Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  In Carmine’s crew during the late 1960s was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, who later switched to the Gambinos and became a well-known hit man. One day Carmine summoned Gravano and told him to give a beating to a Long Island washing-machine distributor who was having an affair with the wife of one of his brothers.

  Carmine’s parting words were, “Bring me back his ear!”

  Gravano later said he didn’t intend to cut off the man’s ear, but while he was administering the beating with a blackjack he accidentally severed the guy’s pinky finger, so he brought that back with him. Carmine was pleased. It was a gruesome act that reportedly earned “The Bull” kudos from Joe Colombo himself.

  One of the primary reasons for the 1960s being great was the cops, who were often dirty. It wasn’t until Frank Serpico’s undercover work that the extent of NYPD corruption became known. One plainclothes unit in Brooklyn had to be entirely revamped when it was revealed that it, as an entity, was on the take. In 1969, the Knapp Commission was formed. Of course, there would always be dirty cops, but throwing on a light made the roaches scatter.

  In 1968, Larry Gallo, my dad’s good friend, the guy who bore the Mark of the Snake on his neck, died of natural causes. With Larry gone, Kid Blast had to step up, while Crazy Joey tried to run things from prison.

  In 1969, Carmine was out on $15,000 bail regarding the ever-ongoing hijacking charges, and burning the candle at both ends. (Despite Carmine’s legal nightmare when it came to his hijacking bust, hijacking continued to be popular, often in mixed family crews. On April 10, 1967, when a team—including Henry Hill of Goodfellas fame—stole almost a half-million dollars in Air France cargo, Colombo capo Buster Aloi received $50,000 in tribute, which he distributed appropriately.)

  * * *

  By the time Carmine Persico was in his mid-thirties, he had moved his family out of Brooklyn and, like many thousands of other Brooklynite businessmen, to the suburbs of Long Island. He lived on Sunset Drive in Hempstead, just off the Hempstead Turnpike, only a few miles east of the Belmont Park racetrack. It was a beautiful two-story home, with a finished attic and basement, and a sweet screened-in porch on one side. Step out the front door and you were looking at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club. Built in 1930, it was not a show-off house by any means. Not like those fortresses along Shore Road in Bay Ridge. This was home sweet home. Two and a half bathrooms.

  His home-life conditions improved, but the rest of his life kept the same ol’ scenery. His headquarters were at the Diplomat Social Club at the dingy corner of Carroll and Third Avenue, only a couple of blocks from where Steve Bove was murdered, just around the corner from Mush’s club.

  And he hung out with the same guys all the time, the guys he trusted. His crew. Humongous Hugh “Apples” McIntosh was always at Carmine’s side. Gerry Lang was always there. Sonny Franzese’s brother Carmine, maniac Greg Scarpa, and, when he got out of prison for the Steve Bove murder, Carmine’s brother Alphonse.

  Also hanging around was a stone-faced kid named Tony Sirico. He was a half-generation younger, born in the forties, and could be very scary when he wanted to be. He was arrested twenty-eight times while working in Carmine’s crew—but it all ended up looking surprisingly good on his resumé when he was cast as Tony Stacks in the movie Goodfellas, and went on to play Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos.

  * * *

  In 1970, Joe Colombo’s son was busted by the feds on a conspiracy charge. Former Profaci underboss Sal Musacchio, one of the guys kidnapped by the Gallos, and capo Sebastian “Buster” Aloi were busted in Nassau County on Long Island for gambling. In response, Joe transformed his activist Italian-American Civil Rights League into an anti-FBI group. The initial group consisted of the Colombo family and about thirty friends, but it grew. For two months during the spring, the organization picketed FBI headquarters in New York every night. The harassment of the FBI was steady but weak. Colombo wanted to up the ante, so he planned a major event—the sort of thing that would bring him national, perhaps even global publicity—maybe initiate a congressional investigation.

  On June 29, 1970, there was to be a massive rally at Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park in Manhattan. The IACR and its supporters were scheduled to march on FBI headquarters. Some of Colombo’s activists prepared signs to be handed out that read: “More Power to Italians.”

