The would-be godfather is afraid of being killed
Night after night, just before bedtime for federal prisoners, two Mafia triggermen walked up to the modern twelve-story Metropolitan Correction Center near New York's city hall. With unidentified inside help, locked doors opened mysteriously for the gunmen, who took up positions in the hall outside one particular cell. Tossing restlessly on the hard pallet behind the bars was chunky Carmine ("Lillo") Galante, 68, who once aspired to become the Mafia's capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses). As lights dimmed in the cell block, the two armed men settled down for a nightlong vigil. Their assignment: to keep other mobsters from putting Lillo to sleep forever.
The extraordinary nocturnal sentry duty by Galante's bodyguards demonstrates both the Mafia's remarkable influence inside U.S. prisons and the fact that there is no rest for a mobster who strives to become godfather and fails. Sooner or later a rival will try to put him out of the running, permanently.
After the Mob's last overlord, Carlo Gambino, died of natural causes in 1976, New York's Galante strutted about the streets as though he were the anointed successor. Despite much press attention, the longtime bootlegger, drug king, racketeer and killer never reached the top. Law enforcement officials figure that Lillo now will be lucky just to keep on living and that his best chance of doing so rests upon protection from federal agents—the hated enemies who have kept him locked up for more than 20 years, one-third of his life.
The threats to Galante grew out of incessant rivalry among the five Mafia clans based in New York City, where the most powerful don is usually looked on by Mafiosi elsewhere in the U.S. as the capo with the most respect.
Galante began gunning for the top spot soon after becoming head of the Mafia family once run by Joseph ("Joe Bananas") Bonanno, who now lives in Tucson, Ariz. Galante was immediately challenged by Aniello Dellacroce (translation: Little Lamb of the Cross), who is one of the Mob's most feared executioners and longtime second in command to Carlo Gambino. The wily Dellacroce, 63, paid his respects to Gambino's memory by letting the late capo's brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, remain titular head of the family, while Dellacroce was elevated to the Mafia's ruling commission last summer. He emerged as the most powerful U.S. mobster.
As the feud between Galante and Dellacroce turned bloody, more than a score of their soldiers were slain. Then federal authorities revoked Galante's parole last spring from an earlier 15-year narcotics sentence on the unassailable grounds that he had been "associating with known criminals." At Dellacroce's urging, the Mafia commission in September not only decreed that Galante no longer headed the Bonanno family but let out a contract on his life.