Who Killed Joey Gallo?

Mary Gallo grabbed her son's coffin at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and cried, "My baby, my baby son." She wailed, "Joey, why didn't you take him with you, Joey? Take Big Boy...."

It wasn't clear whom Mary Gallo was referring to. The prevailing belief about Joe Gallo's murder was that three Italian gangsters had come through the Mulberry Street door of Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy and opened fire. It was a Mob version of the shoot-out at the OK Corral. But Mary Gallo's meaning should have been clear. Joey's mother was berating her dead son for not killing his own assassin, the gunman who shot him three times in the back while Gallo was eating calamari. As his party celebrated his 43rd birthday in the small hours of April 7, 1972, Gallo became an entry on a police blotter, "Homicide GUN at 0520."

For nearly 30 years the identity of Big Boy was a mystery. Then Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran, a six-foot-four hit man, confessed to me that his godfather, Russell Bufalino, had ordered him to kill Gallo, whom Sheeran called "a fresh kid." In my 2004 book, I Heard You Paint Houses, I wrote about what Sheeran told me.

I had spent five years interviewing Sheeran, trying to understand what drove him to murder his friend and Teamsters mentor Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Sheeran confessed in passing to shooting Crazy Joey Gallo after telling me how valuable Gallo was to Bufalino. The accepted version of his death had been that Carmine "Sonny Pinto" DiBiase led two unidentified Italian gangsters through a side door of Umberto's, and they blasted away. The source for this was Mob informant Joe Luparelli. The authorities seemed to believe Luparelli, but no one was ever indicted for killing Gallo based on Luparelli's information. I've had plenty of experience as an interrogator, and I was satisfied Sheeran had told me the truth about Gallo.

Shortly after my book was published, Sheeran's account received additional support when writer Jerry Capeci corroborated that a lone gunman had shot Gallo. As a young reporter for the New York Post, Capeci said he had "spent a few hours at Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan during the early-morning hours of April 7, 1972." Capeci wrote that Al Seedman, chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, walked out of Umberto's and told reporters that all the carnage was the work of a lone gunman. The case was building for a necessary revision of an important slice of Mob history.

Then fortune brought me something extraordinary. Eric Shawn, senior correspondent with Fox News, called me to say he had discovered an eyewitness to the Gallo shooting. She was a journalist at The New York Times who wished to remain anonymous. He phoned her, and she admitted she had been at the scene and witnessed the shooting. Shawn said, "I understand three Italian types came in and started shooting." She said, "No, it was a lone gunman." He directed her attention to an Internet photo of Sheeran taken in the early 1970s, around the time of the Gallo hit. "Oh my God," she said. "I've seen this man before." Shawn immediately walked from Fox News on 47th Street to the New York Times building on West 43rd Street (continued on page 145)Joey Gallo(continued from page 69) and gave her a copy of my book.

I told Ted Feury, a friend of mine and a retired CBS executive. With a big smile Feury said, "I know her. She was the best grad student I ever had at Columbia. She's a terrific gal, very bright, a great journalist and as honest as they come. I'll call her."

The three of us had dinner at Elaine's in Manhattan. Although other journalists knew of her presence at Umberto's, the eyewitness told us she still wanted anonymity. She drew a diagram of the scene for us, indicating her table in relation to the Gallo party's. "There were a lot of shots that night," she said. "I heard those shots for a long time afterward." She confirmed that they came from a single gunman, "and he wasn't Italian, that's for sure." She flipped through a display of photos, including ones of other gangsters, and when she saw a black-and-white photo of Sheeran from the early 1970s she said, "Like I told Eric Shawn, it's been a long time, but I know this much: I've seen this man before." In answer to my question she said, "No, not from a photo in the newspaper. I've seen him in the flesh." I showed her black-and-whites of a younger Sheeran, and she said, "No, too young." An older Sheeran, "No, too old." She picked up the photo of Sheeran taken around the time of the Gallo hit and said, "This picture gives me chills."

