Joseph Gallo, nicknamed “crazy” by fellow mobsters, was a Red Hook–born gangster specializing in typical 1950s and 1960s mafia activities such as extortion and racketeering.
He was also flamboyant, charming, and well-read, and in the early 1970s he became kind of a celebrity, hanging out with writers, actors, and other New York scenesters.
Gallo, who was born and raised in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, was a very colorful character and talkative by nature. In the 1950s he was nicknamed "Joey the Blond" because of his full chest of blond hair. In 1947 after viewing the Richard Widmark film Kiss of Death Joseph began to mimic Widmark's film character, "Tommy Udo" with his drowsy, heavy-lidded appearance and in later years could recite long passages of the movie's dialogue.
He secretly owned several nightclubs on Eighth Avenue and two sweat shops in the Manhattan garment district where forty or fifty women made fabric for dress suits. He ran floating dice and high-stakes card games, an extortion racket and a numbers betting operation from an apartment building on President Street in Brooklyn. Joey used kids to deliver and pick up this booty. He allegedly kept a pet lion in the basement of the same address.
In the late 1950s, Gallo tried to overpower mafia boss Joseph Profaci to take control of the Profaci family. In May 1961, several gunmen tried and failed to kill Gallo. In 1961, Gallo was convicted of extortion and sent to prison for the next ten years. After Profaci died of cancer, underboss Joseph Magliocco was the new target of the Gallo revolt. While incarcerated at Auburn Correctional Facility Joseph was an avid reader of Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Leon Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, and his literary role model Niccolò Machiavelli.
In the early to late 1960s Gallo befriended African-American youths from Brooklyn realizing that there was a lot of money to be made by joining forces. While in prison, Gallo already had made numerous connections with black mobsters such as Nicky Barnes. Gallo was one of the first Mafiosi to predict a shift of power in the Harlem rackets from the Italian Mafia to black gangs.
Upon his release in 1971, Gallo started battling family boss Joe Colombo and the renamed Colombo family. Gallo was allied with Carlo Gambino. On June 28, 1971 Joe Colombo was shot three times in the head by an African-American posing as a photographer. Colombo went into a coma from which he never awoke. The "photographer", who was immediately shot dead by unknown shooters, was said by authorities to be a Gallo associate. However even though the FBI and police were taping and photographing the rally, no pictures or film of Colombo or his killer being shot has ever been released.
On April 7, 1972, Gallo was celebrating his 43rd birthday with sister Carmella, his wife, her daughter, and his bodyguard, Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas at Umberto's Clam House located at 129 Mulberry Street in Little Italy, Manhattan.
Between seafood courses at least two gunmen burst in through the rear entrance and opened fire with .32 and .38 caliber revolvers. Gallo was hit five times, overturning a butcher block dining table to protect his party, then drawing fire away from them by running toward the exit. Diapoulas, caught by surprise, was shot once in the buttocks as he dove for cover. Gallo, mortally wounded, stumbled into the street, where he collapsed while his killers sped away in a car.
Apparently Gallo thought he was safe there because of an unwritten agreement that Little Italy was off-limits to bloodshed.
At his funeral, Carmella cried over the open coffin that "The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!"
ps: Umberto’s Clam House has since relocated a few blocks away, on the corner of Broome and Mulberry Streets
>>> Bob Dylan’s 1976 Desire album contained the over-11-minute long “Joey” song.
