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When Galante got that fearful word, he was in the Metropolitan Correction Center. He soon learned that killers from two families were trying to get him: triggermen who worked for Dellacroce and others who belonged to the Colombo family, a clan that after a decade of internal struggle is trying to regain other mobsters' regard—and Dellacroce's thanks—by eliminating his rival. Knowing how easily he could be assassinated in prison, Galante arranged to have his bodyguards take up their nighttime baby-sitting beside his cell.
In what appears to have been a routine transfer, Galante was sent in late September to the medium-security federal prison at Danbury, Conn. Once again the armed men turned up at Lillo's bedside to tuck him in and stand guard. But also tracking Galante was a skilled Colombo family hit man, Carmine ("the Snake") Persico. Serving a 14-year sentence in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta for hijacking, the Snake somehow managed to get himself transferred to Danbury. But during the trip north, he was held briefly at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison and was visited there by another Colombo gangster. Federal authorities interpreted the meeting as a sign that something was afoot and detained Persico in Lewisburg.
Meanwhile, Dellacroce dispatched hit teams of his own toward Danbury. Federal officials learned about them from wiretaps that revealed talk among mobsters about the contract on Galante. Belatedly, Morris Kuznesof, chief federal probation officer in Manhattan, wrote Danbury Warden Raymond Nelson that he had received information "from a highly reliable source that an attempt to murder Mr. Galante will be made at your institution." Nelson slapped Galante into solitary confinement "for his own protection." But Lillo apparently prefers to rely on his own security arrangements, without the feds' help. Contending the plots to kill him were fictitious and that the Government was trying to harass the prisoner, his attorney, Roy Cohn,* has asked a federal judge to release Galante from "the hole."
In solitary, Lillo eats alone, exercises under guard in isolated areas and is kept away from other convicts. Even so, he has developed a bad case of the shakes. He is suspicious of his guards and does not even dare turn for comfort to the prison chaplain. One reason is omerta, the Mafia oath of silence. Another is the fact that Dellacroce, in one of his favorite disguises, likes to don a clerical collar and go about as "Father O'Neill" (a play on a common mispronunciation of his first name). Lillo has no yearning for the last rites, least of all as administered by the Little Lamb.
* Cohn, who became known nationally for his televised role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel in the 1953 Army-McCarthy hearings, now occasionally represents mobsters in court.