  To appreciate what Colombo was doing you had to know the climate of the country, which was very protest oriented. Students were protesting the Vietnam War. Black people protested they weren’t treated fairly. So Colombo decided to be hip. His complaint: Italians were being persecuted in this country. Our civil rights were being violated. Colombo shouted it for all to hear. Not everyone bought in.

  Truth was, there were hoods who didn’t like the scam. It wasn’t becoming. Bad optics, they’d call it today. Some hoods, such as those on President Street, didn’t want to go to the rally. We went. The Gallo crew, and me a six-foot teenager. We were told it would be disrespectful to not be there.

  Hoods were tepid at best when it came to the movement, Colombo’s slogans resonated big-time with Italians in the legit world tired of being thought of as mobsters just because their names ended in a vowel. Everyone had their own take on Colombo’s unusually bold form of hypocrisy.

  It was called the Italian Pride Rally, and attendance surpassed Colombo’s largest dreams. The crowd grew until it stopped traffic on the West Side. The entertainment was out of this world. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. rat-packed their way through a set. Jimmy Durante played piano and told jokes.

  Colombo’s tub thumpers said there were 650,000 people there. Cops said 40,000. My estimate was in between, about 100,000 people. More than five-hundred charter busses delivered Italians to the city, coming from as far away as Florida. Some of the piers were shut down because of absent longshoremen. In Italian neighborhoods, shops were closed. It was a holiday, a big party. At the rally, someone handed out little American and Italian flags, so everyone was waving something. The previous summer 300,000 kids gathered on a farm in upstate New York for three days of rock and roll and anti-Vietnam chanting, so the Columbus Circle rally was dubbed in the tabloids as “Italian Woodstock.”

  “Come on, FBI, stop harassing the Italians!” That was the rallying cry. A stream of speakers assailed the practice of equating Italians with criminals. Joe Colombo was in charge, of course, but the real energy behind the movement was his son Anthony, V.P. of the IACRL ad hoc committee. When Anthony took the podium, the band played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Goodfellas wasn’t yet a movie title back then, and only a few got the joke.

  “Are we one? Are we united today?” Anthony asked. Most of the crowd cheered enthusiastically. But others did not. Carmine and other old-fashioned gangsters thought it was too much. To be facing prison and appeal for sympathy from those who weren’t in the life was downright castrating.

  Joe Sr. spoke last. At first disregarding the self-serving nature of the protest—after all, this entire event was about Joe’s son not going to jail—the crowd gave Joe an enthusiastic hand. He told the gathering that he was just a real-estate salesman. Why should his family be subject to federal investigation?

  Enthusiasm waned as Joe’s hypocrisy went from implied to in-your-face. When festivities were over, only about one out of ten at the rally stayed for the march on FBI headquarters. Two cops on crowd control duty at FBI HQ were stabbed with ice picks, but there were no arrests. Both cops were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening wounds.

  Blowback was harsh. Some journalists weren’t afraid to call Joe Colombo out. He was the boss of a crime family, after all, the very guy who most made all of those innocent Italian-Americans look bad. The FBI, the papers said, was not trying to persecute Italians, but was rather intent on getting killers off the streets.

  Karma was instant. The day after the rally, Joe was arrested and indicted, along with twenty-four others, by Nassau County D.A. William Cahn and charged with criminal co
ntempt for refusing to answer grand jury questions about organized crime. Colombo pleaded not guilty and paid his $5,000 bail. Predictably, the IACRL sent about one-hundred protesters out to the Long Island courthouse where Colombo’s hearing took place. Signs referred to the D.A. as a “stoolie” for the FBI.

  Colombo denied refusing to answer questions. If he seemed evasive it was because he wasn’t feeling well and may not have communicated well. Cahn called Colombo the head of a “Mafia crime family.” Colombo said Cahn was going to have to prove that.

  “If there’s anything we can do to help Mr. Cahn fight crime, we want to do it,” Colombo said.

