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Until Joe Colombo burst into headlines more than a year ago, the pattern of silence had never been broken. In an America now angrily aware of the Cosa Nostra, Colombo wanted to return to the omerta of turn-of-the-century Little Italys, where Mafia was a whispered word and bosses were not bad gered by grand juries, tax investigators and wiretaps. To accomplish his goal, Colombo tapped deepseated, legitimate grievances among Italian Americans and — shocking editorial writers and Mob capos alike—jumped into press conferences and picket lines. He sought to make Cosa Nostra private once more by turning any derision of Italian Americans—Mafiosi or not—into a cause for public censure. It was a radical notion that more traditional Mafia leaders could not have imagined and, in the end, could not countenance.
Ironically, Colombo's deviation from old-line Mafia methods resulted from his adherence to the traditional code of family loyalty (see box, page 21). When his son Joseph Jr. was arrested in April 1970 on a charge of melting coins into silver ingots, Colombo acted at once. He took the usual steps of putting up bail and hiring a top lawyer to look for irregularities and loopholes. Then he did something new. He began picketing the FBI, claiming that he and his family were being harassed. After several months of daily demonstrations, the Italian-American Civil Rights League was formed.
The league's first major action was to sponsor Italian-American Unity Day last year. The rally conspicuously closed stores in neighborhoods controlled by the Mafia; New York's waterfront was virtually shut down when many longshoremen took the day off for the ethnic celebration, and almost every politician in the city joined the 50,000 celebrants in Columbus Circle. Nelson Rockefeller was offered honorary league membership and accepted.
Not only did the league persuade the Justice Department and some moviemakers to ban the term Mafia, but its campaign against corporations that used Italian stereotypes in their advertising led to cancellation of television commercials, including a prizewinning Alka-Seltzer ad, "Spicy Meatballs." The Ford Motor Co. assured the league that in television series it sponsored the FBI would not track down criminals belonging to something called the Mafia. Plans for a $3.5 million hospital were announced; recently the league set up a children's summer camp. A year after the first pickets marched in front of FBI headquarters, Colombo was honored as league man-of-the-year. Thirteen hundred people came to the dinner marking his "undying devotion to the Italian-American people and all humanitarian causes."
There were articles in magazines (TIME, April 5) and newspapers on Colombo; a lengthy story in a recent issue of New York analyzed Colombo's role as a catalyst for ethnic pride and an influence in New York City politics. To some observers, Colombo appeared to change as a result of the heady publicity: he started to view himself as a civil rights leader just as misunderstood by cops in New York as black leaders were by rural sheriffs in the South. Each of his successes—and some were formidable, even laudable—underscored his determination. But those same successes were writing his own contract.
Blacks v. the Mob