Word: joeys
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...Clinton Avenue, old women stared in black shawls. Men in working clothes muttered to one another in Old World accents. Inside, under a lithograph of Christ, rested a $5,000 burnished bronze casket festooned with flowers and surrounded by heavy, silently angry men and weeping women. Within it lay Joey Gallo, assassinated three days before as he celebrated his 43rd birthday in a Lower East Side clam house called Umbertos (TIME, April 17). His mother keened: "My Joey! What did they do to my Joey...
...baroque atmospherics, the Gallo assassination was more than merely an episode of gangster nostalgia. As Gallo lay in his open casket, his face a mask of mortuary prettification, his sister Carmella promised: "The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey." Within the space of six days, a total of five other bodies turned up, and the word was around that three more executions had been approved by the family of New York Mafia Overlord Carlo Gambino...
...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...
...Going to the mattresses" is a tradition of Mafia warfare, a tactic like lifting the drawbridge in a medieval Italian castle town. Last week about 20 members of the Gallo mob were dug in near Joey's old headquarters, a store front on Brooklyn's President Street, just across the street from the redoubt they occupied during the 1961-62 Gallo-Profaci war. If they have followed their practice from those days, they have nailed chicken wire over the windows, to prevent hand grenades from being lobbed in. In such campaigns, security is tight. Sentries are posted...