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Soon after the shooting, telephoned threats were received that a man was going to "machine-gun the whole family." Colombo's wife Lucille and sons, Anthony, 26, Joseph Jr., 24, and Vincent, 21, quickly converted a second-floor waiting room into a battle center. Within hours, Roosevelt Hospital took on the look of a grim, almost surrealistic parody of a Godfatheresque scene from Mario Puzo's bestselling novel.
In the book, Godfather Vito Corleone is shot down in the street by members of a rival Mafia family but survives, hovering near death. To guard against a feared second attack, his family stations private detectives and trusted caporegimes (lieutenants) throughout the hospital where he is recuperating. If anything, Colombo security within Roosevelt Hospital was even tighter, despite the presence of uniformed and plain-clothes New York City policemen.
At the hospital's entrances, small groups of outsize, burly men, wearing tiny green-and-red Italian-American League pins, nervously watched the streets, quickly sizing up each approaching pedestrian. "You watch this stairway," one bull-necked "captain" instructed a younger man. "If somebody goes into the hallway, you follow him. If he gets in the elevator, you get in with him. And if he gets off at the floor, you tell him he can't go no further."
Inside the hospital, caporegimes and "button men," or soldiers, the lowest-ranking Mafia family members, prowled the corridors near Colombo's room. No one was allowed near the room without the O.K. of Vincent ("Vinnie")
Vingo, a Colombo family loan shark with a fearsome reputation for violence.
Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., his wife, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, who recently concluded an alliance between his militant Jewish Defense League and Colombo's league, were among the few nonfamily members to pass Vingo's muster. Davis, who emerged from the hospital grim and tight-lipped after visiting with the Colombo family, refused to comment on the shooting, saying only that Colombo has "our prayers."
The Traditional Mafia Way The brotherhood that is the Mafia has always operated in secrecy. Sworn to an omertd — the oath of silence — in a ceremony of blood and fire, the old-line Mafiosi cultivated their anonymity as the first line of defense against ar rest and prosecution. Despite the publicity caused by Prohibition gangland wars, the Mafia was still able to maintain a cloak of secrecy around its activities. Behind this shield, Mafia leaders gained control of gambling and narcotics, some labor unions and legitimate businesses. When the first systematic crackdowns by law-enforcement agencies started ten years ago, the bosses deemed their facelessness more important than ever.