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While homicide is as old as Cain, Mafia killings have a style all their own. They are the blood-feud eruptions of one of the nation's strangest and most powerful subcultures, and are carried out with an almost ritual quality. They are unlike fatal quarrels of husband and wife, random slaughter in delicatessen holdups and bar brawls, and the other killings that constitute the vast majority of murders in the U.S. Instead, the Mafia practices a drama of implacable tribal will: just as Clausewitz defined war as foreign policy by other means, La Cosa Nostra regards murder as an instrument of business—often conducted with a vengeance. The peculiar vogue that the Mafia is now enjoying in films and books may spring from a kind of stylish atavism that Americans recognize in a brute feudal system that allows swift retribution with no red tape. In part, it simply appeals to the antibureaucratic impulse, the secret instinct that things can be "fixed," even in satisfyingly violent ways. For the moment, many still find the Mob romantically sinister and enterprising, but the popular infatuation may fade now that the bodies are real.
In some ways it was ironic that the bloodletting should erupt now. Until last summer, many Americans were half-persuaded that the Mafia was chimerical. In New York, Mobster Joseph Colombo organized the Italian-American Civil Rights League, using many law-abiding Italian-Americans as a shield for the Syndicate. The Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, the league argued, were anti-Italian figments of the FBI'S imagination. Colombo even succeeded in embarrassing the producer of The Godfather into deleting the two names from the script. Then, at a "Unity Day" celebration in Manhattan's Columbus Circle last June, a black gunman named Jerome Johnson pumped three 7.65-mm. slugs into Colombo. Johnson himself was immediately killed by a Colombo bodyguard. Colombo survived, although he is paralyzed and said to be virtually "a vegetable." To its acute discomfort, the Mafia, which flourishes best in secrecy, found itself awash in the same kind of publicity that followed the 1957 summit meeting in Apalachin, N.Y., where 60 chieftains from across the nation were arrested.
Kid Blast. On the surface, the present warfare is a feud between Joe Colombo and Joe Gallo forces. After Colombo was hit last summer, the word passed through the underworld that the Gallos were behind it. The fact that the gunman was black seemed fo confirm the theory; when "Crazy Joe" was in New York's Attica prison for extortion, he allied himself with black prisoners and once organized a protest against white prison barbers who refused to cut blacks' hair. After he got out early last year, Gallo said he wanted to bring blacks into the Syndicate, an idea that infuriated older Mafiosi. La Cosa Nostra, after all, is the most exclusive men's club in the world.