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that Crazy Joey was behind it, especially since he’d perplexed other Mafiosos by hanging out with black prisoners during his stay in the joint, and ostensibly aimed to start a black mob, under his control, when he got out. According to many inside sources, there was a contract out on Joey Gallo from the day Colombo died, and on April 7, 1972, as he celebrated his 43rd birthday in Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, an anonymous hit man walked in off the street and shot Crazy Joey to death much as Joey had murdered Albert Anastasia. It was the end of a gang war that had lasted almost a decade and a half—a few more of their henchmen were disposed of, and the Gallo family was decimated, their power gone. Mobsters in general breathed a collective sigh of relief—the Gallos had always been hungry troublemakers—and went back to business as usual.

It is out of this fairly typical tale of mob power-jostlings that Dylan has, unaccountably, woven “Joey,” which paints a picture of Joey Gallo as alienated antihero reminiscent of West Side Storys “Gee, Officer Krupke” lyrics “He ain’t no delinquent, he's misunderstood.”

Always on the outside of whatever side there was

When they asked him why it had to be that way

Well, the answer—just because

Joey Gallo was a psychopath, as his biographer, Donald Goddard, confirms, although the analyst who examined him while he was in prison diagnosed Joey's disease as “pseudo-psychopathic schizophrenia.” Joey's answer: “Fuck you. Things are not right or wrong anymore. Just smart or stupid. You don’t judge an act by its nature. You judge it by its results. We’re all criminals now…. Things exist when I feel they should exist, okay? Me. I am the world.” Toward the end of his life, his wife routinely fed him Thorazine, which he docilely took, even though it still didn’t stop him from beating the shit out of her.

Dylan then goes on to paint a romantic, sentimental picture of Joey and his brothers in the gang:

There was talk they killed their rival

But the truth was far from that

No one ever knew for sure where they were really at

Well, according to the D.A. at Joey's early-Sixties extortion trial, “In the current war taking place between the Gallo gang and established interests, there have been killings, shootings, strangling, kidnappings, and disappearances, all directly involving the Gallos. Interestingly enough, since the defendant's being remanded on November 14 in this case, there have been no known offensive actions taken by the Gallos in this dispute. This would give some credence to the belief that Joe Gallo is, in reality, the sparkplug and enforcer of the mob.” But who believes D.A.s, right? Okay, try his ofttimes enormously sympathetic biographer: “Almost all the charges ever brought against him, even in the beginning, were dismissed. No witnesses…. Once people got to know that careless talk was liable to bring Joe Gallo around to remonstrate and maybe make his point with an ice pick, witnesses in Brooklyn became as scarce as woodpeckers. Once the story got around that Joey had gripped a defaulter's forearm by the wrist and elbow and broken it over the edge of a desk to remind him that his account was past due, the Gallos had very few cash-flow problems with their gambling, loan-sharking, and protection business.”

Most interestingly of all, his wife tells the story of how she became innocently entangled for a moment with a member of Joey's gang as they drunkenly tried to pull their coats off the racks of a nightclub cloakroom. Later, in bed, Joey accused her of kissing the guy, and she responded that that was absurd because, for one thing, he was wildly unappetizing. But Joey hounded her about the matter, convinced that her confession would prove that he had seen what he had convinced himself he had seen and was therefore not insane. Finally, to prevent further harassment (to perhaps, in fact, save her own life) and reassure him as to his sanity, she “confessed.” The next night, as they lay awake together in bed again, he casually remarked, “Say, listen—you