RARELY has there been such a bizarrely precise intersection of fantasy and brutal reality. In half a dozen Manhattan theaters one morning last week, projectors were unreeling the mustily violent world of The Godfather, the Mafia wars of 1945-55. While Paramount's actors did their impersonations of caporegimes and button men in supposedly archaic rites of murder, the bright black Cadillacs were nosing up to the curb outside Guide's funeral home in Brooklyn.
The scene there had an authenticity that was almost theatrical. From the brownstones along Clinton Avenue, old women stared in black shawls. Men in working clothes muttered to one another in Old World accents. Inside, under a lithograph of Christ, rested a $5,000 burnished bronze casket festooned with flowers and surrounded by heavy, silently angry men and weeping women. Within it lay Joey Gallo, assassinated three days before as he celebrated his 43rd birthday in a Lower East Side clam house called Umbertos (TIME, April 17). His mother keened: "My Joey! What did they do to my Joey!"
It was not strictly a Mob funeral in the old style—nothing to compare with the opulent rites for, say, New Jersey Racketeer Willie Moretti after he was executed in 1951. No ambassadors came from the other New York Mafia families, but they had their reasons for staying away—too many police and reporters, and war in the air. The cortege, led part of the way by a police car with a flashing dome light, slowly toured Gallo's old President Street neighborhood, then drove to Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery. Police and federal agents were among the spectators. An unusually large number of gravediggers and an out-of-place olive-drab telephone van were on hand. The mourners filed by, dropping single roses onto the casket and crying: "Take him, Big Boy! You've got him now, Big Boy!" Big Boy meant God.
In its baroque atmospherics, the Gallo assassination was more than merely an episode of gangster nostalgia. As Gallo lay in his open casket, his face a mask of mortuary prettification, his sister Carmella promised: "The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey." Within the space of six days, a total of five other bodies turned up, and the word was around that three more executions had been approved by the family of New York Mafia Overlord Carlo Gambino.
Blood Feud. More ominously, the Gallo and Colombo gangs last week officially declared war. The two clans "went to the mattresses"—the Mob's term for consolidating forces in fortified hideouts, hauling in mattresses for a long siege and sleeping on them for the duration. It was the most bitter gang conflict in a decade, and could become the bloodiest campaign since the savage Castellammarese war* in 1930-31, when scores of Mafiosi killed off one another in the streets across the country.