  Carmine Persico must’ve felt like he was going to puke. Mr. Profaci had maintained that he was a legit businessman as well, olive oil, but he didn’t go around rubbing people’s noses in it. Some newspapers, astoundingly, printed Colombo’s Dyker Heights, Brooklyn address.

  * * *

  A year later, as the anniversary of Italian Woodstock approached, Joe Colombo made plans to hold the second annual. But things had changed by then. I know the boys in the Gallo crew were told not to go to the 1971 Italian-American Civil Rights League rally, again to be held at Columbus Circle, because that would have been construed as showing support for Joe Colombo, which by this time the crew did not want to do. Support for Colombo had degraded from begrudging to non-existent. The crew had gone to the first one but didn’t like it and left early. The League scored a major victory in November 1970 when they held a benefit at Madison Square Garden and Sinatra again showed up to sing. By this time though, it wasn’t just the Gallo crew that wanted to steer clear of Colombo’s party. Carlo Gambino ordered all of his people to stay away as well. So both the crowd and the energy level was down at Italian Woodstock II, June 28, 1971.

  Colombo’s activism had been interrupted as of late by African-American agitators. Guys from the ghetto, Nation of Islam guys with sharp black suits and skinny ties but no dough, were wondering out loud just what the fuck this millionaire was talking about. Colombo assumed the pushback from blacks was Joey Gallo’s work. Crazy Joey was getting the brothers agitated. Colombo had heard that Joey had, counter-intuitively, gotten tight with some of the inmates from Bed-Stuy while in prison.

  Now this Gallo crew doctrine—“don’t go to the rally”—be-came very important, because things did not go well for Joe Colombo that day. As he was on his way to the podium to give his speech, a mini-skirted black woman with a large Angela-Davis-style afro flirtatiously said hey.

  Colombo’s face twisted languorously into a wolfish grin. The guy escorting the woman, a press-credentialed filmmaker toting an expensive camera—in actuality Harlem hustler Jerome Johnson—took advantage of a stationary target, pulled an automatic, and fired three shots into Joe Colombo’s head.

  Colombo’s kid and a bodyguard wrestled Johnson to the ground, at which point another man stepped forward and shot Johnson to death. The second shooter escaped. His identity (as well as that of the flirtatious woman) remained forever unknown—officially, anyway.

  Only moments after the shootings, a reporter found Colombo’s son Anthony, who was already processing dad’s shooting in an historical context: “It was a nut—the same kind of a nut who killed President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy,” Anthony said.

  As police tried to secure the area, which had turned into a wild scene, people running and screaming and falling and being trampled upon, Colombo—blood pouring from his mouth down onto his shirt—was loaded onto a gurney and rushed by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital where a team of three brain surgeons battled for hours to remove bullets and fragments from his gray matter.

  Afterward, one surgeon said that Colombo remained close to death. He described a blood clot in Colombo’s brain that had “burst like a boil” during the operation. Eventually, doctors said he was probably going to live, but Colombo was brain dead.

  Back at Columbus Circle, there was a half-hearted attempt to continue the show, but just about everyone split after the shooting. Colombo didn’t die, not technically, and not right away.

  As Joey Gallo liked to say, “Colombo got vegetabled.”

  At the 54th Street police station, Kid Blast and Joey Gallo, who admittedly had a reputation for questioning authority, were among the first to be questioned by investigators.

  Joey was adamant: “It was not me. Someone tried to make it look like it was me, but it was not!” Joey explained that he wasn’t a major fan of Colombo’s style, but his beef was with the previous administration. Investigators tended to believe him. But not everyone did. Joey made friends with black men in prison. Black guy bumped Colombo.

  Some city authorities were avoiding the question of culpability by going to the Warren Commission playbook: Daniel P. Hollman of the NYC Joint Strike Force to Combat Organized Crime said he didn’t think rival mob families were behind the shooting, that Jerome A. Johnson was (like Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, referenced by Anthony Colombo minutes after the shooting, before him) a lone nut, a psychopath, who acted alone for reasons unknown. Hollman said he’d studied Johnson’s background and came to the conclusion that no one would ever have hired Johnson as a pro killer.