I wanted to formally interview the eyewitness alone, show her the black-and-white photos in better lighting and play her a color video of Sheeran. The lighting at Elaine's was too dim. Because of our busy schedules, nine months would elapse before I could meet the witness at her home. I brought my photos and a video I'd made of Sheeran on September 13, 2000, when he was 79. Although he was 27 years older than he'd been at Umberto's, the footage was in color, and it was Sheeran in the flesh.

"I was 18 at the time," the eyewitness told me, "a freshman in college in Chicago. It was probably spring break, and I was with my best friend. We were visiting one of her brothers and his wife, who lived near Gracie Mansion. We'd gone to the theater and then probably drove around and did some sightseeing. None of us were drinking. We were underage, and my friend's brother and his wife didn't drink when they were out with us. We ended up at Umberto's about 20 minutes before the shooting. No way were there only seven people there besides the Gallo party, if that's what some book says. It was pretty crowded for that time of night, with people at maybe four or five tables and a couple of people sitting at the clam bar. Maybe people left after we got there and before it happened--I don't know. We came in the front door, the one on the corner of Hester and Mulberry. There were no tables to the left, on the Hester side. They were all in front of you as you walked in, between the bar on the left and the Mulberry Street wall on the right. We sat toward the back. I was facing Hester Street, and my best friend sat to my right. Her brother and his wife were opposite us. They faced the back wall and the side door off Mulberry. I remember the Gallo party to our left because of the little girl and because I thought the girl's mother was very pretty. Besides the little girl there were two or three women and two or three men. I don't remember seeing the faces of the men.

"Our seafood had just arrived when I noticed a tall man walk through the Mulberry Street door. I could see the door easily; it was just off my left shoulder. He walked on a diagonal to the bar, right in front of me, the whole way in my direct line of vision. As he walked past I remember being struck by him. I remember thinking he was distinctive--quite tall and a handsome man. He stopped at the bar, not far at all from our table. I was looking down at my plate of food when I heard the first shot. I looked up, and that same man was standing there facing the Gallo table with his back to the bar. I can't say I remember a gun in his hand, but he was definitely the one doing the shooting. There's no doubt about that. He calmly stood there while everybody else was ducking. The Gallo party didn't know what hit them.

"It was Sheeran. That man was the same man in this photo. Even the video looks more like the way he looked that night--even though he's much older in the video. It was him, I'm positive. He looks bloated and fat in the photos you showed me from 1980 but not in the video.

"My friend's brother yelled for us to get down. Other people were screaming to get down too. Besides the gunshots the thing I remember most when I was down on the tile floor was the crashing of glass. We stayed on the floor. When the shooting stopped, my friend's brother yelled, 'Let's get out of here,' and we got up and ran out the Mulberry Street door. There were a lot of others shouting, and they ran away when we did.

"We ran up Mulberry. There was nobody on Mulberry firing at any getaway car, if that's what the bodyguard claimed. Our car was parked near the police station. On the drive home we speculated about whether we had just been in a robbery or a Mob hit. Nobody wanted to stereotype Little Italy, but we thought it was Mob-related. I don't remember if we heard it on news radio on the way home, but we saw it in the papers the next day. It was pretty horrible. I think if my girlfriend and I had been there alone we might have gone back the next day, but her brother and his wife were very protective and didn't want us involved in any way."

This Gallo witness with a journalist's memory and an eye for detail, a witness who had a chance to observe before the fear set in, told me she had not read any of the stories that had cropped up over the years. She hadn't heard about the "three Italians" until Eric Shawn mentioned them. "That's ridiculous," she said. "There's no way three Italians burst through that side door on Mulberry Street and started shooting. I'd have seen them come in. If there were three men, we'd have been too scared to get up and run away. If we did get up, we wouldn't have run out that side door."

When I closed the session by asking again how sure she was that Sheeran was the man she'd seen that night, she said, "I'm positive. He's definitely the man I saw that night."

•

Why did Sheeran tell me all he told me? Within weeks of Hoffa's 1975 disappearance, the FBI placed Sheeran on its short list of eight suspects. As Sheeran's daughter, Dolores, put it to me, "The FBI spent almost 30 years scrutinizing my father's every move to get him to confess." When the FBI squeezed, Sheeran took the Fifth. Hoffa's daughter, a St. Louis judge, wrote him asking that he tell what he knew "under a vow of secrecy," but he remained silent. In 1980 the FBI took him to trial for two murders and other mayhem, but he was acquitted. In 1981 he was finally convicted of labor racketeering and given a 32-year sentence.

