Gangster Sonny

Born: 1914
Died: 1978

He was a bustout guy (petty gambler) all his life…What does he know?” So said New Jersey Mafia boss Simone Rizzo “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante in a conversation taped by the FBI. He was talking about Joseph Colombo, who in his day was the youngest Mafia boss in the country and the youngest also to be assassinated. Like DeCavalcante, numerous other mafiosi resented Joe Colombo, who had the reputation of being the Mafia’s Sammy Glick, a man who got ahead through sheer opportunism - not by brains or muscle but through being a “fink.”

It was in a sense a bum rap. For one thing, Joe Colombo was an accomplished murderer, part of a five-man hit team for Joe Profaci. Two other members of that squad were Larry and Crazy Joe Gallo; when you killed with the Gallo boys you killed with the best. The police attributed at least 15 killings to the team.

In many respects Colombo was also one of the most forward-looking members of the Mafia. He understood the importance of image and tried to change his crime family’s way. It was to prove the death of him. But then any crime boss who manages to upset the FBI, other godfathers and his own crime family members is almost certain to go.

When in the early 1960s Joe Bonanno moved to take control of the entire New York Mafia, he planned the murders of several top members of the crime syndicate’s ruling board. Bonanno gave the contract to his ally Joe Magliocco, who had fallen heir to Profaci’s Brooklyn crime family, and Magliocco in turn ordered his ambitious underboss Colombo to carry out the hits.

It was not a smart move. Joe Colombo was nothing if not a survivor, and he’d always been that way in mob affairs. He survived the assassination of his father, Anthony Colombo, who in 1928 was found dead in his car next to an equally dead lady friend. They had been garroted. Police learned from underworld informers that the elder Colombo had been rubbed out for playing loose with Mafia regulations. A reporter once asked Joe Colombo if he ever tried to find his father’s slayers, and he snapped back, “Don’t they pay policemen for that?”

Colombo went on to serve boss Profaci far better apparently than his father had. After serving time on the piers as a muscleman, he organized mob-rigged dice games, moved into bigger gambling operations in Brooklyn and Nassau County, loan-sharking, and hijacking at Kennedy airport. And he did hit team duty.

But his survival instinct remained high and it was stratospheric when Magliocco handed him Bonanno’s contracts. Colombo figured the odds and decided the chances of Magliocco and Bonanno winning out were low - and zero if he took word of the plan to the intended victims, namely Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. He figured right. Eventually the other side won what in part would be called the Banana War. Bonanno had to retreat. Colombo fared a lot better, being rewarded with leadership of the Profaci family.

Next he had to deal with an insurrection led by the Gallo brothers. But, while fending them off, he still had time for other campaigns. One was disguising his own Mafia family, insisting that all his soldiers hold down a real job. They had to be butchers, bakers or sanitation men - anything just so it was legitimate. “It was almost a fetish with him,” an FBI agent once said. Colombo himself worked as a salesman for the Cantalupo Realty Company in Brooklyn. The flaw in Colombo’s plan was that his men didn’t much like it. One of the prime benefits of a “made” mafioso is that he doesn’t have to hold down a 9-to-5 job like “average jerks.” Now Colombo was forcing them to do what their way of life was supposed to save them from doing.

Then, Colombo moved on to another ill-conceived program, at least from the mob survival viewpoint. He came up with the idea of improving the image of Italian Americans by forming the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Colombo’s idea was that this would make Italian Americans proud of their heritage, and that in unity they would be able to fight the authorities’ alleged victimization of them. The league was also intended to fight the Italian gangster stereotype.

Other Mafia leaders looked upon Colombo’s effort with varying degrees of distaste and distrust. They had long ago decided that denying the existence of the Mafia simply called more attention to it. Still Colombo was permitted to stage a giant rally on June 29, 1970, at Columbus Circle. Fifty thousand people attended the event, and it was a huge success. Politicians vied for the right to appear at the rally. Even Governor Nelson Rockefeller took honorary membership in the league despite its Colombo imprint.

By his own acknowledgment, Colombo was a hero. He started expanding the league’s activities. But meanwhile some of Colombo’s lieutenants grew alarmed by the declining revenues of the family while their boss was minding everything but crime business. These capos approached other families who were more than annoyed by Colombo’s activities, and they agreed that he was going too far. He had to be muzzled.

The chief voice in opposition was the most powerful don in the country, Carlo Gambino, whose life Colombo had saved earlier by finking on Bonanno. But Gambino was more concerned about what Colombo was doing lately. What Colombo had done was greatly annoy the FBI by establishing picket lines at the agency’s New York office. By mid-1971 the feds and other law enforcement agencies had 20 percent of the Colombo crime family under indictment for various charges. What if that happened to the other families, Gambino fretted.

