Crazy Joe Gallo: The Mobster Who Brought a Lion to a Mafia Meeting – HT
April 7th, 1972, 4:30 in the morning. Ombberto’s Clam House, 129 Malbury Street, Little Italy, Manhattan. Joey Gallow was sitting at a butcher block table, eating shrimp and scun jelly with his wife, his 10-year-old step-daughter, and his sister. He was celebrating his 43rd birthday.
The smell of garlic and fried clams hung in the air, checkered tablecloths, low voices. Then four men walked through the door carrying 32 and 38 caliber revolvers. They opened fire. 20 shots. Gallows swore, tried to pull his own gun, and flip the table to shield his family. He took bullets in his back, his left elbow, and his buttock.
He staggered toward the front door, bleeding through his pinstripe suit, stumbled out onto Hester Street, and collapsed next to his black 1971 Cadillac. His bodyguard, Pete the Greek, was hit in the hip. His sister was screaming. His stepdaughter, Lisa, just 10 years old, watched the whole thing. The whole hit took less than 30 seconds.
Joey Gallow bled out in the street on the same day he was born. This was not just another mobster getting clipped in a restaurant. Joey Gallow was the guy who kept a pet lion named Cleo in his Brooklyn basement. He read Sart and Kimu in prison. He befriended black gangsters when no Italian mobster dared even sit next to one.
He kidnapped his own boss’s top men and declared war on the entire proofs crime family. He walked into Bobby Kennedy’s Senate hearing room, looked at the carpet, and said, “Nice carpet. Good for a crap game.” He was 5’6, blonde, blue-eyed, and diagnosed by a court psychiatrist as a paranoid schizophrenic. and he was the most dangerous man in Brooklyn.
This is the story of how one man tried to rewrite the rules of the American mafia. How a kid from Red Hook became a hitman, a philosopher, a celebrity socialite, and the most wanted target in New York’s underworld. From President Street to prison to the Copa Cabana to a pool of blood on Malberry Street, this is the rise and violent fall of Crazy Joe Gallow.
But here is what most people never talk about. Gallow did not just fight the Columbbo family. He tried to do something no one in the mafia had ever attempted. He tried to unite black and Italian criminal organizations into a new kind of power structure. And for a brief wild moment in the early 1970s, he almost pulled it off.
To understand Joey Gallow, you have to understand where he came from. Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1930s and4s. This was a neighborhood where the docks ran everything, where Long Shoremen drank their paychecks and wise guys collected the rest. Joey was born on April 7th, 1929 to Ombberto and Mary Gallow. His father, Ombberto, was a bootleggger during Prohibition who took his earnings and invested them into a lone sharking operation.
He ran a greasy spoon restaurant in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, and he did absolutely nothing to discourage his three sons from following him into the life. Joey was the middle child. His older brother, Larry, was quiet and calculating. His younger brother, Albert, who they called Kid Bless, was the loyal soldier.
But Joey was different. Joey was electric. He dropped out of high school at 16. Shortly after, he was involved in a car accident that gave him a permanent nervous tick. Some people thought it made him look unstable. He used that. He leaned into it. Around this time, he and his childhood friend Pete Diapulus, who everyone called Pete the Greek, and a guy named Frank Iliano formed a small crew.
They started with jukebox and candy machine rackets. The scheme was simple. They would approach a bar or a restaurant and tell the owner he needed a jukebox. If the owner said no, Joey would pull a knife and hold it to his throat until the man changed his mind. Within a few years, Joey Gallow controlled the jukebox racket across a wide stretch of Brooklyn.
People in the neighborhood started calling him Joey the Blonde. You have to understand something about Joey that made him different from every other street kid running rackets in Brooklyn. He was obsessed with movies. Specifically, he was obsessed with the 1947 film Kiss of Death. There is a character in that movie played by Richard Whitmark named Tommy Udo, a cackling, unpredictable psychopath.
Joey Gallow did not just watch that movie. He studied it. He started quoting Tommy Udo. He started walking like him, talking like him, using that same unhinged energy. And when you combine a real capacity for violence with a guy who is performing the role of a psychopath, you get something genuinely terrifying. That was Joey Gallow.