In 1991, when Sheeran was 70, my partner and I got the high-ranking Philadelphia mobster and Teamster out of jail 10 years early based on his arthritis and need for surgery. In 1999, when he was 78, after first getting absolution from his church, Sheeran contacted me, a former homicide prosecutor, and consented to tape-recorded interviews. Sheeran had been raised a strict Catholic. His father had studied for the priesthood. Sheeran knew his lease was short, as he put it, and he wanted to prepare for the next life. What most plagued the conscience of this man who had performed 25 to 30 hits was that his godfather, Bufalino, had forced him to kill his mentor, Hoffa.

Sheeran's lawyer, former Philadelphia DA F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, cautioned him from the outset that he would be indicted for what he confessed to me. Balancing a desire to confess and a fear of dying in jail, this stand-up guy let me dig the truth out of him. I put four men on death row with less evidence than I dug from him.

"Jimmy Hoffa," Dolores said, "was one of only two people my father cared anything about. Russell Bufalino was the other. Killing Hoffa tortured my father the rest of his life."

Sheeran told me Bufalino had asked Hoffa not to retake the Teamsters presidency after Hoffa got out of jail on a pardon from President Nixon. The Mob wanted to continue to have the free hand in the Teamsters pension fund that the puppet president, Frank Fitzsimmons, afforded them. Hoffa said no. Bufalino told Sheeran to tell his friend "what it is." In Mob talk this meant Hoffa would be killed if he persisted in his quest. "They wouldn't dare," Hoffa replied to Sheeran.

Sheeran saw this as Hoffa's ego talking. Sheeran said the Mob has a saying for those whose thinking appears distorted: "When in doubt, have no doubt." He said to me, "If I ever said no to Russell, you and I wouldn't be talking now. If I said no to Russell about Jimmy, he'd have been just as dead, and I'd have gone to Australia with him."

Sheeran had been a combat infantryman in World War II. The average number of combat days was 80; Sheeran had 411. He waded ashore in three amphibious invasions. He helped liberate Dachau. He learned to kill in cold blood on orders. "When an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and 'hurry back,' you did what you had to do," he said. The Gallo hit was more like house-to-house combat than the traditional two shots behind the ear of an unsuspecting victim by a close friend. And Sheeran was an out-of-towner, not easily recognized by the mobsters of Little Italy or known to NYPD detectives.

But why did Bufalino order Sheeran to kill Gallo? Sheeran was evasive with me on this topic. We had an understanding that he would leave things out that tended to reflect badly on others--even the dead. He never wanted anyone to call him a rat.

Though a member of the Colombo crime family, Gallo had a long-standing feud with Joe Colombo, the family's boss. Colombo had formed the Italian-American Civil Rights League, claiming Italians were a minority in need of protection. On June 28, 1971 the league held a rally at Manhattan's Columbus Circle. In front of tens of thousands of people, including Colombo's family, an assassin posing as a press photographer shot Colombo three times. The assassin was immediately shot and killed. Colombo didn't die right away. He was paralyzed and in a coma and would remain in a vegetative state for several years.

All eyes--law enforcement and Mob--were on the recently released Crazy Joey Gallo. The assassin was a black man with a long rap sheet. Only Gallo cultivated alliances among the city's black criminals. Sheeran said Bufalino and Colombo were friends. Some say the Colombo family represented Bufalino's family on the Mob's ruling commission. But clearly Bufalino was close to Colombo. Bufalino even established a chapter of Colombo's Italian-American Civil Rights League near his northeastern Pennsylvania headquarters.

April 6, 1972 was Gallo's 43rd birthday. His bride of three weeks, Sina Essary, her 10-year-old daughter, Lisa, Gallo's sister Carmella and two bodyguards--Bob "Bobby Darrow" Bongiovi and Pete "the Greek" Diapoulos--began Gallo's birthday celebration at the Copacabana nightclub. Gossip columnist Earl Wilson and his wife and secretary were there. NYPD detective Joe Coffey, author of The Coffey Files, was also at the Copa that night with his partner and their wives. They had seen Gallo come in. Coffey told me that if their wives hadn't been with them they would have tailed Gallo that night and "walked right into the jackpot."

