But most historians and most detectives who worked the case agreed that the killers were Columbbo loyalists Philip Gambino and Sunonny Pinto acting under orders from the wounded family hierarchy to avenge Joe Columbo shooting and to restore their pride. The headlines the next morning told the story the city already knew by heart crazy Joe Gallow has been gunned down in Little Italy.

At about 5:30 this morning, the best that we can determine at the moment, an unidentified [music] male walked in the side door, fired some shots, and then ran from the premises. >> A man walked in from the back door and he walked up uh the side of the table. He fired uh three shots. He hit uh Joe twice and he hit his bodyguard Pete the Greek one time.

>> Joe Gallow is dead at Beakman Downtown Hospital >> in Brooklyn. Joe’s brother Albert received the news just before dawn. He sat in silence for a long time before saying it was bound to happen. But silence quickly turned to rage. Joe had been more than a brother to Kid Blast. He was the myth that carried all of them.

 With him gone, the Gallow crew lost its center. Albert, now the last brother standing, began plotting revenge. In August 1972, the last remnants of the Gallow crew tried to strike back. Word reached Kid Blast in President Street that several key Colbo figures, Alons Persico, known as Ali Boy and the son of Carmine, his son Little Ali and Jarro Jerry Lang Langela, were meeting at the Neapolitan Noodle, a semib restaurant on East 79th Street, where passers by couldn’t see who was inside.

 The moment the gallows learned the three men were seated together, Kid Blast and Punchy Iliano got to work. The plan was simple. Walk in, take a drink at the bar, and kill every man at the Persico table. But the Persico’s look held. Just moments before the gunman arrived, the Columbbo group left their seats at the bar to move to the dining room.

 Four businessmen celebrating a family engagement slipped into the vacated stools, unaware that they had just taken the places of marked [music] men. The shooter walked in wearing a shoulderlength black wig, slapped a $10 bill on the counter, ordered a scotch and water, and waited. After a few minutes, he stood up, drew two pistols, and opened fire, hitting the wrong table.

 Sheldon Epstein and Max Tequelsh were killed and two others were wounded. [music] The intended target seated only a few feet away escaped unharmed. It was one of the rare times in mob history that innocent bystanders were murdered in a hit gone wrong and the botched attack became a national headline. A humiliating blow to the already fractured Gallow faction.

 In the months that followed, a fragile piece settled in. The commission intervened, wary of the constant bloodshed. Both sides were ordered to stand down, but beneath the surface, resentment simmered. Some of the younger Gallow men were restless, frustrated by the lack of money and opportunity under Albert’s leadership. In 1974, several of them defected back to the Columbbo family.

The betrayal reignited the violence. That September, a sniper shot seriously wounded Punchy Iliano, now Albert’s top man, near the Gallow headquarters on President Street. The commission once again stepped in, this time with a permanent solution. The Gallows would be absorbed into another family. Albert, tired and weary, accepted.

 The proposal came from the Genevves crime family who offered Albert and his remaining men a place under Vincent Chin Giganti’s wing. It was an act of mercy or containment. Either way, it ended two decades of chaos. Kid Blast was finally made a soldier in the Genevves family and he was no longer just a rogue. Kid Blast rose to become one of the Chin’s most trusted captains. He wasn’t flashy.

 He didn’t chase headlines and he learned early that keeping quiet was the best protection a man in his position could have. Over the years he settled into a steady role inside the Genevves family. Respected for his experience and his reliability and unlike so many of his contemporaries, Kid Blast never disappeared into witness protection.

 He never fled the country and he never died in a back room. Today, at 95 years of age, Kid Blast is still alive, still connected in an advisory sort of way, and by all accounts, still living in Red Hook. His name has slipped into the background just the way that the mafia likes it.

 His brother Joe, on the other hand, never faded. Crazy Joe Gallow’s name stayed loud. It stayed in newspapers, police files, books, songs, and stories told in bars long after his death. His legend only grew with time. Newspapers turned him into a symbol of rebellion, a gangster who talked like a poet, a killer who quoted philosophy. Writers compared him to Jesse James, [music] to John Dillinger, to a figure straight out of Greek tragedy.

 He had fought the system, defied the commission, mocked [music] the bosses, and paid for it in the only way men like him ever did, violently and publicly. In 1976, his Greenwich Village neighbor Bob Dylan released the song Joey, a ballad that turned the gangster’s story into American folklore. The lyrics painted him not as a criminal, but as a tragic anti-hero, a man of principle, caught in a violent world.

>> [music] >> child. [music] Blew you away. [music] It was romantic, wrong, and perfect all at once. The myth of Crazy Joe Gallow became part of the city’s DNA. The man who once tamed a lion on the streets of Brooklyn. Who smoked hash with Bohemians. Who read Canton Voltater in prison and quoted nature in jazz clubs.

Who dared to believe he was bigger than the mafia itself. From the underworld, he was a warning, a reminder that charisma and fame could be as deadly as bullet. For the public, he was the [music] last outlaw of the 20th century, the bridge between the gangsters of the old world and the icons [music] of the new.

 His story ended fittingly on the streets of New York City beneath neon lights, surrounded by friends and by enemies halfway [music] between reality and legend. Crazy Joe Gallow died believing he’d become something more than a gangster. And history made sure that he was [music] right. I’d like to finish the story of Crazy Joe Gallow if I could with a quote of his.

 wherever you are, be the best at it. And that was something that Joey definitely lived by. He was the best rebel the mafia had ever seen. Thanks so much for watching. I really, really do appreciate it. Please [snorts] consider subscribing if you enjoyed the video and liking the video if you were a fan. So once again, thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next