The Mafia Encyclopedia (34 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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shot him. Since she was now a liability rather than an aid, Mary was murdered as well.
Finally, though, Vince Coll decided he was strong enough to move on Schultz, who was at the time busily extending his policy racket in Harlem and devoting less time to the beer business. In the spring of 1931 Vince Coil informed Schultz that he wanted a piece of the beer racket. Schultz's answer was a flat no. The Coil brothers then went on a rampage, hijacking Schultz beer trucks until a full-scale war broke out. On May 30, 1931, Schultz gunners killed 24-year-old Peter Coil on a Harlem street corner. Vince was overwhelmed with grief and over the next few weeks came out of mourning only long enough to mow down four Schultz men. In all at least 20 gunners on both sides were killed. It is difficult to figure out the exact number because the Castellammarese War was in full blaze at the same time; the police had real difficulty figuring out which corpse should be attributed to which gang war.
Coll had less firepower than Schultz and had to make up for it by paying top dollar for gunmen to join him. Squeezed for cash, he tried to raise it by muscling in on the rackets controlled by Jack "Legs" Diamond and Owney Madden. He also started kidnapping their top aides and holding them for ransom. Even in the underworld the Mad Mick was an outlaw.
On July 28, 1931, Coll picked up his Mad Dog sobriquet when he tried to gun down Schultz aide Joey Rao and several of his men in Spanish Harlem. Coil blazed away with a machine gun but Rao and his men were unscathed. Instead, five children playing in the street were hit and one, five-year-old Michael Vengalli, his stomach virtually shot away, died.
Coll was identified as the gunner and the public demanded that he be brought in dead or alive. Coil realized he would be cornered sooner or later so he kidnapped yet another Owney Madden aide and collected $30,000 ransom. Then he surrendered and with his loot hired the top criminal lawyer of the day, Sam Leibowitz, to defend him. The case against Coil looked airtightuntil Leibowitz worked his courtroom magic. Somehow the brilliant defender made it seem the eyewitnesses rather than his client was on trial. In the end Coil went free.
At this point the underworld was said to have put out a $50,000 reward for the trigger-happy Coll. Legs Diamond wanted him, as did Madden and Schultz. Schultz had by this time started to work very closely with Luciano, and Meyer Lansky, who also agreed that Coil had to go, made too many waves and was bad for business. Thus virtually all of the underworld wanted the Mad Dog dead. And the desperate Schultz even walked into the detectives' squad room of the forty-second precinct station in the Bronx and announced that he would reward any officer who bumped off the Mad Mick with a lavish home in Westchester. Clearly, Vince Coil was not very popularand his days were numbered.
On February 1, 1932, four gunmen entered a home in the North Bronx where a card game was in progress. They had a tip that Coil would be there. Killed were a woman, Mrs. Emily Torrizello, and two Coll henchmen, Fiorio Basile and Patsy del Greco. Basile's brother, Louis, and another female were wounded. Vince Coil showed up 30 minutes after all the shooting.
Eight days later, Coil was in a drugstore telephone booth talking to Owney Madden, threatening to kill him unless he was given money. Madden kept him talking while the call was traced, something the underworld in New York at the time had no trouble having done. Coil was still on the phone when a black limousine with three men pulled up to the curb outside the drug store. One man stood by the car, another just inside the door of the store and the third, with something bulging under his overcoat, strode toward the phone booth. Coil saw the man remove a Thompson submachine gun from under his coat, but in his cramped position the Mad Dog could not react in time. Coil died instantly, his body riddled with bullets.
Colombo, Joseph, Sr. (19141978): Crime family boss
"What experience has he got? He was a bustout guy [petty gambler] all his life.... What does he know?" So said New Jersey Mafia boss Simone Rizzo "Sam the Plumber" DeCavalcante in a conversation taped by the FBI. He was talking about Joseph Colombo, who in his day was the youngest Mafia boss in the country and the youngest also to be assassinated. Like DeCavalcante, numerous other mafiosi resented Joe Colombo, who had the reputation of being the Mafia's Sammy Glick, a man who got ahead through sheer opportunismnot by brains or muscle but through being a ''fink."
