The police investigation of the murder of Gino E. Gallina, a former assistant disrict attorney in Manhattan concentrated yesterday on the questioning of organizedâ€crime figures.
Mr. Gallina was snot to death by a lone gunman Thursday night on a street in Greenwich Village, and a 27â€yearâ€old woman acquaintance with him was wounded slightly. Many passersâ€by witnessed the slaying. The police said they Were withholding the identity of the woman because she was a potential witness.
The police said that a number of underworld figures were prime suspects because Mr. Galling had been the lawyer of some of the alleged kingpins of crime.
“He was known to us as a mob lawyer,†a Federal prosecutor said yesterday. “We figured it would only be a matter of time before some disgruntled client would kill him. He had an extensive clientele of organizedâ€crime big shots.â€
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The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robort R. Fiske Jr., said last night that Mr. Gallina had visited Mr. Fiske's office at 1 St. Andrews Plaza, in Manhattan, on the day of the slaying.
Reached at his home. Mr. Fiske declared, “He was there, but he was there with a client.â€
Mr. Fiske declined to identify the client or to say what business had brought Mr. Gallina to the government office only hours before his death.
Mr. Gallina, 42 years old, was ‘ shot eight times as be stepped froin his car With the woman on Carmine Street near Varick Street.
Homicide detectives denied a report that Mr. Gallina was “wired'—fitted with a radio transmitter—when found lying on the ground. Federal officials also denied a report that he had been working secretly for them.
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Mr. Gallina had worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's office from 1965 to 1969. He was named but not indicted as, a coâ€conspirator in a 1975 narcotics trial in Federal Court here. A Government affidavit charged that he had been involved “in a corrupt scheme to obtain narcotics money.â€
One of Mr. Gallina's clients was Frank Lucas, reputed to be a major narcotics dealer, who is now serving prison sentences totaling 70 years on two narcotics convictions.
Mr. Gallina lived with his wife and three children in Pelham Manor in West Chester County