As he reached the group, he whipped out two guns and emptied them at the five men. Two went down dead and two were seriously wounded. When the smoke cleared the man was gone, the Colombo soldiers were still sitting at their tables with their mouths open, the fusillade meant for them had been directed at the wrong people. Police later learned that the Gallos had imported a hit man from the West Coast to kill as many Colombo soldiers as he could. But he did not know what they looked like. His spotter had simply said they were sitting at the bar. The murders of the innocents created a massive, City Hall-driven police action against the mob, but as usual it was more wind than substance.

The killings continued and on March 11, 1973, two men murdered Sam Wuack, the manager of the Broadway Pub on 45th Street, Manhattan. However, due to the evidence of a courageous cocktail waitress, the police were able to identify and arrest one of the killers, Robert Bongiovi, one of Crazy Joe�s former bodyguards. He became one of the first mobsters convicted of murder in New York in almost a decade. Interestingly enough, Bongiovi had been with Crazy Joe the night he had been killed, but had gone off before Joe and his party visited Umberto�s. Another interesting fact that emerged was that Matty "The Horse' Ianello, the Genovese capo who owned Umberto�s, also owned the Broadway Pub. It was assumed that Bongiovi hunting Matty, believing he had set up Crazy Joe, and failing to find him, killed Wuyak as second choice. Bongiovi, who was 36 when he went to prison, would have been eligible for parole in 1998.

With the second Gallo war petering out, it was essential to get some stability back into the family. By 1973, Vincent Aloi was under attack from the Justice Department and, in December of that year, was found guilty on perjury and conspiracy charges and went off to prison. Carmine Persico was also in prison at this time and his brother Alphonse served for a time as acting boss. It was then decided to appoint Thomas DiBella to head up the family, although it has always been accepted that Carmine Persico was pulling the strings from inside prison. DiBella was a man in his seventies, a true old time mafioso who had been part of the family under Profaci, serving faithfully and controlling union and dockside activities, without treading on any toes for 55 years. Those qualities, plus his age, got him into the seat of power. Persico knew by the time he came out of the federal pen, DiBella would be happy enough to step aside without contesting the handover of power.

As the seventies were drawing to a close, Carmine Persico was back in the boxseat, but he only had a few good years left to make the most of it.

Born in 1937, Carmine came from Brooklyn, where his father Carmine, Sr. scammed his way through life as a soldier in the Genovese family. Known as "Jr." on the streets to his friends and "Snake" to his enemies, he became the leader of a group of young thugs and terrorists called the Garfield Boys. He reputedly killed his first victim at the age of 17 and was supposedly skilled in street fighting and shakedown tactics. However, reporter Pete Hamill, who grew up at the same time and in the same neighborhood as Jr. remembers him differently. "Jr. wasn�t very good with his hand�s�But if 3 other guys were holding you, he was devastating."

Persico allegedly admitted to one friend that he had been one of the shooters on the Anastasia murder in 1957. He had a passionate hatred for cops and was involved in the beating of one and the shooting of another.

When a youngster, he allegedly killed a man. Before he could be convicted on the testimony of a state witness known only as "The Blue Angel," his older brother Alphonse confessed to the murder and went to prison for 18 years. As long as "Ally Boy" and the Snake were out of prison they were inseparable, the Mutt and Jeff of the Colombo family. Among his many claims to fame, or infamy, Carmine once appeared on the FBI�s Most Wanted List, one of the very few mafiosi ever to do so.

Small in stature, scrawny and ugly in appearance, one hand was twisted from a bullet wound; he had also been shot in the face during the first Gallo Wars. The incident, that went down in mob lore had him and a partner in crime, Alphonse D�Ambrosia, sitting is a car as a group of Gallo hoods drove by shooting at them with a M-1 carbine. Ambrosia was shot in the chest and the Snake got one in the face, but spat the bullet out and then drove them both to hospital. It was Carmine, allegedly, who was busy garrotting Larry Gallo when the curious cop walked into the bar.

His tenure as boss of the Colombos was marked by his troubles with the law. Of his first thirteen years in the seat, he spent ten of them in prison. When he was out of prison, he operated the family out of the Diplomat Social Club, on the corner of 3rd Avenue and Carroll Street in the Van Brunt district of Brooklyn. Social clubs were and are a singular phenomenon of organized crime.

By the very nature of their activity, hoodlums find it difficult, mainly because of continuing surveillance by law enforcement, to meet socially. They are wary of using telephones and will usually never commit anything to paper. But, in New York in particular, they operate in a whirlpool of overlapping territorial arenas, often contested by a multitude of conflicting opportunists. Somehow all of the activities of gang members have to be coordinated, and disputes resolved, if the different families are to coexist in peace and harmony. The social clubs act as conduits to help smooth out and resolve these problems by allowing criminals to meet and talk to each other, without fear of being overheard. They are also a meeting place for members and associates to scope out new jobs, organize, and transfer money and often drugs. Outstanding loan shark payments are made and, of course, bosses can pass on instructions to their subordinates within the safety of these buildings.

The Diplomat was typical of the format and layout to be found in dozens of similar clubs across New York. It had double doors to the entrance and three windows fronting on to the street. Forty feet wide and eighty feet deep, it contained a large L shaped bar, arcade-type gambling machines, a cigarette machine and a jukebox. At the back of the room, opposite the entrance, were a bathroom and a kitchen. To the front were booths and, throughout the rest of the room, tables and chairs were scattered at random.
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