When the Copa closed at four on the morning of April 7, Gallo urged Bobby Darrow to take Wilson's secretary home in a cab. Gallo, Diapoulos, his date Edith Russo, Carmella, Sina and Lisa got into Diapoulos's limo and headed downtown in search of a late dinner. Their first choice was Chinatown, but they ended up at Umberto's, which Genovese capo Mattie "the Horse" Ianello had recently opened.

Earlier at the Copa an incident occurred that would explain the forces that led to the Umberto's shooting. It was something I didn't know about when Sheeran was alive. I discovered it after I interviewed the New York Times journalist. As a result of what she said, I figured I should know more about the informant Luparelli's version and ordered all the books I could find on the subject. Many bordered on the silly, especially Luparelli's own book, but Diapoulos's 1978 book, The Sixth Family, was more revealing.

Sheeran had told me that the evening began when he'd gotten a call from Bufalino to go to Yonkers to meet John "the Redhead" Francis, a former IRA hit man. Francis drove Sheeran to Umberto's, dropped him off and circled the block once. If Sheeran did not come outside in a reasonable amount of time, Francis was to leave, and Sheeran would be on his own.

Sheeran described the hit, explaining he had two little brothers--guns--in his hands that night. "You wanted to do some noisy stray shooting all over the place to send the witnesses for cover," he told me. He walked in as the witness had described, stopped at the bar and first wounded Diapoulos the bodyguard in the buttocks because there was no reason to mortally wound him. Sheeran figured that Gallo, as a convicted felon, would not have a piece on him. Gallo ran from the table, either to get between Sheeran's fire and the women or simply to save himself. Sheeran followed him out the front corner door and finished him off. Francis was on the corner waiting for Sheeran.

But Sheeran never told me how he knew Gallo would be at Umberto's that night. He also hadn't told me details about Bufalino's motive. I learned the answers to both questions from one seemingly insignificant anecdote in Diapoulos's book about events at the Copa earlier that night.

"After the show we all went down to the lounge and had drinks at the round bar. The girls sat at the table talking among themselves. Champagne was still being sent over. A wiseguy named Frank sent some. He was with an old-timer, Russ Bufalino, a regular greaseball, the boss of Erie, Pennsylvania. Joey, feeling no pain with all the champagne, grinned at the button in Bufalino's lapel. It was a Colombo Numero Uno button with a diamond in it. 'Hey,' said Joey, 'what're you doing with that? You really believe in that bullshit league?' You saw how Bufalino's chin went, his back going very straight, turning away from us. Frank, with a very worried look, took Joey by the arm. 'Joey, that's nothing to talk about here. Let's just have a few drinks.' 'Yeah, we'll have a few drinks.' 'Joey, he's a boss.' 'So he's a boss. So am I a boss. That make him any better than me? We're all equal. We're all supposed to be brothers.' Brothers came out like it was anything but. 'Joey,' I said, 'Let's go to the table. Let's not have a beef.'"

A boss doesn't have a beef. The real-life Donnie Brasco, undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone, wrote in The Way of the Wiseguy, "Insulting the boss even in passing can easily get you killed." Now that we know about the insult, no doubt Sheeran called the Redhead to drive down from Yonkers with the little brothers. Together they followed Gallo to Umberto's. Retired NYPD detective Joe Coffey told me, "The Gallo hit was my case. Sheeran's confession makes the most sense of all the versions I heard, and I was the first one to interview Luparelli."

Thirty-one years later a "wiseguy named Frank" did a final taping for me, a video to serve as the signature on the audio confessions I already had. The next day the man who shot Hoffa and the "fresh kid" Gallo because they showed disrespect to Bufalino stopped eating the food on his tray. Frank Sheeran died on December 14, 2003 at the age of 83, after giving credible and corroborated confessions that finally solved the murder mysteries of Jimmy Hoffa and Crazy Joey Gallo.

"I was looking down at my plate of food when I heard the first shot. I looked up, and he was standing there."