Of course, just look at Greg Scarpa and Whitey Bulger.

Ok so. Lefty Rosenthal who was an FBI Informant said that Frank Schweis murdered Roselli and Nick Calabrese said he got the silencer and gun for the Giancana hit and that the Lapietra brothers did it... your putting misinformation out there. Your supposed to be an expert on the subject but your just making up conjecture.... and as for Colombo, Gambino has a 1.2 million dollar motive and Chubby in front of Mike Franseze and others shot Jerome Johnson...

For the record, I don't think Colombo was whacked over any debt, that sounds like smoke and mirrors. If he was whacked by the mob, I'm sticking with the "he wouldn't back away from the League and was bringing too much heat" theory.

I respectfully disagree the government had anything to do with Columbo being killed. There is absolutely no way after all this time that had the government had anything to do with that killing and a few of the others that no credible person with knowledge would not come out and announce it. not in this day and age of the narcissism running rampant on social media nd T.V....NO WAY. Two informant's in particular come to mind I think would've come out M. Franzese and Sammy the Bull with information about it if true. Just zero chance anyone around with information would keep any of it to them selves. It was a mob hit all the way.

I'm not so sure, but I'm leaning more towards it was a mob hit. On the other hand, it's very suspicious that there wasn't a thorough investigation into who masterminded the assassination. And that's exactly what it was, an assassination, life as a vegetable isn't life, IMO he was killed that day. And how come no thorough investigation into Johnson's killer? According to the law, murder is murder even if the victim is a mob boss. It reminds me of the killings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, absolutely no one serving any time and those killings occurred in the 1990s. If they were street gang murders, then the gangbangers involved would be serving life right now. The fact that they're still unsolved has GOVERNMENT written all over it. Very strange to say the least.

I don't think it was a mob hit. Too many inconsistencies even in Scarpa's information. And everything Bronx said above makes 100 percent complete sense. If it was a mob hit, this is not how it would've been done. IMO ~LisaB

I'll listen to anyone who provides a valid point to counter my thoughts written. I'm not married to the idea it was Gallo, if I can be convinced otherwise. At this time, I just don't believe in a government conspiracy. I do believe in a mafia conspiracy, Gallo, Gambino's and Genovese's.

opinions on this question...why there on that day? mob knows how to kill and not jeapodize shooters.why there

it was a double murder day ..two hits..

another question, the plotters, if the mafia did it ,did they talk to each other and say, well there will be maybe a 100 l.e. guys there, maybe right next to joe, do they now starting killing cops besides those two targets? i was at the first rally ,shoulder to shoulder people. not conducive for a calculated mob hit. sounds alot like a r.f.k. hit pretty similar

I too believe that it was a Mob hit,approved by Gambino and Genovese Families. From what I heard,a lot of the local merchants and League supporters were informed that their presence at the rally would not be necessary. I believe that the reason they picked Mr. Johnson was pretty simple. They wanted a hitman that would never be connected to the Mob. After all. the agenda of organized crime is to downplay the Mafia's existence. So who better than a member of an ethnic group that would never be in the Mob. Could have just as easily been an Asian or an Indian.

For sure, but in those days, pre-RICO, mafia bosses were pretty untouchable from law enforcement.

And why the passive approach by the FBI after the fact?

Bingo Hollander! I completely agree. with your comment below as well

Don't take this as a smart assed comment, but the answer to this question is Joe Colombo.

He got himself killed by trying to become the Italian equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The others were never going to put up with it.

It was driven by Gambino, doubtless with the blessing of at least Lucchese but most likely the tacit approval of the other two as well.

I have to disagree, almost all of them were sent to prison. Vito Genovese, Carmine Trumanti, Luciano, Catena, Capone, Perscio did time before Rico, and that his leaving out underbosses and others.

