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Scripts. Gallo kept telling his newfound friends that he had gone straight. He told Celebrity Columnist Earl Wilson: "I'll never go back there—I think there is nothing out there for me but death." Police insist that Gallo was gulling others; that he actually was as much involved in the rackets as ever.
The truth seems to be that Gallo was leading a schizophrenic life in those last days: a steel-tough gunman in racket circles; a philosophic, warm conversationalist outside the Mob. Whether he was really at home in both roles, or just a good actor, he was clearly convincing. Actress Joan Hackett found him fascinating well before she knew of his Mafia connections. "I liked him completely apart from any grotesque glamorization of the underworld," she recalls. "I thought his attempt to leave that life was genuine. He was the brightest person I've ever known." But Gallo also conceded that "I'll never make it in the straight world."
With the slaying of two other lesser mobsters in New York last week, full gang warfare seemed imminent. The new image of Mafiosi as softspoken, smart-dressing businessmen, who shun such crudities as murder and torture as oldfashioned, seemed to be fading. Perhaps the Mob was taking those gory movie scripts about itself too seriously. At any rate, it was exposing the cruelty and ruthlessness of racketeering. Offscreen, murder is brutally final. Indeed, Gallo did not like parts of The Godfather. He told a friend that he thought the death scenes seemed "too flashy."