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For nearly a week, police investigators could establish no direct connection between Jerome Johnson and the Mafia. By week's end they had settled on the theory that Johnson had been chosen precisely because such a connection was difficult to prove. Johnson, police asserted, was a hired killer who had been silenced by a second triggerman at the rally. Colombo associates meanwhile continued to insist that the murder attempt was an isolated attack. "It seems like shooting civil rights leaders is 'in' in recent years," explained a league official.
The Colombo family's public pronouncements constituted a weak, improbable case. As Colombo lay in a coma, Mafia and law-enforcement officials awaited developments in what was certainly the opening round of a new Mob conflict. In the past, the emergence of a boss of bosses like Gambino has usually resulted in a war. The modern Mafia was reorganized in the 1930s, and the Commission was established after bloody battles to curb the power of a single leader. Gambino's assertion of leadership—quite apart from the Colombo family's need for revenge—makes it possible that a full-scale battle may erupt. Beyond doubt, the attempt to murder Joe Colombo has profoundly affected the Cosa Nostra. Gallo blocked off the street where he lives the night after the attack, and that same night, only twelve hours after Jerome Johnson fired three bullets into Colombo, business in a small Italian restaurant outside New York City began to pick up. A group of well-dressed men sat around tables near the kitchen having a late-evening snack and coffee. They chatted for an hour, then left. For the first time in years, the Mafia's high Commission had been driven out of the anonymity of phone booths and into a public meeting. Unwilling though they might have been to admit it, the new-style leader Colombo had forced them into the oldest of their ways.