According to the most widespread theory, Gambino decided to let the Gallo forces take out Colombo. The second Unity Day rally of the league was set for June 28, 1971. Gallo knew he and his men would never go close enough to Colombo to hit him, but he had other resources. Of all the Italian mafiosi, Joe Gallo had good connections with the black gangsters in Harlem. On the morning of June 28, Colombo showed up early in the rally. Just as the crowd started to form, a black man, Jerome A. Johnson, wearing newspaper photographer’s credentials, moved up on Colombo. He was no more than a step away when he pulled a pistol and put three quick shots into the gang leader’s head. Instantly, Colombo’s bodyguards shot the assassin dead. Colombo did not die on the spot, but he suffered brain damage. He was nothing more than a vegetable for seven years before finally expiring.

There were some troubling aspects to the assassination. Why had Johnson done it when he knew he couldn’t get away? Many thought he was simply demented and that there had been no mob plot against Colombo. Carlo Gambino undoubtedly approved that line of thinking, but the police investigation indicated that the assassin had been told others were going to create a disturbance to permit his escape. Johnson was simply double-crossed.

But why kill Colombo so publicly when the mob prefers its rubouts without witnesses? The answer was twofold. Gambino wanted to doom the entire league movement by bathing it in violence. And most of all he wanted to rub Colombo’s nose in the gutter, to demean him totally.

The reason for Colombo’s venom was not discovered by government agents until 1974, three years after the shooting. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Chandler, Gambino had gone to Colombo and ordered him to stop all his nonsense. Colombo, now infatuated by his own importance, spat in Gambino’s face. Five weeks later Colombo was paid back, and it must have pleased Gambino no end that the man who had demeaned the godfather didn’t die outright but lingered for years in semi-death.

Born: 1903 Died: 1957

Albert Anastasia, chief executioner of Murder, Inc., found his unbridled brutality could land him leadership of one of the most important Mafia families in the country. But, preoccupied with killing, he was not really a competent godfather, a fact decisively indicated by the efficient and prosperous operation of the family under Anastasia’s underboss and successor, Carlo Gambino.

One of nine brothers, Italian-born Anastasia jumped ship in the United States sometime between 1917 and 1920. He became active in Brooklyn’s dock operations and rose to a position of authority in the longshoreman’s union. It was here that Anastasia first demonstrated his penchant for murder at the slightest provocation, killing a fellow longshoreman in the early ’20s. Nor was his executioner’s behavior pattern altered by a consequent 18-month stay in the death house in Sing Sing. He went free when, at a new trial, the four most important witnesses turned up missing, a situation that proved permanent.

Dead witnesses forever littered Anastasia’s trail. In the mid-1950s Anastasia was prosecuted for income tax evasion. The first trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial was scheduled for 1955. Charles Ferri, a Fort Lee, New Jersey, plumbing contractor who had collected $8,700 for work he had performed on Anastasia’s home, was expected to be a key witness. In April, about a month before the retrial, Ferri and his wife disappeared from their blood-splattered home in Miami, Florida, suburb. Some time earlier Vincent Macri, an Anastasia associate, had been found shot to death, his body stuffed in the trunk of a car in the Bronx. A few days after that, Vincent’s brother Benedicto was declared missing, his body supposedly dumped in the Passaic River. The erasure of the two Ferris and the two Macris was seen as part of a plot to eliminate all possible witnesses against Anastasia. At Anastasia’s trial the crime boss suddenly entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to one year in federal prison. It was unlikely the government would have accepted what amounted to a plea bargain had it still had a full arsenal of witnesses against him.

Considering Anastasia’s lifelong devotion to homicide as the solution to any problem it was not surprising that he and Lois “Lepke” Buchalter were installed as the operating heads of the national crime syndicate’s enforcement arm, Murder, Inc. Some estimates have it that Murder, Inc., may have taken in a decade of operation a toll of between 400 and 500 victims. Unlike Lepke and many other members of Murder, Inc., Anastasia was never prosecuted for any of the crimes. There was a “perfect case” against him, but the main prosecution witness not surprisingly disappeared.

Anastastia was always a devoted follower of others, primarily Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. His devotion to Luciano knew no bounds. When in 1940 Luciano finalized plans to take over crime in America by destroying the two old-line Mafia factions headed by Joe “the Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, he outlined his plot to Anastasia. He knew the Mad Hatter, as Anastasia had become known, would enthusiastically kill for him. Anastasia responded by seizing Luciano in a bear hug and kissing him on both cheeks. “Charlie,” he said, “I been waiting for this day for at least eight years. You’re gonna be on top if I have to kill everybody for you. With you there, that’s the only way we can have any peace and make the real money.” Anastasia was personally part of the four-man death squad that mowed down Maseria in a Coney Island restaurant in 1931.

During World War II Anastasia appeared to have been the originator of a plan to free Luciano from prison by winning him a pardon for “helping the war effort.” To accomplish the goal, Anastasia set out to create problems on the New York waterfront so the Navy would agree to any kind of deal to stop sabotage. The French luxury liner S.S. Normandie, in the process of being converted into a troopship, burned and capsized in New York harbor. Anastasia was credited with ordering his brother, Tough Tony Anastasio (different spelling of the last name), to carry out the sabotage. Afterward, a deal was made for Luciano to get lighter treatment in prison, and Anastasia was informed to cease waterfront troubles. Lansky years later told his Israeli Biographers: “I told him face to face that he mustn’t burn any more ships. He was sorry - not sorry he’d had the Normandie burned but sorry he couldn’t get at the Navy again. Apparently he had learned in the Army to hate the Navy. ‘Stuck-up bastards’ he called them.”

