Word: colombo
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...Blast. On the surface, the present warfare is a feud between Joe Colombo and Joe Gallo forces. After Colombo was hit last summer, the word passed through the underworld that the Gallos were behind it. The fact that the gunman was black seemed fo confirm the theory; when "Crazy Joe" was in New York's Attica prison for extortion, he allied himself with black prisoners and once organized a protest against white prison barbers who refused to cut blacks' hair. After he got out early last year, Gallo said he wanted to bring blacks into the Syndicate...
...blood between the Colombos and Gallos went back to 1960, when Joey, along with his brothers Larry and Albert ("Kid Blast"), began a rebellion in the Brooklyn fief of the late Joseph Profaci. After a two-year war and at least nine murders, Joseph Colombo took over the Profaci organization. Again last year, the Gallos tried to move in on Colombo's gambling operations. They also opposed Colombo's Italian-American Civil Rights League. Before last summer's rally, Gallo's men moved through the Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn ordering shopkeepers to remain open on Unity...
Then, two weeks ago, came Joey Gallo's murder. The immediate assumption was that Colombo forces had taken their revenge. The war was on. Early on the day of Gallo's funeral, a Colombo lieutenant named Gennaro Ciprio left his restaurant in Brooklyn and walked toward his car. He stopped three bullets, apparently fired by a rooftop sniper, and died in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. Investigators say that Ciprio was probably killed because he was spying on the Colombos for the Gallos...
...later Tommy Ernst, a Staten Island mobster, was fatally wounded. A New Jersey janitor named Frank Ferriano was found in a lower Manhattan parking lot with half his head blown off by a shotgun blast. Hours later Richard Grossman, said to be a credit-card swindler working for the Colombo family, was found in the trunk of a car in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. He, too, had been shot in the head with a shotgun...
Carlo's War. The Colombo-Gallo war was directly involved only in the Ciprio killing. Yet all of the assassinations had been specifically approved by leaders in the Gambino family. Although neither the Colombos nor the Gallos seemed to be aware of it, the Gambinos were deliberately promoting the war, approving executions in order to fan the flames and encourage the Colombos and Gallos to kill one another off. Eventually, 73-year-old Carlo Gambino hopes, the war will leave him in undisputed control of four of the five New York Families. The holdout would be the Bonanno family...