It was in a sense a bum rap. For one thing, Joe Colombo was an accomplished murderer, part of a fiveman hit team for Joe Profaci. Two other members of that squad were Larry and Crazy Joe Gallo; when you killed with the Gallo boys you killed with the best. The police attributed at least 15 killings to the team.
In many respects Colombo was also one of the most forward-looking members of the Mafia. He understood the importance of image and tried to change his crime family's way. It was to prove the death of him. But then any crime boss who manages to upset the FBI, other godfathers and his own crime family members is almost certain to go.
When in the early 1960s Joe Bonanno moved to take control of the entire New York Mafia, he planned the
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Mafia crime boss Joe Colombo Sr. (holding an umbrella) leads his Italian-American Civil Rights League
in picketing FBI headquarters. Godfather Carlo Gambino ordered Colombo to stop all the nonsense,
which was producing too much heat. Colombo did not and was assassinated.
murders of several top members of the crime syndicate's ruling board. Bonanno gave the contract to his ally Joe Magliocco, who had fallen heir to Profaci's Brooklyn crime family, and Magliocco in turn ordered his ambitious underboss Colombo to carry out the hits.
It was not a smart move. Joe Colombo was nothing if not a survivor, and he'd always been that way in mob affairs. He survived the assassination of his father, Anthony Colombo, who in 1938 was found dead in his car next to an equally dead lady friend. They had been garroted. Police learned from underworld informers that the elder Colombo had been rubbed out for playing loose with Mafia regulations. A reporter once asked Joe Colombo if he ever tried to find his father's slayers, and he snapped back, "Don't they pay policemen for that?"
Colombo went on to serve boss Profaci far better apparently than his father had. After serving time on the piers as a muscleman, he organized mob-rigged dice games, moved into bigger gambling operations in Brooklyn and Nassau County, loan-sharking, and hijacking at Kennedy airport. And he did hit team duty.
But his survival instinct remained high and it was stratospheric when Magliocco handed him Bonanno's contracts. Colombo figured the odds and decided the chances of Magliocco and Bonanno winning out were lowand zero if he took word of the plan to the intended victims, namely Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. He figured rightly. Eventually the other side won what in part would be called the Banana War. Bonanno had to retreat. Colombo fared a lot better, being rewarded with leadership of the Profaci family.
Next he had to deal with an insurrection led by the Gallo brothers. But, while fending them off, he still had time for other campaigns. One was disguising his own Mafia family, insisting that all his soldiers hold down a real job. They had to be butchers, bakers or sanitation menanything just so it was legitimate. "It was almost a fetish with him," an FBI agent once said. Colombo himself worked as a salesman for the Cantalupo Realty
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Company in Brooklyn. The flaw in Colombo's plan was that his men didn't much like it. One of the prime benefits of a "made" mafioso is that he doesn't have to hold down a 9-to-5 job like "average jerks." Now Colombo was forcing them to do what their way of life was supposed to save them from doing.
Then, Colombo moved on to another ill-conceived program, at least from the mob survival viewpoint. He came up with the idea of improving the image of Italian Americans by forming the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Colombo's idea was that this would make Italian Americans proud of their heritage, and that in unity they would be able to fight the authorities' alleged victimization of them. The league was also intended to fight the Italian gangster stereotype.
Other Mafia leaders looked upon Colombo's effort with varying degrees of distaste and distrust. They had long ago decided that denying the existence of the Mafia simply called more attention to it. Still Colombo was permitted to stage a giant rally on June 29, 1970, at Columbus Circle. Fifty thousand people attended the event, and it was a huge success. Politicians vied for the right to appear at the rally. Even Governor Nelson Rockefeller took honorary membership in the league despite its Colombo imprint.
