PROFESSIONAL KILLERS (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Read Free Book Online

flexing his muscles and organising rigged dice games on the piers of New York. Soon he was climbing the greasy pole within the Profaci Family, one of the five divisions of the Mafia created by Lucky Luciano in 1931.
    Joseph Profaci headed the Profaci Family, a man loathed by his soldiers because of his legendary tightfistedness and his heavy taxation of family members. He ran his branch of the Mob along the lines of the old Sicilian Mafia families, levying charges and tributes from family members. Nevertheless, under Profaci, the Brooklyn-based family business prospered through its labour rackets, extortion, gambling, hijacking and loan sharking. And Profaci, of course, prospered more than most. He was a flamboyant man, smoked big cigars, drove big, black cadillacs, and bought rows of tickets to Broadway shows. He owned homes in New York and Florida and a 328-acre estate in New Jersey.
    Colombo was a well-spoken, articulate man with pots of charisma and flair, so it is no surprise that by the late 1950s he was a ‘made’ man – a full member of the Mafia family. His calm manner and gentlemanly behaviour belied his awful temper, however, and he could erupt into a terrible rage at any moment. But above all, Colombo was a survivor. After all he had survived the assassination of his father, Joe Sr.. He had been garrotted in his car, along with a lady friend, in 1928. Famously, when Joe Jr. was asked when he got to the top of the tree whether he was ever tempted to find the people responsible for his father’s murder, he replied: ‘Don’t they pay policemen for that?’
    Joe became a highly respected enforcer for Profaci, ensuring monies got paid and debts were settled. He was part of a five-man hit team, working alongside Larry and Crazy Joe Gallo, two of the Mafia’s most efficient killers. It was a team credited with at least 15 kills. ‘When you killed with the Gallo boys,’ Carl Sifakis writes in The Mafia Encyclopedia , ‘you killed with the best.’ In addition to his hit-man duties, he worked as an enforcer on the docks, before moving on to running gambling dens, hijacking, and loan-sharking. He was seen as tough, smart and supremely capable. It did not take him long to achieve the senior Mafia position of capo.
    In 1962, the unpopular Joe Profaci’s 34-year reign finally ended when he succumbed to cancer. To the disappointment of many members of the Profaci Family, especially Joey Gallo and his family of violent street thugs and enforcers, Giuseppe Magliocco, a man very much in the Profaci mould, was given control. The war with the Gallos, which had gone on during Profaci’s time, simmered on. Carmine ‘Junior’ Persico and Hugh McIntosh, two of Magliocco’s chief enforcers, survived attacks by the Gallos. And they would, undoubtedly, have gone after many more of Magliocco’s crew had 17 of them not been convicted on racketeering charges and two of them not been murdered by Magliocco’s men. Meanwhile, leader Joey Gallo sat in prison, powerless to do anything.
    So with the Gallos safely out of the way for a while at least, Magliocco could get on with running the business. Part of that business was doing a big favour for Joe Bonnano, known as ‘Joe Bananas’ and head of the Bonnano Family, another of the five divisions of the Mafia. Bonnano wanted to be capo di tutti capi , boss of bosses, and there was only one way he could achieve that; he needed to be rid of the bosses of the other three families – Carlo Gambino, Thomas Lucchese and Stefano Magadinno. There was really only one man for the job. The ever reliable and eminently capable Joe Colombo was to be entrusted with it.
    But it did not work out quite the way Bonnano had planned. What he forgot was that Joe Colombo was very close to the Gambino Family. In fact, before joining the Profaci Family, he had been employed by the Pride Meat Company run by Paul Gambino, brother of Carlo. It was through Gambino, who had taken a shine to the bright young