Joe Gallo "Crazy Joe" 5

  One of the more fascinating and complex figures to come out of the American underworld. He was a study in contrasts; highly-intelligent, poetic, sensitive, humorous (one extortion victim asked him if he could have time to think Joey's "offer" over, and Joey allegedly replied, "Sure, have 6 months in the hospital on me."), charming, brutal, sadistic, ferocious, deadly. Although short and thin, he was known as a vicious street-fighter, and one of the more brutal killers to emerge from Brooklyn (as an adolescent, his role model was the Tommy Udo character from the classic film noir "Kiss Of Death"). With his brothers Larry and Albert, he formed a gang within the Profaci Crime Family centered around President Street. In the early 1960's, tired of Mafia boss Joe Profaci's despotic rule, the Gallo brothers led a bloody revolt that, for a few years, littered the streets of NY with bodies. Joey was finally imprisoned for extortion (the extortion took place at Mulberry Street's Luna Restaurant, which had some of the best veal parmigiana I've ever eaten), brother Larry made his peace with the underworld big-wigs (Profaci had died of cancer in 1962), and that would have been that, except that Joe was ultimately released from prison in 1971 (Larry, considered the more stable of the brothers, died of cancer in 1968), insisting that no one had made peace with him. While in prison, he had educated himself, reading everything from Camus to Machiavelli, and had also aligned himself with a number of black and Puerto Rican prisoners, proposing a monumental shake-up of the entire structure of the organized crime heirarchy. Needless to say, this didn't sit too well with said heirarchy, and Joey's death-warrant was sealed. For awhile, he was considered a minor celebrity, attending the best parties and events, surprising and even charming the jaded guests with his wit and intelligence. He was suspected of masterminding the very public 1971 shooting of enemy Joe Colombo (Colombo, gravely wounded, lingered on as a vegetable until 1978), but doubt has been cast on this theory. Joey lasted until April 1972, when his enemies, finally having tracked him down, dramatically and fatally shot him in Umberto's Clam House, located not far from Luna's, while he dined with his family (up until they closed Umberto's down a few years ago, one could still see the bullet holes that had killed Gallo on the walls). Bob Dylan wrote a elegiac song about Gallo that had him sounding like a combination of Christ and Cagney. A few years after his death, there was a low-budget movie about him starring Peter Boyle, and supposedly the Joe Mantegna character in "Godfather III" was loosely based on him. Gallo was buried in Brooklyn's historic Greenwood Cemetery, not far from Albert Anastasia (he was rumored to be the one who assassinated Anastasia in 1957), actor Frank Morgan, Lola Montez, Leonard Bernstein, Horace Greeley, Boss Tweed, and Laura Keene (she was performing on stage when Lincoln was assassinated). And, so far as I know, no members of my family are buried here.