After an arrest in 1950, he was evaluated by court psychiatrists who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. That diagnosis followed him for the rest of his life. People started calling him Crazy Joe. He never tried to shake that name. He wore it like armor. By the mid 1950s, the Gallow brothers had caught the attention of Joe Profacy, the boss of one of New York’s five families.
Profacy saw potential in these wild kids from Red Hook. He brought them into the fold and almost immediately he put them to work on one of the biggest hits in mafia history. On October 25th, 1957, Albert Anastasia, the boss of what would later become the Gambino family and the man known as the Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc.
, was sitting in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheran Hotel on 7th Avenue in Manhattan. He was getting a shave. Two gunmen walked in and they did not hesitate. They shot Albert Anastasia multiple times. He died in that chair, surrounded by shattered mirrors and blood soaked towels. The hit was one of the most famous in mafia history and Joey Gallow later bragged about it openly.
You can just call us the barbershop quartet. He told people that tells you everything you need to know about how Joey Gallow operated. Most guys who kill a mafia boss keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. Joey Gallow made jokes about it. Here is where the trouble started. Gallow expected a serious reward for his role in the Anastasia killing.
a bigger cut of the family’s rackets, more territory, more respect. Joe Proface did not deliver. Profasi was old school. He hoarded money. He demanded a $25 tribute from every single member of the family, which does not sound like much, but it was the principal. He expected his soldiers to kick up constantly while he sat on his fortune.
The Gallow brothers watched Prooface collect and collect while they scraped for scraps. Joey decided he was done waiting. But here is the thing about Joey Gallow. He did not just complain about it. He did something so audacious that nobody in the mafia had seen anything like it before. On February 27th, 1961, the Gallow brothers kidnapped four of Profacy’s top men.
Not low-level guys, not soldiers. They grabbed Joseph Maggalioko, the under boss and Proface’s own brother-in-law. They grabbed Frank Proface, the boss’s brother. They grabbed Kappa regime Salvatore Musakia. And they grabbed soldier John Simone, four of the most important men in the family, snatched off the streets in a single coordinated move.
Profasi himself barely escaped, fleeing to Florida for safety. Think about the nerve it took to do that. This was a soldier kidnapping his own bosses in the mafia. That is not rebellion. That is a declaration of war. The gallows held the hostages and demanded a complete restructuring of how the family’s money was divided. They wanted a bigger cut. They wanted respect.
They wanted what they had earned. Profacy’s conciglier Charles Lo Cicero negotiated a deal. The hostages were released peacefully. Profacy agreed to give the gallows better terms. But here is what nobody should have been surprised by. Profasy had no intention of keeping that deal. Not for a second.
On August 20th, 1961, Prophasi sent men to kill Larry Gallow and a crew member named Joseph Gioelli known as Joe Jelly. The hit on Joe Jelly succeeded. He disappeared and was never seen again. But the attempt on Larry Gallow became one of the most infamous scenes in mafia history. Carmine Persico and Salvator Damrosio lured Larry to the Sahara Lounge on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.
While they were sitting at the bar, Persico wrapped a gar around Larry’s neck and started strangling him. Larry was seconds from death when a police officer walked into the bar on a routine check. The cops saw what was happening and the killers fled. Larry survived with rope burns across his throat.
That scene, by the way, inspired one of the most famous moments in The Godfather when Luca Brazzy gets strangled at the bar. That was Larry Gallow’s near-death experience, dramatized for the screen. Now the war was fully on. The Gallow Profacy conflict raged through Brooklyn for the next two years. Nine men were murdered. Three more vanished.
Bodies turned up in car trunks. Men disappeared from social clubs and were never found. The gallows operated out of their headquarters at 51 President Street in the Carol Gardens section of Brooklyn, a three-story brick tenement they called the dormatory. It was here that Joey Gallow kept his pet lion Cleo in the basement.
You have to picture this, a fullgrown lion in the basement of a Brooklyn walkup. Gallow would bring people down to see it. He would use it to intimidate rivals. Sometimes he would bring Cleo out on a leash. The neighbors on President Street had a lion living below them. That was the world of Joey Gallow. But the war caught up with him.
In November of 1961, Gallow was convicted of conspiracy and extortion for trying to muscle in on a businessman’s operation. On December 21st, 1961, he was sentenced to 7 to 14 years in prison. And while Joey Gallow sat behind bars, the world outside kept turning. Joe Profacey died of cancer on June 7th, 1962. Leadership of the family eventually passed to a man named Joseph Columbbo and the family was renamed the Profacy family became the Columbbo family.
But the Gallows never forgot. And Joey Gallow, locked away in a cell, was about to undergo the most extraordinary transformation of his life. Here is where Joey Gallow’s story separates itself from every other mafia tale you have ever heard. Most guys go to prison and come out harder, angrier, more violent.
Joey Gallow went to prison and came out a philosopher. He was incarcerated at three different New York State prisons, Green Haven, Attica, Auburn. At Auburn, he took up watercolor painting, bright emotional colors on Canvas. He worked as an elevator operator in the prison woodworking shop. But the real change happened in his mind.
Gallow taught himself the Evelyn Wood speedreading technique. And then he read everything. Sart, Kimu, Nichi, Makaveli, Kafka. He read up to 10 books at a time. He gave himself what amounted to a graduate level education in philosophy, political theory, art history, and literature. He wrote poetry. He called himself the Walt Wittman of the streets and proposed a book of verse he wanted to title cracked bricks.
He debated existentialism with anyone who would listen. He once asked a visitor whether they preferred sart or kimu as casually as another man might ask about the Yankees. But Gallow did not just educate himself. He did something far more dangerous. something that would set off a chain of events leading directly to his death. At Green Haven, he befriended an African-American drug trafficker named Leroy Barnes, known as Nikki Barnes.
Nikki Barnes would later become one of the most powerful heroin dealers in Harlem, known as Mr. Untouchable. And it was Gallow who mentored him. Gallow recognized something that no one else in the Italian mafia was willing to see. The power structure in Harlem was shifting. Black criminal organizations were gaining territory, gaining muscle, gaining independence.
Rather than fight them, Gallow decided to ally with them. He coached Nikki Barnes on how to professionalize his operation, how to upgrade his organization from a street crew into a real criminal enterprise. In 1964, Gallo even sued the Department of Corrections after he was punished for allowing a black barber to cut his hair.
In a mafia where black men were not even allowed to enter Italian social clubs, Joey Gallow was building bridges. That took either incredible foresight or a complete disregard for the rules, probably both. During a prison riot at Auburn, Gallow rescued a severely wounded corrections officer from a mob of angry inmates.
The officer was so grateful that he later testified on Gallow’s behalf at a parole hearing. Think about the complexity of this man. a diagnosed schizophrenic, a convicted extortionist, a suspected killer, and here he is saving a guard’s life during a riot while reading Nichi in his cell at night. On April 11th, 1971, after nearly 10 years behind bars, Joey Gallow walked out of prison and back onto the streets of New York City.
And everything had changed. His brother Larry was dead. Cancer had taken him in May of 1968. The family he had gone to war for was now run by Joseph Columbo, a man Gallow considered a pretender. And Columbo sent a peace offering, $1,000. Joey Gallo looked at that money and laughed. He demanded 100,000. Columbo refused.
That refusal set the final clock ticking. But before the violence resumed, something strange happened. Joey Gallow became a celebrity. His first wife, Jeffy Lee Boyd, was a Las Vegas showgirl who had previously been married to the jazz saxoponist Jerry Mulligan. Through Jeffy, who lived on 8th Street in Greenwich Village, Joey entered a world of jazz clubs, beatnic pads, and downtown bohemian culture.
He fit right in. He could discuss German expressionism and its influence on film noir. He could debate the merits of fascism versus communism over cocktails. He was charming, articulate, and genuinely brilliant. And he was also a violent criminal who had spent a decade in prison for extortion. That combination was irresistible to the New York literati.