By his own acknowledgment, Colombo was a hero. He started expanding the league's activities. But meanwhile some of Colombo's lieutenants gre alarmed by the declining revenues of the family while their boss was minding everything but crime business. These capos approached other families who were more than annoyed by Colombo's activities, and they agreed that he was going too far. He had to be muzzled.
The chief voice in opposition was the most powerful don in the country, Carlo Gambino, whose life Colombo had saved earlier by finking on Bonanno. But Gambino was more concerned about what Colombo was doing lately. What Colombo had done was greatly annoy the FBI by establishing picket lines at the agency's New York office. By mid-1971 the feds and other law enforcement agencies had 20 percent of the Colombo crime family under indictment for various charges. What if that happened to the other families, Gambino fretted.
According to the most widespread theory, Gambino decided to let the Gallo forces take out Colombo. The second Unity Day rally of the league was set for June 28, 1971. Gallo knew he and his men would never go close enough to Colombo to hit him, but he had other resources. Of all the Italian mafiosi, Joe Gallo had good connections with the black gangsters in Harlem. On the morning of June 28, Colombo showed up early in the rally. Just as the crowd started to form, a black man, Jerome A. Johnson, wearing newspaper photographer's credentials, moved up on Colombo. He was no more than a step away when he pulled a pistol and put three quick shots into the gang leader's head. Instantly, Colombo's bodyguards shot the assassin dead. Colombo did not die on the spot, but he suffered brain damage. He was nothing more than a vegetable for seven years before finally expiring.
There were some troubling aspects to the assassination. Why had Johnson done it when he knew he couldn't get away? Many thought he was simply demented and that there had been no mob plot against Colombo. Carlo Gambino undoubtedly approved that line of thinking, but the police investigation indicated that the assassin had been told others were going to create a disturbance to permit his escape. Johnson was simply double-crossed.
But why kill Colombo so publicly when the mob prefers its rubouts without witnesses? The answer was twofold. Gambino wanted to doom the entire league movement by bathing it in violence. And most of all he wanted to rub Colombo's nose in the gutter, to demean him totally.
The reason for Gambino's venom was not discovered by government agents until 1974, three years after the shooting. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Chandler, Gambino had gone to Colombo and ordered him to stop all his nonsense. Colombo, now infatuated by his own importance, spat in Gambino's face. Five weeks later Colombo was paid back, and it must have pleased Gambino no end that the man who had demeaned the godfather didn't die outright but lingered for years in semi-death.
Colombo Crime Family
The first don of what was later called the Colombo crime family, Joe Profaci, came to power upon the conclusion of the Castellammarese War. Profaci thus served with Lucky Luciano, Vince Mangano, Joe Bonanno and Tom Gagliano as head of one of the five Mafia families in New York that comprised the nucleus of the Mafia force in the national crime syndicate.
Profaci ruled for more than three decades, an amazing feat since he was regarded by other mafiosi and many of his own soldiers as the worst don in New York. Profaci's failinggreed. Alone among the dons Profaci levied a tax of $25 a month from each member, allegedly to build a slush fund to take care of mobsters who got arrested. Of course, he pocketed the funds. And he constantly demanded tribute. Joe Valachi later quoted Carmine "the Snake" Persico as complaining: "Even if we go hijack some trucks he taxes us. I paid up to $1,800."
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Eventually Profaci was faced with revolt. A number of his soldiers, including the kill-crazy Gallo brothers, Persico and Jiggs Forlano (a capo and perhaps the biggest loan shark in New York), were rumbling for his demise. Ever cunning, Profaci was not about to cave in to all the rebels and so he divided them, promising rewards that brought Persico, Forlano and others back into the fold, while leaving the Gallos out in the cold. (Persico and Forlano became the staunchest battlers against the Gallos for Profaci.)
Profaci died in 1962 and the power passed to his underboss Joe Magliocco. Like Profaci, Magliocco was upset the way two of the other city crime bosses, Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese, had been interfering in Profaci affairs. Now they tried to undercut Magliocco. Gambino clearly had designs to dominate the Profacis. Only Joe Bonanno stood with Profaci and his successor, while the fifth boss, Vito Genovese, was in prison at the time.