  The NYPD didn’t leap on the “lone nut” bandwagon. They knew better. Johnson might have been a psycho, Chief of Detectives Albert A. Seedman said, but that didn’t mean someone didn’t hire him.

  Sal Polisi, an insider, has pondered the question. He’s asked himself, who gained the most? And he thinks it was Carmine Persico and Carlo Gambino that had Colombo vegetabled. The boss didn’t die until May 22, 1978. Polisi backed up his theory by pointing out that following the Colombo shooting, the Colombo and Gambino families displayed a downright cooperative relationship, including joint endeavors, which would have been out of the question when Joe Colombo was animate.

  Of course, the Colombos were not known for their ability to read between the lines. They reacted spontaneously and blamed Joey Gallo and his crew. There was more violence on the horizon, and again Carmine Persico moved up a wrung on the ladder of power.

  * * *

  With the boss incapacitated, underboss Joseph Yacovelli and Tommy DiBella technically took control of the Colombos—but in reality the Persico family overwhelmed Yacovelli and DiBella at that point. Yacovelli, it was noted by insiders, did not have a crew of his own but had allied himself with Carmine Persico’s crew.

  There was no insubordination involved. Yak was smart enough to let Carmine do his thing.

  Carmine would have been an almost automatic choice as the new boss if it wasn’t for the hijacking beef that wouldn’t go away. The boys didn’t want a new boss who was going to go away any day for a decade or more. Or did they? Maybe having a boss in stir was workable.

  In 1971, there were indications that Carmine, undeterred by the tightening perimeter of justice around him, had upped the earning ante, diversifying from the usual mob rackets into the world of WASP white-collar crime. We know this because of statements made that July by forty-year-old Edward H. Wuenesche, a government informant with immunity, testifying before the Senate Investigations subcommittee. Wuenesche said that he handled $50 million in stolen stocks and bonds, and was involved with certain mobsters in the “counterfeit security racket.” He listed many names of mobsters he’d had dealings with, and one of them was Carmine Persico Jr. Some of the fraudulent transactions were made with the “Sheikdom of Kuwait.” Now that is the white-collar crime big time!

  * * *

  Yacovelli was a short stocky man with slicked-back black hair, a bachelor, rare in mob circles, and known as an expert winemaker. He was hauled in front of a grand jury in September 1971 and asked questions about organized crime’s influence on New York City’s legitimate businesses. He refused to answer. Newspapers noted that, “like Carmine Persico,” Yacovelli was moving up the Colombo ranks like a hit single, going from soldier to capo to consigliere in quick order. Yak was acting boss with Colombo in a coma.

  The older men of the mob, the traditiona
lists, thought sixty-seven-year-old Frank Fusco, who had run gambling operations in Brooklyn forever would make an excellent choice to replace Colombo. But they were behind the times. The family was filled with strong and youthful up-and-comers. A sixty-seven-year-old man was not going to lead.

  The other pretenders to the throne were Joe Colombo’s kids, Anthony and Joe Jr., known as Jojo. They, as princes, thought they were destined to be kings. In the mid-1970s, FBI informant Joe Cantelupo, a Colombo guy, reported that Joe Colombo’s sons had tried a coup but failed. The Colombo brothers had plenty of juice when the old man was in charge. Now, not so much. “The wheel is turned,” Cantelupo said. “The Colombo boys are on the bottom and the Persicos are on top.”

  * * *

  How big was Carmine Persico’s domain? What was the scope of his power? Investigators wanted to know. Cantelupo said Carmine’s wealth and influence was now tremendous, the scope broad. The Colombo crime family, with Carmine in charge, was taking protection money from every business in Bensonhurst, as well as other Brooklyn neighborhoods—a vast region. The protection racket worked, just as it had in the old days, with raw intimidation and terror.