A discussion in another thread led me to take a second look at the famous shooting of Joe Columbo at his Italian American Civil Rights League rally in NYC in 1971.

As we know, Columbo was shot and permanently incapacitated by Jerome Johnson, a two-bit street hustler posing as a news cameraman. Johnson was wrestled to the ground and shot dead in the melee afterward. NYPD initially said the shooting was a harbinger of a Mob war for control of the League’s fat treasury. While NYPD didn’t say so explicitly, news media pointed the finger of suspicion at Crazy Joe Gallo, who had been released from prison that year and resumed a long-running feud with Columbo over grievances dating back more than a decade. Gallo had befriended blacks and Hispanics in prison and recruited them for his rackets when he was released. Johnson was black, making a further link with Gallo.

But after Gallo was assassinated less than a year later, NYPD and the media began to change their tune: Johnson acted alone. No “Mob war” broke out for control of the League and its treasury because the shooting had definitively exposed Columbo as a Don, and the League as a Mafia front. The League and its treasury soon stalled. The Mob had always used professional killers for high-level hits. Why would they use a small-time grifter, armed with a puny WWI-vintage pistol, to whack a Don? And, given the Mob’s historic antipathy to African-Americans, why a black assassin? Gallo was nowhere near the scene of the shooting. And, he was by then, too small-time to have taken over either the Columbo family or the League. So, Johnson was one of the many marginalized American psychos seeking their fifteen minutes of fame by killing or attempting to kill celebrities.

More recently, the finger of suspicion pointed at Carlo Gambino. He had made Columbo a Don after Columbo ratted out a plot against Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. But Columbo’s ultra-high-profile activities on behalf of his League were antithetical to everything Gambino believed. So, the theory goes, Don Carlo giveth, Don Carlo taketh away…

Two facts I dimly remember from contemporary accounts lead me to pose two other theories about the Gallo shooting. The two facts:

First, Columbo formed the League after his son, Joe Jr., was arrested and prosecuted by the Feds in a bizarre currency scheme. The government had recently decontrolled the price of silver, which immediately soared. Columbo Jr.’s racket—melting down the coins for their bullion value, which was much higher than the coins’ face value—was a Federal offense. And Columbo Sr. was appealing a perjury conviction y for lying on his application for a real estate license (his “legitimate” front). Columbo Sr. called the prosecutions “harassment of Italian-Americans” who were unfairly linked to a “non-existent Mafia.” Then he formed the League so he could turn out hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people to picket the FBI, the New York Times and other news outlets in an attempt to get the charges against his son reduced or dismissed.

Second, Jerome Johnson got close to Columbo by carrying press credentials and an expensive, professional-grade Bolex movie camera. He was accompanied by an attractive female. When she called out, “Hi, Joe,” Columbo turned toward her—setting up Johnson’s three shots to his head. Johnson was immediately tackled by a mélange of NYPD cops on guard duty and Columbo bodyguards. He was shot three times and killed in the pileup. A weapon was recovered, but its owner was never identified. No one was arrested or questioned about Johnson’s killing. The woman simply walked away and disappeared into the crowd.

Now for the two theories:

NYPD did it. Reason: The police Mob Squad, bridling over Columbo’s celebrity and the way the League’s activities were trying to portray the cops as “anti-Italian,” wanted a quick end to both Joe and the League. They were familiar with Johnson and his psycho personality from his arrests. They had the wherewithal to issue his press credentials, and to equip him with the expensive camera. A police conspirator was primed to spot Johnson, keep his gun at the ready, and to shoot Johnson immediately after Columbo was hit. The cop dumped his gun in the ensuing pileup. Other cops let the woman walk.

A faction in the Columbo family did it. Reason: Their livelihoods were hurting. The League’s and Columbo’s high profiles brought intense media and law enforcement scrutiny of Mafia activities. Mob guys found it harder and harder to operate as easily and openly as they did before. What’s more, Columbo’s allegations that there was no such thing as the Mafia weakened the fear factor that enabled Mob guys to shake down victims. And, while their earnings were suffering, Columbo was benefiting from a League that he had formed to both line his pockets and to get him and his son off the hook for dumb-ass crimes they’d committed. So, plenty of people within the Columbo family had good reason to resent Joe. They knew that Gallo was making problems for Columbo, and might try to make a move on the family after his death. They recruited an African-American shooter to point the finger at Gallo and to justify getting rid of a potential thorn in their side. One of the Columbo family conspirators acting as a bodyguard that day was primed to shoot Johnson and dump the weapon. Who led the Columbo conspirators? No one will ever know, but Carmine (the Snake) Persico and his crew assumed de facto control of the family during the nearly seven years that Columbo lingered in a vegetative state. Persico later became the official Don.

Gambino can’t be ruled out. But I’m more and more doubtful. Gambino made Columbo a Don, and was his mentor. If he didn’t like what his protégé was doing, he could have called him on the carpet and ordered him to stop. Or, the all-powerful Gambino could have had the Commission force Columbo to step down as Don, as he had Joe Magliocco in ’63, in the move that elevated Columbo. There’s evidence that Gambino may have supported the League. Columbo soldier Rocco Miraglia was arrested in 1970, and police found in his briefcase a list of contributors to the League. One entry read: “Carl 30,000.” Columbo testified before a grand jury that the entry represented $30,000 raised by Carlo Gambino.
But the most compelling reason is that Gambino was too careful to leave the loose ends that resulted from the shooting. Gambino was a nonpareil strategist and long-range schemer. He spent five patient years engineering the breakup of the Bonanno/Profaci/Magliocco alliance that resulted in his being able to install Columbo as his ally as head of a formerly hostile family. If he wanted Columbo out, he first would have selected a successor who’d be loyal to him—he wouldn’t have left a messy, unresolved succession in the Columbo family.

Your views? Any other theories?