Originally Posted by
big sky brad
In the late 50s Joey did a job for Joseph Profaci, one of the heads of the Five Families, the crime families that controlled the mafia in New York.
The Profaci crime family was organized in 1928, the last of the Five Families to be organized.
And Joey's cut for the job was supposed to be $100,000 dollars, but Profaci stiffed him.
So, Joey went after Profaci, but Profaci acted first.
He had a soldier, John Scimone, join the Gallo gang as a spy and Scimone set up the murder of Joseph "Joe Jelly" Gioelli, who was one of Gallo's top enforcers and biggest hitters.
Profaci gunmen kidnapped Gioelli and took him out on Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn in a fishing boat.
Once on the water, Gioelli was shot and dismembered.
His clothing was stuffed with dead fish and thrown in front of an auto shop frequented by the Gallo gang.
This was the impetus for the "he sleeps with the fishes" scene in the movie, The Godfather, part I.
Profaci also tried to have Larry killed by luring him to a meeting at the Sahara Lounge, a Brooklyn supper club, where he would be strangled with a garrote, but a police officer just happened to walk into the club during the attempt to strangle Larry and interrupted the murder.
That scene was later recreated in the movie The Godfather, Part II.
Larry bore a horrible around his neck for the rest of his life as a result of being nearly strangled to death.
Joey wound up going to the can for 10 years in 1961 for extortion when a restaurant owner told the feds that Joey was trying to put the squeeze on him for some spending dough. With Profaci's men trying to kill Joey every chance they could get, Joey had a hard time making any money running his old rackets. So, Joey tried to raise some quick cash by squeezing some of the profits out of the pockets of a popular restaurant owner located in Brooklyn. Joey had already threatened the restaurant owner in a previous meeting, but the owner took his threat personally as he was Italian himself, and he didn't think he should have to give in to Joey's demands.
So the feds told the restaurant owner to set up another meeting with Joey. Then when the owner told Joey that he would need some time to think about giving him some money, Joey replied, "sure, take the next 3 months recuperating in the hospital to think about it on me" and the feds got Joey's threat on tape of him telling the owner that.
After Joey got out of the big house, he went right back to business. Profaci was dead by then, but Joey still wanted his cut of the deal he had made with Profaci, $100,000 dollars. Profaci's crime family had become the Columbo crime family by the time Joey got out of prison. So, Joey went after Joeseph Columbo, the head of the family.
Columbo was a little nutty. He started an Italian anti-defamation league and ran it himself. The other heads of the crime families didn't like the publicity yet Columbo thrived on it, complaining about how the Godfather movie, which had been released that year, made all Italians look bad. Joey hired a photographer named Jerome Johnson to go to one of Columbo's rallys and kill Columbo. Johnson shot Columbo 3 times in board daylight at the rally and was quickly gunned down by Columbo's body guards. But, even though there was no obvious link to Gallo, he was the one most people, even the police said had orchestrated the hit on Columbo. So the word was put on the street, and before the end of April 1972, Gallo was shot dead.
Eating at a restaurant at 3 AM in the morning, celebrating his 43rd birthday.
Reply With Quote
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks