Crazy Joe Gallo: The Mobster Who Brought A Lion To Mob Meetings HT
April 7th, 1972. 4:30 a.m. Ombberto’s Clam House, 129 Malberry Street, Little Italy. Joey Gallows at a rear table. His back to the door eating skunk gilly. His wife of 3 weeks, Cena Esserie, laughed at something his sister said. His 10-year-old step-daughter, Lisa, was getting tired. The smell of garlic and seafood filled the air.
Checkered tablecloths. the quiet of an almost empty restaurant. Then the door burst open for a gunman. The first bullet hit Gallow’s bodyguard. The second caught Joey in the back. He lurched from his chair, stumbled toward the kitchen, reaching for a gun he didn’t have. Three more shots, left elbow, left buttock, back.
He collapsed on the floor near the front door, clutching a menu, blood pooling beneath him. His sister screamed. The gumman vanished into the pre-dawn darkness. Joey Gallow died at 43 on his birthday. The whole thing took 20 seconds. This wasn’t just another mobster. Joey Gallow was a guy who kept a live lie in his basement, read Sartra and Kimu in prison, befriended black gangsters when it violated every mafia rule, and declared war on the entire Columbbo family.
He hung out with Bob Dylan and Jerry Orbach. He wanted to revolutionize organized crime. He thought he could rewrite the rules. Instead, he became the most hated man in the New York underworld. This is a story of how one man’s refusal to follow tradition turned him into a celebrity mobster and a marked man. From kidnapping his own bosses to building alliances that shocked the mafia.
From intellectual awakening behind bars to his final meal in Little Italy, this is the rise and violent fall of crazy Joe Gallow. But here’s what the history books don’t tell you. Gallow didn’t just fight the Colombos. He tried to create something that had never existed. A multi-racial crime organization that would unite Italian mobsters, black gangsters, and anyone else the traditional mafia rejected.
And for a brief dangerous moment, it looked like he might actually pull it off. Joseph Gallow was born April 7th, 1929 in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His father, Ombberto, was a bootleger during Prohibition. His mother, Mary, kept the house. Joey grew up with two brothers, Larry, two years older, and Albert, who everyone called Kid Blast, a year younger.
Red Hook in the 1930s was docs long shoreman poverty and mob influence. The pro- foye family controlled the waterfront. If you want to work, you paid tribute. If you didn’t, you didn’t work. Joey was small, skinny, 5’6, maybe 140 lb. But he had something dangerous. Unpredictability. Other kids played stickball.
Joey stole cars. Other teenagers got jobs. Joey got arrested. By 17, he’d been picked up for burglary. By 20, he was a regular at the President Street Social Club, working odd jobs for the Proacey crime family. His brothers followed him in. Larry was a thinker, the planner. Albert was a muscle, quick with his fists, earned his nickname, Kid Blast, for his temper.
Together, the Gallow brothers became enforcers for Joe Profi, one of the original commission bosses. a man who’d been in the game since the 1920s. Joey’s first major job came in 1950. He was 21. Pro- fought ordered a hit on a rival named Willie Gallow. No relation. Joey handled it personally.
Shot him twice in the head outside a Brooklyn bar. No witnesses, no arrest. The kid had potential. Proface noticed. So did everyone else. By the mid 1950s, Joey Gallow was a maidman, a soldier in the Proachi family. He ran a crew out a threestory brick building at 51 Present Street in Red Hook. They called it the dormatory.
Vending machines, loan sharking, protection rackets, standard mob business. But Joey was never standard. In 1957, he allegedly did something that changed mafia history. Albert Anastasia, boss of what would become the Gambino family, sat down for a haircut at the Park Sharon and Hotel Barber Shop. Two gummen walked in and shot him five times.
Anastasia died in the chair. Theories swirl for decades about who did it. One name kept surfacing. Joey Gallow. Word on the street said Joey was the shooter sent by Veto Genovese to clear the way for Carlo Gambino to take over the family. Was it true? No one knows. Joey never confirmed it, but he never denied it either. And in mob circles, the legend was enough.
Joey Gallow was a guy who could walk into a public place and kill a boss. That made him dangerous. That made him useful. That made him feared. But here’s what separated Joey from other wise guys. While they were betting on horses and playing cards, Joey was reading philosophy, history, psychology. He’d visit bookstores in Greenwich Village, pick up Nichzche, Dastoyki, existential works about men creating their own destiny.
He started hanging around artists, musicians, writers. He didn’t fit the mold. Most mobsters want to blend in. Joey wanted to stand out and he did something else that violated every mafia code. He kept a pet lion. The lion’s name was Cleo, a fullgrown African lioness. Joey bought her from a circus or zoo. Accounts vary.
He kept her in the basement of the dormatory, fed her raw meat, walked her on a leash through the streets of Red Hook. People thought he was insane. Maybe he was, but there was method in it. When someone owed Joey money and didn’t pay, he’d bring them to the dormatory. He’d take them downstairs, show them Cleo, the lion would growl, pace, bear her teeth.
Joey would say something like, “You see, Cleo, she’s hungry, and I’m thinking about feeding her something other than steak. The debts got paid every time.” This was Joey Gallow, part gangster, part performance artist, part philosopher. He styled himself as an outsider, even within the underworld. And in 1960, that attitude would lead him to do something unthinkable.
He’d kidnap his own bosses. You have to understand the structure. Joe Proface ran his family like a feudal lord. He took a bigger cut than other bosses. He demanded tribute from every crew even when they weren’t earning. Soldiers were supposed to kiss his ring, bring him tributes on holidays, show constant deference, and pro- fa gave back very little.
No legal support, no financial help when guys went to prison, nothing. By 1960, Joey Gallow had had enough. He looked around. He saw soldiers doing all the work while pro- fought lived in a mansion. Never got his hands dirty. Collected money like a tax collector. Joey started talking to other soldiers. We’re doing the heavy lifting.
Why are we getting crumbs? Larry Gallow agreed. So did Kid Blast. They started holding secret meetings, not just with their crew, with other disgruntled Profi soldiers. By early 1961, they had a plan, a revolution, but they needed leverage. February 27th, 1961, the Gallow brothers made their move. They kidnapped four of Proace’s top men, under boss Joseph Malioko, Frank Proachi, the boss’s brother, Capo Regime Salvatore, Musakia, Soldier John Shimon.
They grabbed them off the street, brought them to the dormatory, held them hostage. The demand was simple. Renegotiate the terms. Soldiers keep more what they earn. Pro- Face gives up some control. Equal treatment. Joey thought Pro Face would see reason. He thought they could force change from within. Pro Face saw treason.
He negotiated. He agreed to terms. He got his men back. Then he immediately went back on every promise. Instead of reform, he declared war. The first Columbbo war had begun, named after Joe Colombo, one of Pro Face’s loyalists who’d later take over the family. From 1961 to 1963, Brooklyn became a war zone.
Drive by shootings, car bombs, bodies and vacant lots. The Gallow crew fought from the dormatory, fortify it like a bunker, mattresses on the windows, guns stashed in every room. They slept in shifts. They moved in packs. Paranoia became survival. Larry Gallow nearly died. August 20th, 1961. He walked into the Sahara Lounge on Udica Avenue for a meeting.
Pro- Face soldiers grabbed him from behind. They looped a rope around his neck. They strangled him. He was seconds from death when a cop walked in for a random check. The killers fled. Larry survived with rope burns across his throat. The gallows started calling the proachi enforcer who led to hit the snake. His name was Carmine Persico.
But Joey had a bigger problem. November 1961, he got arrested for extortion. He’d been shaking down a bar owner for protection money. The victim testified. Joey got convicted. December 21st, 1961. Judge Samuel Lieovitz sentenced him to 7 to 14 years in state prison. Joey Gallow was 32 years old at the height of a mob war and now he was going to prison.
He ended up in Attica, then Green Haven, then Great Meadow Correctional Facility, and something happened there that no one expected. Joey Gallow transformed himself. Prison radicalized him. He read eight books a day. philosophy, political theory, history, Kimu, Sartra, Malcolm X’s autobiography. He read about power structures, revolutions, marginalized groups fighting systems designed to crush them. He saw parallels everywhere.
The mafia wasn’t just organized crime. It was a cast system. Old bosses on top, young soldiers on the bottom. And Joey started thinking about something dangerous. What if you could build something different? He befriended African-American inmates. In 1960s New York prisons, races didn’t mix. Whites sat with whites. Blacks sat with blacks.
Joey didn’t care. He talked to everyone. He played cards with black gangsters, shared cigarettes, discussed strategy, and he listened. One story became legend. A black inmate got stabbed in a prison fight. He was bleeding out on the floor. Guard were slow to respond. Joey Gallow stepped in.
He applied pressure to the wound. He screamed at the guards to call for help. He saved the man’s life. Word spread. Crazy Joey was like other Italian mobsters. He respected black gangsters. He saw them as equals. This was unheard of. The mafia was insular, racist, traditional. Sicilians didn’t work with outsiders.
But Joey saw opportunity. Black gangsters in Harlem and Brooklyn controlled heroin numbers. Street soldiers. If you could form an alliance, you could build an army. An army the traditional mafia couldn’t match. He started making connections. When black gangsters got out of prison, they remembered Joey. When Joey’s crew needed muscle, they had options the Columbbo family didn’t.
But while Joey was reading and recruiting in prison, the war outside was ending badly for the gallows. June 6th, 1962, Joe Proface died of liver cancer. His under boss, Joseph Maglo, took over, but Maggyoko was weak, sick, paranoid. By 1963, he was out. The commission installed Joe Colbo as the new boss. Columbo immediately moved to crush what was left of the Gallow faction.
One by one, gallows soldiers got arrested, got killed, got scared, and switched sides. By 1963, the gallows had lost. Larry and Kid Blast were on the streets, keeping a low profile. The Present Street crew was a shadow of what had been. Joey sat in prison reading, planning, thinking. He knew when he got out he’d be walking into a death sentence.
The Columbbo family wanted him dead. Carmine Persico the snake wanted revenge for the kidnappings. Every soldier would be looking to make their bones by killing crazy Joey. But Joey had a plan and it involved doing something no Italian mobster had ever done before. April 11th, 1971. After serving nearly 10 years, Joey Gallow walked out of prison on parole.
He was 42, thinner, older, but sharper, more focused. He returned to Brooklyn with a vision. Joe Columbo had taken over the family in Joey’s absence. Columbo had done something unusual. He’d gone public. He founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League, a front organization that protested FBI harassment and media stereotypes of Italian-Ameans.
He held rallies, press conferences. He became a celebrity boss, appearing on TV, shaking hands with politicians. Joey thought was a joke. You don’t parade around. You stay in the shadows. But Columbomo’s publicity stunt gave Joey an opening. If Columbbo was distracted playing civil rights leader, he wasn’t paying attention to the streets.
As a supposed peace gesture, Columbbo sent word to Joey. He offered $1,000 as a welcome home gift. Joey laughed. He sent a message back. 100,000. That’s what it costs for peace. Columbo refused. Joey said, “Fine, then there’s no peace.” On June 28th, 1971, Columbbo held his second Italian Unity Day rally at Columbus Circle. 50,000 people showed up.
Columbo stood on stage, smiling, waving. Then a black man named Jerome Johnson stepped forward with camera. He shot Columbbo three times in the head, neck, and jaw. Columbo collapsed. His bodyguards killed Johnson instantly, three shots to the head. Columbo survived but spent the rest of his life in a vegetative state. He died seven years later.
Who ordered the hit? Police investigated. They questioned Joey Gallow immediately. Joey had an alibi. He’d been at a restaurant miles away, but everyone knew Joey had connections with black gangsters. Jerome Johnson was black. It had Joey’s fingerprints all over it. The Columbbo family believed it. Carmine Persico believed it.
Joey Gallow had just declared war again. And this time there would be no negotiation, only blood. Joey knew he was a target. He moved constantly. Different apartments, different burrows. He surrounded himself with bodyguards, some Italian, some black. He carried a gun everywhere. He slept with one eye open. But Joey also started living like he had nothing to lose. He embraced a celebrity.
He hung out in Greenwich Village, the artist hub of Manhattan. He went to comedy clubs, jazz bars, art galleries. He became friends with celebrities. Jerry Orbach, the actor, befriended Joey. Orbach had starred in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a 1971 film loosely based on Joey’s life.
They met after the movie came out. They hit it off. Joey loved theater, movies, the idea of storytelling. Orbach was fascinated by Joey’s intelligence, his contradictions, a killer who quoted Kimu. Joey met his second wife through this scene. Cena Esserie, she was 29, an actress, beautiful blonde, a former nun who’d left the convent. Joey was smitten.
They married March 1972. 3 weeks later, Joey was dead. Through Jerry Orbach, Joey met other artists, comedians like Don Rickles, musicians, actors. Joey soaked it in. He wanted to be more than a gangster. He wanted to be a rebel intellectual, a revolutionary, someone history would remember. But while Joey was living his Greenwich Village fantasy, the Columbbo family was planning his execution.
Carmine Persico coordinated the hit from prison. He was serving time on hijacking charges, but he still ran the family. The order went out. Find Joey Gallow. Kill him. Make it public. Make it humiliating. Show everyone what happens when you challenge the family. The job went to a crew led by Carmine Sunny Debiosi.
Sunny was a soldier. Tough, loyal, hungry to prove himself. He’d been watching Joey for weeks, tracking his movements, learning his patterns. Joey wasn’t easy to pin down. He changed locations. He varied his schedule. But he had one weakness. Ego. He loved being seen. He loved restaurants. Nightife being recognized. April 6th, 1972.
Joey’s 43rd birthday. He celebrated that night. He went to the Copa Cabana nightclub with Cena, his sister Carmela, and his stepdaughter Lisa. They saw Don Rickles perform. Joey laughed, drank, enjoyed himself. He acted like he didn’t have a target on his back. After the show around 4:00 a.m.
, they decided to get food. Little Italy Ombberto’s Clam House. It had just opened a few weeks earlier. Joey liked supporting new businesses. Plus, he was hungry. They walked in, took a table at the back. Joey sat with his back to the door. A mistake he never should have made. His bodyguard Pete the Greek Diapas sat nearby.
They ordered clams, skunggilly, shrimp. The restaurant was nearly empty. A few customers, staff cleaning up. Outside, Sunny Diosi and his crew pulled up for men. They’d been tipped off. Someone had called, told them where Joey was. They grabbed guns, walked through the door. 4:30 a.m. The door swung open. Pete the Greek turned. He saw the guns.
He reached for his weapon. The first shot hit him in the buttocks. He went down. Joey spun around. He saw the gunman. He tried to stand. The second bullet caught him in the back. He lurched forward, stumbling toward the kitchen. Maybe he thought he could escape out the back. Maybe he was trying to draw fire away from Cena and Lisa.
Three more shots. Left elbow, left buttock, back. Joey collapsed near the front door. Blood everywhere. His sister screamed. Cena tried to shield Lisa. The gunman ran, disappeared into the night. Police arrived within minutes. Joey was still alive. Barely. He was conscious. He looked up at the cop leaning over him.
The cop asked, “Who did this?” Joey smiled. He said, “Nothing.” Omar, the code of silence. Even dying, Joey wouldn’t break it. He died at Beakman Downtown Hospital at 5:30 a.m. Cause of death, gunshot wound to the back, severing his spinal cord and puncturing vital organs. He bled out in minutes. The NYPD investigated. They knew it was a mob hit.
They knew the Columbbo family did it. But proving it was another matter, no witnesses talked. No one saw anything. Pete the Greek survived but refused to cooperate. The case went cold. Years later, Sunny Debiosi would admit to the killing in his memoir. He claimed he was a shooter. He described the planning, the execution, the escape. By then, the statute of limitations had run out. No one could be prosecuted.
Joey’s murder officially remains unsolved. Joey Gallow’s funeral was April 10th, 1972 at Guido’s funeral home in Brooklyn. Hundreds showed up. Mobsters, celebrities, curious onlookers. Cena sat near the coffin, numb. Three weeks into a marriage that ended in blood. Jerry Orbach was there. So was Kid Blast.
Larry Gallow had died of cancer in 1968. Spared from seeing his brother’s end, they buried Joey at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. No grand monument, just a headstone. Joseph Gallow 1929 to 1972. But Joey’s death didn’t end the story. It sparked something unexpected, a myth. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him.
Joey, an 11-minute ballot that appeared on Dylan’s 1976 album, Desire. Dylan had been fascinated by Joey’s story. After the murder, Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta told Dylan about Joey over dinner. They showed Dylan a painting they commissioned of Joey. Dylan was captivated. The song romanticized Joey, portrayed him as a Robin Hood figure, a rebel fighting corrupt bosses, a man of the people.
Dylan sang, “What made the one come and blow you away?” He painted Joey as a martyr, misunderstood, targeted for daring to challenge the system. The song was controversial. Critics said Dylan was glorifying a killer. Families of Joey’s victims protested. But the song became part of Joey’s legend. It turned Crazy Joe Gallow into a folk hero, a symbol of rebellion against authority.
The Columbbo family fell apart after Joey’s death. Carmine Persico became boss in the late 1970s. He ran the family from prison, serving a 139-year sentence. The second Colbo war erupted in the 1990s, tearing the family into factions, murders, betrayals, informants. By the 2000s, the Colbo family was a shell of its former self.
Sunonny Debiosi, Joey’s killer, lived quietly for decades. He eventually wrote a book, Mafia Hit Man, detailing his life and Joey’s murder. He died in 2019. Cena, Joey’s widow, moved to Nashville. She remarried, she rarely spoke about Joey. When she did, she remembered him as intelligent, funny, magnetic, a man who could have been something else if he’d been born in a different world.
She died in 2024 at 83. Lisa Esserie, Joey’s stepdaughter, the little girl who watched him die, disappeared from public life. No interviews, no books. Some stories are too painful to revisit. Pete the Greek, Joey’s bodyguard, who survived the shooting, went into hiding. He knew the Colombos would come for him eventually.
He lived paranoid, looking over his shoulder. He died in the 1980s. Cause unknown. Kid blast. Joey’s brother, the last surviving gallow, stayed in Brooklyn. He kept a low profile. He never retaliated for Joey’s death. He knew it was a war they couldn’t win. He died in 1995 at 65. Joey’s legacy is complicated. He killed people. He terrorized victims.
He shook down businesses, destroyed families with lone sharking, used violence as a tool. He wasn’t a hero. He was a criminal. But he was also something unique in mafia history. An intellectual who questioned everything. A rebel who tried to build something different. A mobster who crossed racial lines in a world built on segregation.
He saw the mafia’s future required evolution, adaptation, alliances with groups the old guard despised. He was right. By the 1980s, Italian-American crime families were losing power. Black, Hispanic, Russian, Asian gangs were taking over drug markets. Street crime territories a mafia once controlled. Joey saw it coming 20 years early, but he moved too fast. He challenged too much.
And the old guard crushed him for it. The lion Cleo outlived Joey after his arrest in 1961. Someone took her to a zoo. She lived there for years. Visitors would stop, read the plaque, learn she once belonged to a mobster who walked her through Brooklyn streets. They’d laugh. They’d take pictures.
They had no idea what that lion represented. She represented Joey’s need to be different. To shock, to intimidate, to show everyone he wasn’t like the others. A lion doesn’t belong in a Brooklyn basement. Joey Gallow didn’t belong in the traditional mafia. Both were out of place. Both were dangerous. Both became legends. Greenwich Village in the 1970s was a collision point.
artists, musicians, activists, and yes, mobsters mingled in bars and cafes. It was a place where a gangster could sit next to a poet, where a killer could discuss existentialism with an actor. Joey thrived there. It validated his self-image. He wasn’t just muscle. He was a thinker, a revolutionary. But revolutions require allies. Joey built a multi-racial crew.
Italian soldiers, black gangsters from Harlem and Bedford Stavverson, Puerto Rican enforcers. At a time when the mafia wouldn’t even let Irish Americans become made men, Joey was forming a rainbow coalition of crime. The mafia commission saw it. They saw the threat. If Joey succeeded, if his model worked, it would destroy the traditional family structure.
It would dilute power, break Omda, invite chaos. They couldn’t allow it, so they killed him. Not just to end a war, to end an idea. Here’s the thing about Joey Gallow. He was born 30 years too early. In the 1990s and 2000s, when crime became multithnic, when street gangs partnered with organized crime, when racial barriers broke down, Joey’s motto became reality.
Black gangsters worked with Italian mobsters. Hispanic cartels partnered with American crews. Joey’s vision came true, but he didn’t live to see it. The irony is brutal. Joey died for an idea that eventually won. But history doesn’t care about irony. It only cares about who survives long enough to claim victory. On April 7th, 1972, Joey Galla was eating clams at 4:30 in the morning.
He was celebrating his birthday. He was with people he loved for a brief moment. He felt safe. He felt untouchable. He felt like he’d beaten the odds. Then the door opened and 20 seconds later, his revolution was over. Ombberto’s clam house became famous for Joey’s murder. Tourists visited. They’d sit at the table where he died.
They’d order skunk Gilly, take photos, tell their friends they ate where Crazy Joe got whacked. The restaurant played into it. Kept newspaper clippings on the walls. Let the legend grow. It closed in 2021. A victim of the pandemic. The building remains. The blood stains are long gone, but the story persists. Crazy Joe Gallow.
The mobster who brought a lion to mob meetings. The killer who read Sartra. The revolutionary who tried to integrate organized crime. The man who befriended Bob Dylan and got immortalized in song. Was Joey a visionary or just a violent sociopath with an oversized ego? Maybe both. Maybe that’s what made him dangerous. Visionaries without conscience create chaos. Joey created plenty.
He wanted to be remembered. He wanted a matter. He wanted historians to look back and say, “That guy was different.” Mission accomplished. We’re still talking about him 50 years later. But ask yourself this, would Joey be satisfied with how he’s remembered as a footnote, a curiosity, a character Bob Dylan sang about? Or would he be furious that he’s not recognized as a revolutionary he believed he was? We’ll never know.
Joey Gallow took his final thoughts to Greenwood Cemetery. What we know is what he left behind. A legend. A cautionary tale. A reminder that in the mafia, challenging tradition doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a corpse. Larry Gallow, Joey’s brother, the one who almost got strangled, saw the future before he died.
In 1968, lying in a hospital bed, dying of cancer, he told Kid Blast, “Joe is going to get killed. They’ll never forgive him. Tell him to leave. Go to California. Start over.” Kid Blast delivered the message. Joey laughed. Run! I’m not running. I’m crazy, Joe Gallow. They should be running for me. Pride is what built Joey. It’s what killed him.
The mafia in 2026 is unrecognizable compared to Joey’s era. Informants everywhere. Rico prosecutions. Shrinking memberships. Old bosses die in prison. The families that once controlled New York are shadows. The Columbbo family barely functions. The power Joey fought over doesn’t exist anymore. If Joey had survived, if he’d escaped to California, lived to 80, watched the mafia collapse, what would he think? Would he feel vindicated? Would he say, “I told you the old ways were dying.
” Or would he just be another old man, bitter, forgotten, irrelevant? Death froze Joey at 43. Forever young, forever rebellious, forever crazy Joe. Bob Dylan song and the line. Someday if God’s in heaven overlooking his preserve, I know the men that shot him down will get what they deserve. Poetic, romantic, completely wrong.
Most of the men who killed Joey live long lives. They died of old age, natural causes, surrounded by family, no divine justice, no karmic retribution, just the reality of organized crime. You win or you lose. Joey lost, but he lost spectacularly. And in a world where most mobsters die unknown, forgotten, erased by time, Joey achieved something rare.
Immortality through myth, the lion in the basement, the books in prison, the friendship with Bob Dylan, the murder on his birthday. These details elevate him. They make him memorable. They make him crazy. Joe, in the end, Joey Galla was a product of contradictions. Violent but intellectual, loyal but rebellious, traditional but revolutionary.
He contained multitudes. And the mafia couldn’t contain him, so they killed him at Ombberto’s clam house for 30 a.m. April 7th, 1972. 20 seconds. That’s how long it took to end a revolution. Joey Gallow thought he could change a mafia. He couldn’t, but he showed future generations what was possible.
multi-racial crews, challenging hierarchies, thinking beyond tradition. The idea survived even if Joey didn’t. That’s his legacy. Not the lion. Not the Dylan song. Not the celebrity friends. The idea that the rules could be rewritten. Even if trying to rewrite them got you killed. Crazy Joe Gallow lived 43 years. He spent 10 in prison. He started two mob wars.
He killed dozens. He inspired a folk song. He kept a lion. He read philosophy. He married an actress. He died eating clams. And 50 years later, we’re still trying to figure out who he really was. Maybe that’s exactly what he