It was now that Bonanno, in his own quest for supremacy, concocted a scheme to kill off Gambino and Lucchese, as well as a few other crime bosses around the country. It may be that Bonanno felt he had no options, that if Magliocco fell, Gambino would turn next on the Bonanno family.
Magliocco agreed to join Bonanno in his plot and gave out the contracts on the two New York City leaders to a dependable hit-man capo for Profaci, Joe Colombo. But Colombo was not dependable this time. Instead of carrying out the hits, he revealed the plot to the intended victims. This lead eventually to the socalled Banana War to dethrone Bonanno; but Magliocco tumbled easier. Summoned to appear before the commission of which he was a member, Magliocco, extremely ill and suddenly very tired, confessed. He was allowed to live (he was to die of a heart ailment in a matter of months) and dethroned.
The grateful Gambino installed the accommodating Joe Colombo as Profaci family chief and thus gained another firm vote in the commission. In time Gambino would rue his choice of Colombo, a man who had ambitious ideas. One idea that Gambino bought at first was that it would be smart to rally Italian Americans into an anti-defamation league to say they were being smeared by all this talk about an Italian Mafia. Actually what Colombo wanted to do was clothe the Mafia with the respectability of the vast majority of Italian Americans. (By contrast the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has never objected to stories about Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Gurrah Shapiro, Louis Lepke, Mickey Cohen, Mendy Weiss, Arnold Rothstein or Jake Guzik and other Jewish gangsters.)
After a year of protests by Italian Americans led by Colombo, including picketing of the FBI offices in New York, Gambino had enough and ordered Colombo to cool it. He didn't and he was assassinated.
Unlike other volumes on the Mafia this book will offer no chart listing the various Mafia crime families and their bosses and other leaders. One reason is that any such chart, given the nature of the mob, is subject to abrupt change. But more important, the chart would be inaccurate. Federal listings and those of state and local police agencies frequently vary with one another about who was or is in power when.
The post-Colombo succession was a particular special problem for law enforcement agencies. Despite the fact that hostility between Colombo and the FBI made it the most intensely watched crime family, it took the government three years to discover the new boss was Thomas DiBella. That was with four federal agencies and three local agencies maintaining 24-hour surveillance and eavesdropping on both the Colombo and Gambino families. In 1971 when Colombo was shot (he lingered in a vegetable state for seven years) DiBella was listed as only a low-ranking soldier in the Colombos. Actually DiBella, a retired tractor foreman on the docks, had been in the mob since 1932, but until 1974 no one in official circles ever suspected his importance. He had only one conviction, for bootlegging in 1932.
Because of age, DiBella eventually stepped aside for younger blood although he continued as a top adviser. The leadership passed to former rebel Carmine Persico. There would have been an era of peace for the mobthe Gallo threat had been settled with the death of Larry Gallo and the assassination of Crazy Joe Galloexcept for Persico's constant involvement in criminal prosecutions. He was to spend a total of 10 of the 13 years prior to 1985 in various prisons. The family was in something like chaos until Jerry Langella wrested the leadership to himself, subject to some dispute from Persico at a later date. By late 1986, with both Persico and Langella facing long years in prison, authorities indicated that Victor Orena, a distant Persico relative, had been named boss pro tem.
The family can only boast of about 115 members as well as few hundred more supporters, making it with today's Lucchese crime family one of the two smallest in New York. But the roster of crimes the family is involved in is impressive: narcotics trafficking, gambling, loans-sharking, cigarette smuggling, pornography, counterfeiting, hijacking and bankruptcy frauds, to name just a few.
Murder is also in the picture, but the boys can be rather understanding about that. According to the police, one potential victim asked that he not be put in cement blocks and tossed into the Gowanus Canal, mob standard procedure. He requested that instead his

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