Since at this point every other aggrieved special-interest group in the firmament was glomming onto the emerging politics of victimization, a dodge that quite usefully absolved everybody of everything, it occurred in the spring of 1970 to 47-year-old Joseph Colombo, boss of what had once been the Profaci crime family and was by now the Colombo crime family, that perhaps he might grab a piece of this action himself. The Mafia. La Cosa Nostra. What the hell was it with all that stuff? Why, there was no such thing as the Mafia. It was just something the FBI had made up. It was just a dirty slur against all the good, honest, hardworking Italian-American people, that’s what it was. Joe Colombo wasn’t going to stand for it.
How come everybody the FBI arrested had Italian names? Therefore, all Italians were mobsters, was that it? Was that what the FBI was imputing? This was like arguing that all Italians were New York mayors, since Fiorello LaGuardia had been one once, but legions of pols immediately rushed in to join the crusade all the same. “Stigmatizing an entire ethnic group!” roared Bronx Rep. Mario Biaggi. “A psychological burden on all of us!” The FBI couldn’t believe its ears. Mobsters were complaining now that they were being discriminated against?
The freshly minted Italian-American Civil Rights League got to work in April, coincidentally enough just minutes after one of Colombo’s three sons, 23-year-old Joseph Jr., was charged with melting down coins for resale as silver ingots. Suddenly there were hundreds of picketers outside FBI headquarters at Third Ave. and 69th St., protesting the federal persecution of all Italians everywhere. This extraordinary spectacle went on for weeks. Neighborhood residents finally went to court to demand some peace and quiet.
Now, all at once, the league was chartering chapters all over the Northeast. On June 29, nearly 100,000 people rallied in Columbus Circle to hear chest-thumping speeches from Biaggi, longshoreman boss Tony Scotto and hoodlum Vincent Gigante’s priest brother Louis. Shortly, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell deemed it enlightened to ban such words as “Mafia” from Justice Department communications: “There is nothing to be gained by using these terms,” Mitchell ordered, “except to give gratuitous offense” to “many good Americans of Italian-American descent.”
In Albany, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller directed the state police to amend its vocabulary as well. Ford Motor Co. chief Lee Iacocca pledged that the offending words would no longer be heard on the Ford-sponsored TV series “The FBI.” Producers of the forthcoming film “The Godfather” agreed to drop them from the script. In November, 5,000 guests at a black-tie league event at the Felt Forum ponied up a half million dollars in contributions as Frank Sinatra, Jerry Vale, Connie Francis and Vic Damone entertained.
Joe Colombo had discovered something. In 1970s America, all you had to do was cry out Ethnic bias! and everybody around you would cave in on the spot.
It was really quite brilliant. Considering that Joe Colombo was, after all, a Mafia boss.
And not even much of one at that. Joe’s fellow bosses just rolled their eyes. Hands-down the most featherweight boss the mob had ever known, Joe had spent his life running craps games until fortune beckoned in the early ’60s, when Joe Bonanno handed him a contract to whack Carlo Gambino and the up-and-coming Colombo realized it was in his better interests to tip off his target instead and then accept his gratitude after Bonanno was deposed. Just a cheesy little bust-out guy, that’s all Colombo had ever been, and now his new patron Gambino was throwing him a whole family. Nobody could believe it.
And now, for God’s sake, he was also the loudest and most headline-happy boss the mob had ever known. Like so many populist demagogues before him, Joe Colombo was finding that he quite enjoyed the attention. On the night of March 22, 1971, he threw himself a testimonial banquet, and more than 1,400 supporters assembled at the Huntington Town House in Huntington, L.I., to hail him as “the guiding spirit of Italian-American unity” and to salute him for “restoring dignity, pride and recognition to every Italian.”
Comic Tom Poston emceed. Enzo Stuarti sang. “We are building a stairway to heaven!” the feted Colombo cried out. “Peace and brotherhood, that is all I seek! There is a conspiracy against all Italian-Americans!” As it happened, he was due in court the next day on a perjury matter. “My conscience is clear!” he bellowed. The silver-ingot case against Joe Jr., meanwhile, had recently collapsed, by reason of a key witness’ abrupt inability to remember anything about anything.
Through the spring the juggernaut noisily rolled on under the stewardship of 26-year-old Anthony Colombo, who liked to denounce “self-loathing Italians” such as state Sen. John Marchi, who regularly informed the public that the league was plainly nothing but a con. “Italian-Americans have been had,” Marchi sighed.
Anthony also sued WCBS-TV for $1 million for reporting that he was a “reputed Mafia chief.” Quite a glib fellow, he suffered only one small embarrassment, when the federals seized what they said were loansharking records and he angrily replied that in fact they were lists of benefit-ticket buyers, then had to try to explain why an anti-defamation group would identify one of those individuals as “Johnny the Wop.”
In May, the Colombos announced they were joining forces with Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, and that they would all be fellow freedom fighters together.
John Marchi was not the only New York Italian deeply troubled by the league. Another was Don Carlo Gambino, who was becoming increasingly unhappy with his one-time protege Joe Colombo. What was Don Carlo supposed to do with a crime boss who kept holding press conferences?
On Monday morning the 28th of June, there were just 3,000 supporters at the second annual unity rally in Columbus Circle, but it was early yet. Presiding over events, Joe Colombo at 11:15 a.m. was striking poses for photographers when one of them pulled a gun and pumped three slugs point-blank into his head and neck, whereupon he himself was instantly gunned down by other parties who then instantly vanished.
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Mob war, cops agreed. The dead shooter was one Jerome Johnson, a black ex-con presumably linked to the recently disimprisoned Crazy Joey Gallo. Everybody knew Crazy Joe had been openly plotting to move in on the Colombo Brooklyn rackets with his newly built black army. This was something Carlo Gambino could easily have stopped if he’d felt like intervening.
Anthony Colombo, for one, found this law-enforcement theory distasteful, since its premise was that there were rival Italian crime families in the first place and was therefore defamatory to Italian-Americans. His own position was that his grievously wounded father had been cut down by shadowy historical forces, like President John F. Kennedy had been.
“They need patsies,” he suggested darkly.
“The CIA has done this before,” nodded the Rev. Louis Gigante.
Comatose Joseph Colombo lingered on for several more years. So did the Italian-American Civil Rights League, under new management, the younger Colombos having promptly abandoned the group after the shooting.
Crazy Joey Gallo was rubbed out in Little Italy in April 1972.
The three Colombo sons pleaded guilty in 1986 to federal racketeering charges and went to prison. “I have not admitted that I am a member of organized crime,” Anthony Colombo declared.
First published on October 27, 1998 as part of the “Big Town” series on old New York. Find more stories about the city’s epic history here.