Anastasia’s violent ways could be contained as long as Luciano and Costello pulled the strings. In 1951 Costello may well have been the prime mover in Anastasia’s rise to boss of the Mangano crime family in which he was technically an underling. Through the years, boss Vince Mangano had fumed at Anastasia’s closeness to Luciano, Costello, Adonis and others and that they used him without first seeking Mangano’s approval. Frequently Mangano and Anastasia almost came to blow over family affairs, and it was considered only a matter of time until one or the other was killed. In 1951, Vince’s brother, Phil Mangano, was murdered and Vince himself became another in Anastasia’s legion of the permanently missing. Anastasia then claimed control of the Family with Costello’s active support. At a meeting of all the bosses of New York families, Costello backed up Anastasia’s claim that Mangano was planning to kill Anastasia and that Albert had a right to act in self-defense. Faced with a fait accompli the other bosses could do nothing but accept Anastasia’s elevation.

In appears Costello had other motivation for wanting Anastasia in control of the crime family. Costello at the time was facing a concentrated challenge from Vito Genovese for control of the Luciano family now that Luciano was in exile. Up until 1951 Costello had depended for muscle on New Jersey crime family boss Willie Moretti, but Moretti was in the process of losing his mind and would soon be a rubout in a “mercy killing” by the mob. That meant Costello needed new muscle and Anastasia, with a family of gunmen behind him, would make a strong foil to Genovese.

Unfortunately, as a crime boss Anastasia turned even more kill-crazy than ever. In 1952 he even ordered the murder of young Brooklyn salesman named Arnold Schuster after watching Schuster bragging on television about his role as primary witness in bank robber Willie Sutton’s arrest. “I can’t stand squealers!” Anastasia raged to his men. “Hit that guy!”

In killing Schuster, Anastasia had violated a cardinal crime syndicate rule which ran, as Bugsy Siegel once quaintly put it, “We only kill each other.” Outsiders - prosecutors, reporters, the public in general - were not to be killed. Members of the general public could only be hit if the very life of the organization or some of its top leaders were threatened. This certainly was not the case with Arnold Schuster, a man whose killing generated much heat on the mob. Like other members of the syndicate, even Luciano in Italy and Costello were horrified, but they could not disavow Anastasia because they needed him to counter Genovese’s growing ambitions and power. Genovese cunningly used Anastasia’s kill-crazy behavior against him, wooing supporters away from Anastasia on that basis. Secretly over a few years time Genovese won the cooperation of Anastasia’s underboss, Carlo Gambino. Gambino in turn recruited crime boss Joe Profaci to oppose Anastasia.

Still, Genovese dared not move against Anastasia and his real target, Costello, because of Meyer Lansky, the highest-ranking and most powerful member of the national syndicate. Normally Lansky would not have supported Genovese under any circumstances, their dislike for each other going back to the 1920s. But in recent years Lansky was riding high as the king of casino gambling in Cuba, cutting in other syndicate bosses for lesser shares. When Anastasia leaned on him for a piece of the action, Lansky refused. So Anastasia started working on plans to bring his own gambling setup into Cuba. That was not something Lansky took lightly. Anyone messing with his gambling empire went. That applied to Lansky’s good friend Bugsy Siegel and it certainly applied to Anastasia. Up until then Lansky had preferred to let Anastasia and Genovese bleed each other to death, but now he gave his approval to the former’s eradication.

Anastasia’s rubout was carried out with an efficiency that the former lord high executioner of Murder, Inc., would have approved. On the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia entered the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York for a quick going over. Anastasia’s bodyguard parked the car in an underground garage and then most conveniently decided to take a little stroll. Anastasia relaxed in the barber chair, closing his eyes. Suddenly two men, scarves covering their faces, marched in. One told the shop owner, Arthur Grasso, who was standing by the cash register: “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.”

The pair moved on Anastasia’s chair, shoving the attending barber out of the way. Anastasia still did not open his eyes. Both men shot Anastasia , who after their first volley jumped to his feet. Anastasia lunged at his killers or what he thought were his killers, trying to get them with his bare bands. Actually he attacked their reflection in the mirror. It took several more shots to drop him, but he finally fell to the floor dead.

Like virtually all gang killings, the Anastasia murder remains unsolved. It is known, though, that the contract was given to Joe Profaci who passed it on to the three homicidal Gallo brothers from Brooklyn. Whether they did it themselves or let others handle the actual gunning was never determined.

The double-dealing did not cease with Anastasia’s death. Gambino now secretly deserted Genovese and joined with Lansky, Luciano and Costello in a plot that would entrap Genovese in a narcotics conviction and send him away to prison for the rest of his life. In that sense Anastasia was avenged, but it was not with the abrupt finality that the kill-crazy executioner would likely have preferred.