Word: lillo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bespectacled Galante, nicknamed "Lillo" or "Cigar," looked more like a grandfather than a godfather. Nonetheless, a Mafia source once told TIME: "Lillo would shoot you in church during High Mass." Galante spent almost half of his life behind bars, starting at ten when he was sent to reform school as an incorrigible delinquent. At 17 he was sentenced to Sing Sing prison for assault. By 1952 he had become a high-ranking enforcer for Bonnano. Because Galante spoke French, Spanish and several Italian dialects, he often acted as the family's emissary in overseas assignments to arrange multimillion-dollar...
...last overlord, Carlo Gambino, died of natural causes in 1976, New York's Galante strutted about the streets as though he were the anointed successor. Despite much press attention, the longtime bootlegger, drug king, racketeer and killer never reached the top. Law enforcement officials figure that Lillo now will be lucky just to keep on living and that his best chance of doing so rests upon protection from federal agents-the hated enemies who have kept him locked up for more than 20 years, one-third of his life...
...what appears to have been a routine transfer, Galante was sent in late September to the medium-security federal prison at Danbury, Conn. Once again the armed men turned up at Lillo's bedside to tuck him in and stand guard. But also tracking Galante was a skilled Colombo family hit man, Carmine ("the Snake") Persico. Serving a 14-year sentence in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta for hijacking, the Snake somehow managed to get himself transferred to Danbury. But during the trip north, he was held briefly at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison and was visited there...
...Galante. Belatedly, Morris Kuznesof, chief federal probation officer in Manhattan, wrote Danbury Warden Raymond Nelson that he had received information "from a highly reliable source that an attempt to murder Mr. Galante will be made at your institution." Nelson slapped Galante into solitary confinement "for his own protection." But Lillo apparently prefers to rely on his own security arrangements, without the feds' help. Contending the plots to kill him were fictitious and that the Government was trying to harass the prisoner, his attorney, Roy Cohn,* has asked a federal judge to release Galante from "the hole...
...solitary, Lillo eats alone, exercises under guard in isolated areas and is kept away from other convicts. Even so, he has developed a bad case of the shakes. He is suspicious of his guards and does not even dare turn for comfort to the prison chaplain. One reason is omerta, the Mafia oath of silence. Another is the fact that Dellacroce, in one of his favorite disguises, likes to don a clerical collar and go about as "Father O'Neill" (a play on a common mispronunciation of his first name). Lillo has no yearning for the last rites, least...