The list of people who gravitated to Joey Gallow reads like a guest list for the most interesting dinner party in 1971 Manhattan. Actor Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta became close friends. Ben Gazera, Peter Faulk, Joan Heckett, playwright Neil Simon, comedian David Steinberg. Galla was even scheduled to appear alongside writer Gore Vidal, activist Abby Hoffman, and filmmaker Otto Preminger at an event.
Susan Santag, the voice of the city’s intelligencia, later said, “I wish I’d had the chance to talk to Joe Gallow before he died.” Writer Gay Tles put it simply. He almost became one of the beautiful people. Gallow loved the attention. He loved walking into Sardis, the famous theater district restaurant where you could hear a pin drop when he entered. He dressed impeccably.
Pinstripe suits, dark shirts, white ties. He leaned into the gangster image for his artistic friends. His second wife, Cena Esserie, later told reporters that people were mesmerized by him. He had that quality that attracted people to him, no matter who they were. He was extremely intelligent and he could talk about anything, art, theater, politics, philosophy, all the things he had been reading about in prison.
Meanwhile, Jerry Orbach had just starred alongside a young Robert Dairo in the 1971 film The Gang That Could Not Shoot Straight, based on columnist Jimmy Brereslin’s novel about the Gallow Crew. Orbach played Kid Sally Palumbo, a character loosely based on Joey himself. So now you had an actor playing a gangster based on a real gangster who was his actual friend.
The lines between reality and fiction had completely dissolved. That was the world Joey Gallow inhabited in the last year of his life. But while Gallow was sipping cocktails with celebrities, the streets had not forgotten him. On June 28th, 1971, Joseph Columbo was shot three times at an Italian Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle, Manhattan.
The gunman was a black man named Jerome Johnson who was killed immediately after the shooting. Columbo survived but was left in a vegetative state. He would spend seven years in a coma before dying of cardiac arrest. Everyone in the underworld looked at the same evidence, a black gunman, an unprecedented hit on a mafia boss.
And Joey Gallow, the only Italian mobster with deep connections to black criminal organizations, had just been released from prison two months earlier. You know what the streets concluded. Whether Gallow actually ordered the Columbbo hit has never been proven. Some investigators believe Carlo Gambino, the most powerful boss in New York, orchestrated the whole thing and used Gallow as a convenient scapegoat.
The accounts vary on this, but it did not matter what the truth was. It mattered what the Columbbo family believed. And they believed Joey Gallow had shot their boss. Remember the name Carmine Persico? The same man who tried to strangle Larry Gallow with a garat Sahara Lounge back in 1961.
Persico was now positioning himself to take over the Columbbo family. And he wanted Gallow gone. But Joey Gallow was not hiding. That was never his style. He walked through Little Italy like he owned it. He ate at the best restaurants. He attended shows at the Copa Cabana. He was working on a book deal with Viking press. He was meeting with Hollywood producers.
3 weeks before his 43rd birthday, he married Cena Esserie, a 29-year-old actress. He had a stepchild he adored. Life was good. Life was also about to end. On the night of April 6th, 1972, Joey and Cena joined Jerry and Marta Orbach at the Copa Cabana to see comedian Don Rickles and singer Peter Lemonello perform.
It was the night before Joey’s birthday. After the show, the group drove downtown in that black Cadillac. They arrived at Ombberto’s clam house after 4 in the morning. Joey, Cena, his 10-year-old step-daughter Lisa, his sister Carmela, Pete the Greek Dipulus, and Pete’s girlfriend. They sat down.
They ordered shrimp, scunili, clams. They were between seafood courses when the door opened. A Columbbo associate named Joseph Luparelli had spotted Gallow earlier and driven to a social club to alert members of the crew. The gunman arrived quickly. Four men with revolvers. They walked into the dining room without hesitation. The first shots hit Gallow in the back.
He swore. He reached for his own weapon. 20 shots filled that small restaurant. Gallow grabbed the butcher block table and flipped it, creating a barrier between the gunman and his family. Even with bullets in his body, he moved toward the door. Witnesses said he was trying to draw fire away from his wife and stepdaughter.
