Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [36]
After Joey is finally sprung, Dylan has him blessing both the beasts and children: “ ‘Twas true that in his later years/He would not carry a gun.” Of course not; no Mafia chieftain ever has, unless in unusually dire fear for his life. The cops would like nothing better than to send one of these guys up on a carrying concealed weapons rap, and anyway that's what the wall of protective muscle that accompanies them everywhere is for.
“‘I’m around too many children,’ he’d say/‘They should never know of one.’” Again true—mob leaders have always been scrupulous about keeping their wives and children universes removed from the everyday brutality of their work. Anybody who saw The Godfather knows that. But as for Joey's magical touch with children, let his daughter, Joie, speak: “He would come home and say, ‘Make me some coffee.’ And I would say, ‘Daddy, I have homework. Can I do it later?’ ‘No. Now’ It was like I was refusing him, and nobody ever did that. He was the king, and I couldn’t stand it…. He used to abuse Mommy terribly, and I resented him coming between us. He broke her ribs once…. I used to complain to Mommy about him and bug her to leave him. ‘What a man you picked,’ I’d say. ‘Who’d want to live with that maniac? You’ve got to be crazy to put up with this.’ So then I’d divorce him as my father. I’d take a piece of paper and draw a very fancy certificate that said, ‘I, Joie Gallo, hereby divorce Joey Gallo as my father.’”
But who but a biographer would let a goddamn kid mouth off like that anyway? A good slap in the puss and they hie to their place. Which is where they belong when the fast bullets fly, as Dylan's vocal lurches to the denouement of his most mythic of sagas:
Yet he walked right into the clubhouse
of his lifelong deadly foe
Emptied out the register
Said “Tell them it was Crazy Joe”
One day they blew him down in a
clam bar in New York
He could see it comin’ through the door
as he lifted up his fork…
Someday if God's in heaven
over’lookin His preserve
I know the men that shot him down
will get what they deserve.
And then, for the last time, the chorus that drones through this whole long, boring song:
Joey, Joey… what made them want
to come and blow you away?
There are several theories in answer to that question. The most prevalent was that, since most people took it for granted that Joey was behind the shooting of Joe Colombo almost a year before, there was an open contract out on Gallo by the Colombo family, meaning that Joey had effectively committed suicide in having Colombo rubbed out. Two other theories advanced by investigators have Gallo once again trying to muscle in on territory occupied by other, more powerful mob factions. In one case, he could have told two thugs to crack a safe for $55,000 in Ferrara's Pastry Shop in Little Italy, a landmark frequented by Vinnie Aloi, at that time a very powerful capo in the New York Mafia. This would certainly have been the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to the mob bosses’ patience with Gallo's hustles, as would another incident reported in the June 4, 1972, New York Times: “Three weeks prior to Gallo's getting killed, he, Frank (Punchy) Illiano and John (Mooney) Cutrone went out to the San Susan nightclub in Mineola, L.I., in which John Franzese [another powerful capo in the Colombo family] is reported to have a hidden interest. Joey is reported to have grabbed the manager and said, ‘This joint is mine. Get out.’ In other words, he was cutting himself in. This was the first sign we had that Crazy Joe was acting up again.”
In any case, any of these courses of action (and Gallo may well have undertaken all three) amounted to signing his own death warrant. An interesting sidelight is that at this time Joey was broke, practically reduced to the shame of living off his bride of three