Word: colombo
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...when an anonymous phone call took him from Manhattan to Tucson, Ariz., and a three-hour interview with a confidant of Family Man, Joe Bonanno. His article appeared with our cover story on the Mafia (TIME, Aug. 22, 1969). Last summer Willwerth reported on the shooting of Joe Colombo...
Blood Feud. More ominously, the Gallo and Colombo gangs last week officially declared war. The two clans "went to the mattresses"-the Mob's term for consolidating forces in fortified hideouts, hauling in mattresses for a long siege and sleeping on them for the duration. It was the most bitter gang conflict in a decade, and could become the bloodiest campaign since the savage Castellammarese war* in 1930-31, when scores of Mafiosi killed off one another in the streets across the country...
...some ways it was ironic that the bloodletting should erupt now. Until last summer, many Americans were half-persuaded that the Mafia was chimerical. In New York, Mobster Joseph Colombo organized the Italian-American Civil Rights League, using many law-abiding Italian-Americans as a shield for the Syndicate. The Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, the league argued, were anti-Italian figments of the FBI'S imagination. Colombo even succeeded in embarrassing the producer of The Godfather into deleting the two names from the script. Then, at a "Unity Day" celebration in Manhattan's Columbus Circle last June...
Muscling. That melodramatic end to the short, brutal life of Joey Gallo surprised no one in New York's increasingly fratricidal underworld. There had been a contract out on his life ever since Mafia Boss Joe Colombo had been shot at an Italian Day rally in New York last June (TIME cover, July 12). Police do not believe that Gallo plotted that murder attempt, but friends of Colombo, who remains unable to talk or walk, thought he had. Gallo had been counted among the walking dead ever since he also aroused the anger of the biggest boss of them...
...calling him "Crazy Joe" but never to his face. He was too mean. Joey took pleasure in breaking the arm of one of his clients who was sluggish about paying protection money. He punctured an enemy with ice picks. He had gained his status by serving as one member (Colombo was another) of a five-man execution squad of Mafia Boss Joe Profaci in the late '50s. Police claim they had scored 40 hits. By then he and his brothers had carved out a chunk of the Brooklyn rackets; they turned against Profaci, touching off a gang...