He stumbled through the entrance, crossed onto Hester Street, and collapsed beside his Cadillac. Pete the Greek took a bullet in the hip. Carmemella screamed. Little Lisa, 10 years old, watched everything. Police arrived minutes later and found Joey Gallow dying on the pavement. He did not make it to the hospital alive. Time of death, approximately 5:00 in the morning, April 7th, 1972.
his 43rd birthday, the same date he had entered the world. 3 days later, at his funeral, his sister Carmela stood by the casket and made a promise that everyone in the underworld heard. The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey. She was right. In the months that followed, at least 10 more men were killed in a new wave of warfare between the Gallow faction and the Columbbo family.
It was the most violent mafia conflict New York had seen in decades. The war dragged on for years before what remained of the Gallow crew negotiated peace and rejoined the Columbbo family. The gunman who killed Joey Gallow were never officially identified. The leading theory points to a Columbbo hit squad. But Frank Sheran, the mob enforcer who later claimed to have killed Jimmy Huffa, also took credit for shooting Gallow.
He said the bosses wanted Gallow eliminated because his flashy celebrity lifestyle was drawing too much attention to organized crime. Most mob experts doubt Shiran’s claim. What is documented is that the Columbbo family had the motive, the opportunity, and the manpower. The rest remains in the shadows. But here is the part that transforms Joey Gallow from a mob story into something larger.
In 1975, 3 years after the killing, Bob Dylan was visiting the home of Jerry and Marta Orbach. He saw a painting of Joey Gallow hanging on the wall and asked about it. What the Orbach told him that night inspired Dylan to write an 11-minute ballad called Joey, which appeared on his 1976 album, Desire. The song paints Gallow as a romantic anti-hero, a man who stood alone against the machine.
I never considered him a gangster, Dylan later said. I always thought of him as some kind of hero, an underdog fighting against the elements. The song was not universally loved. Rock critic Lester Bangs called it one of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellent romanticist trash ever recorded. And plenty of people who actually lived through the Gallow Wars agreed.
Joey Gallow was responsible for a conflict that killed over a dozen men. He terrorized business owners with knives. He was convicted of extortion. But he also read kimu. He also painted watercolors. He also saved a prison guard’s life. He also tried to build alliances across racial lines that no one in the mafia had ever attempted.
The truth about Joey Gallow does not fit neatly into a category. And that is exactly what makes his story worth telling. What happened to the people around him tells you something, too. His brother Albert kid blasted survived the wars and eventually faded from public life. Nikki Barnes, the man Gallow mentored in prison, went on to become one of the biggest heroin dealers in American history before being arrested and eventually becoming a government informant.
Jerry Orbach went on to become detective Lenny Brisco on Law and Order, one of the most iconic television roles in American history. He never forgot his friendship with Joey. Cena Esserie took her daughter Lisa and moved to Tennessee to escape the world her husband had left behind. Lisa grew up to become a casting director in Hollywood.
The Colbo family continued its cycles of violence and internal warfare for decades. Carmine Persico eventually became boss and spent most of his life in prison. Joey Gallow spent 43 years trying to be something the mafia could not contain. He wanted to be an intellectual, a revolutionary, a celebrity, a kingmaker.
He wanted to tear down the old order and replace it with something that crossed racial lines, crossed cultural boundaries, crossed every rule the mafia had ever established. And here is the brutal truth. The mafia does not reward visionaries. It eliminates them. Joey Gallow challenged a system designed to crush anyone who challenged it.
He read Nichi and quoted Kimu, but he forgot the one lesson every philosopher teaches. The world does not change because one man ws it. It changes when enough people are ready. And in 1972, the mafia was not ready for Joey Gallow. He died eating skun jelly at 4:30 in the morning on his birthday.
A lion tamer with no lion left. A philosopher who ran out of arguments. A man who almost became one of the beautiful people buried instead with bullets in his back. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. Tell us, was Joey Gallow a visionary who was ahead of his time, or was he just a reckless gangster who got exactly what was coming? We want to hear your