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By the time Joey was 21, he was in trouble with the law, and a court-appointed psychiatrist found him insane. Other mobsters started calling him "Crazy Joe" but never to his face. He was too mean. Joey took pleasure in breaking the arm of one of his clients who was sluggish about paying protection money. He punctured an enemy with ice picks. He had gained his status by serving as one member (Colombo was another) of a five-man execution squad of Mafia Boss Joe Profaci in the late '50s. Police claim they had scored 40 hits. By then he and his brothers had carved out a chunk of the Brooklyn rackets; they turned against Profaci, touching off a gang war in which nine mobsters died and three disappeared.
Over the years, Gallo developed a wise-guy kind of humor that led some naive acquaintances to consider him a sort of folk hero. He was summoned to Robert Kennedy's office in 1959 when Kennedy was counsel to a Senate rackets investigating committee, looked at the rug and said, "Hey, this would be a great spot for a crap game." He once told a courtroom: "The cops say I've been picked up 15, maybe 17 times. That's junk. It was 150 times. I been worked over for nothing until my hat sits on my head like it belongs on a midget." Someone in 1961 overheard him trying to shake down a Brooklyn restaurant owner for a share of the profits. The proprietor asked for time to think about it. "Sure," said Gallo, "take three months in the hospital on me."
That quip cost Gallo nine years for extortion. In Attica state prison, Gallo earned a reputation as a civil rights leader of sorts. He helped lead an inmate drive to force white prison barbers to cut the hair of blacks; he had his own hair cut by a black barber to show his lack of prejudice. Actually, his motive seemed to be to recruit black toughs for his gang. When he got out of prison in March of 1971, he began hiring blacks as "button men" (musclemen)—pricking the ethnic sensibilities of other Mafiosi. He had openly toured Little Italy with four black henchmen a few days before he was hit. Some officials think that may have hastened execution of the contract.
Hearty Hood. Gallo's defiance of Mafia tradition did not mark him as particularly savvy. Neither did his open claim that he was about to write his memoirs. Other gangsters do not appreciate such literature. There was, for example, a $100,000 contract—for his death, not his papers—out on Joseph Valachi, who wrote in detail of his life with the Mob (he died of natural causes in prison). But Author Marta Curro, the wife of Actor Jerry Orbach, eagerly agreed to help write the book because she had discovered that Joey was "a great person, brilliant, absolutely charming" (see box, page 22).
It was at the Orbach apartment that Gallo married Sina Essary, a dental assistant he had met eleven years ago, before he went to jail. He and his first wife Jeffie Lee were divorced a few months ago. Joey and Sina, whose young daughter opened in the Broadway play Voices last week, soon became a part of the theatergoing, nightclubbing celebrity set. Crazy Joe, the killer, had become Pal Joey, the hearty hood. That, too, did not go down well with various godfathers.