Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [35]
Later in the song Dylan asserts that “The police department hounded him.” Considering the number of rackets the Gallos were involved in, nothing could be further from the truth. Goddard: “Right from the start, relations between the Pizza Squad [NYC anti-Mafia cop team] and the Gallo gang had been imbued with a grudging professional respect, which, in certain cases, shaded into something close to affection. They played the game by the rules.” Adds a cop: “They’re a peculiar mob…. They knew what we had to do and they weren’t going to question it. They treated us like gentlemen. That don’t make them good guys, but they had a little more savvy [than the Colombos]. It was like ‘Why stir the pot? If you’re going to be down here, let's make it pleasant for both of us.’ It's a game. If you get caught, you get caught.”
Perhaps most curiously of all, Dylan says that “They got him on conspiracy/They were never sure who with.” Funny, because everybody from Goddard to the courts and cops agree that Joey's downfall came when, early in May 1961, he tried to muscle in on a loan shark named Teddy Moss. Moss resisted, and, in the presence of undercover cops, Joey said “Well, if he needs some time to think it over, we’ll put him in the hospital for four or five months, and that’ll give him time.”
But how can Dylan have a martyred Mafioso without an evil judge:
“What time is it?” said the judge to Joey when they met
“Five to ten,” said Joey
The judge says, “That's exactly what you get.”
This is what, for want of a better phrase, must be termed poetic license. The truth is that Joey's lawyer was as lame as his gang, and never made it up from Florida for his trial, and Joey refused to have anything to do with the two other lawyers appointed to represent him, choosing to stand mute while the DA delivered a steady stream of evidence that was pretty solid in the first place and never disputed. That Joey allowed this to happen suggests, not that he was railroaded, but merely that he was incredibly stupid. Goddard: “Readily concurring that Joey was ‘a menace to the community’ Judge Sarafite chalked up the first victory in the Attorney General's [Robert Kennedy, who once branded Joey Public Enemy No. 1] assault on organized crime by handing down the maximum sentence of seven and one-quarter to fourteen and one-half years’ imprisonment.”
Dylan: “He did ten years at Attica/Reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.” He also read Freud, Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, John Dewey Bergson, Santayana, Herbert Spencer, William James, Voltaire, Diderot, Pascal, Locke, Spengler, Wilde, Keats, Shakespeare, Goethe, Will Durant, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Clarence Darrow, and Louis Nizer, as well as taking part in a homosexual gang rape about which he bragged at a cocktail party after his release: “He described how, with several other convicts, he had spotted a pretty young boy among a new batch of prisoners and laid in wait for him. Dragging him into the Jewish chapel, they ripped his pants off and were struggling to hold him down when one of them heard the rabbi talking in the next room. A knife was immediately put at their victim's throat with a whispered warning not to cry out, and the rape proceeded in an orderly fashion, each man taking his turn in order of seniority. They wanted this kid, Joey said, while his asshole was still tight.”
This was most likely not, however, the reason that (according to Dylan) “his closest friends were black men.” It was “Cause they seemed to understand what it's like to be in society/With a shackle on your hand.” And also, as previously stated, because Joey for a while entertained dreams of launching a black Mafia when he got out. The psychoanalyst who interviewed Joey in prison voices agreement with Dylan in more clinical terms, but