Everything points to the FBI and Police, if Gambino or anyone else was involved, why were they never charged? Greg Scarpa was right there, and he was secretly working with the FBI at the time. As was by stated by another person earlier, the police and FBI were all over the place and had nothing to offer afterwards. I looked through old news clippings once, and the Gambino and Joe Gallo rumors were put out by LE as soon as Columbo was shot. News stories with "Leaks" from LE said they had all sorts of information linking various others as behind the shooting. Yet no hard facts were ever presented, no indictments handed down.

Jerome Johnson was found with blank checks from Joseph Brocchini in his room
when police searched it. Do you think that could be important?

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/21/...lice-gains-indictment-of-18-here-on.html

My first reaction after reading that is that it sounds incredibly fishy. Why would someone give him blank checks? If he was paid to kill Colombo, they wouldn't be paying him in blank checks...talk about leaving a trail.... But did the cops ever find out why there were blank checks in his room? Or was it just another lead they let fade away? Or was this just another bogus rumor to cover their butts?

Maybe Other Guy can chime in....I can't remember Brocchini's story.....

~LisaB

If he was paid to do it, that's pretty shitty on the mob's part. To pay an outsider nobody to whack a La Cosa Nostra boss? These things are supposed to be done by other made men, and not paid to do it, but out of honor.

I also want to point out that if indeed Jerome Johnson was found with blank checks from Joseph Brocchini, and he wasn't framed, then we know that at the very least he associated with mob guys. In other words, he didn't just pop out of nowhere.

From what I have read about Johnson he didn't have real connections to the Mafia, but he unsuccessfully tried to procure women and become a pimp, and was also involved in gay pornography with Michael Umber who operated at a gay bar that Johnson frequented called Christopher’s End that was controlled by Paul Di Bella, a soldier in the Gambino family. In a July 20, 1971 New York Times article Police Chief Albert Seedman said, “Johnson frequented the Christopher’s End in the weeks immediately preceding the shooting.”

The very fact that Johnson was involved in underworld activity should make any reasonable man believe he was more likely to be hired by the mafia than the fucking CIA. Do you seriously believe that this man was a government asset?

Oh okay lol. I don't like the way it was carried out whoever's behind it. A mob boss like Joe Colombo deserves a proper whacking and a lavish funeral, if they're gonna take him out. Poor guy lived the rest of his life as a vegetable.

First of all. Let me say that I want all of you guys to step back a moment, clear your heads of any preconceived notions you have about WHO killed Colombo. And just marvel at the fact that he was shot and incapacitated back in 1971. It 2021.... it 50 years later and NOBODY has a single clue who really clipped him.

Thats EXACTLY what the conspirators wanted! .... 50,000 plus people present. hundreds of uniformed cops swarming all over the place. Not to mention NYPD detectives, and FBI agents mingling with the crowd. Remember too that the FBI WAS recording film footage from several angles high up in skyscrapers that had a clear view of the podium, platform where Joe was standing and glad-handing people, and scanning the crows for "known" or "reputed" mafia figures to identify. REMEMBER THAT POINT. BECAUSE ITS VERY IMPORTANT.

Press credentials, commercial camera, gun that had been in the police property clerks rooms earlier, black girl who disappears a moment after Joe is shot. Makes a clear getaway although she is probably the only other black people among a sea of white faces.etc etc....... Why can't the FBI (why didn't the FBI) just check their films of that day? They could have tracked the black girls movements through the crowd in a hot minute. They could have seen where she went. Who she went with? WTF?........that fact alone is huge. Absence of investigation. A FBI coverup from the get-go. What ever happened to those films??

News releases by the FBI and LE that the Gallo gang is responsible for the shooting (with no proof I may add). Joe Gallo sends word ASAP that he denies having anything to do with it. This is a classic, time honored method of deflecting suspicion from the real killers.

In truth, Joey Gallo couldn't find his own ass with both hands, let alone orchestrate a "hit"... more than a hit, an "assassination" of this caliber. In fact, none of the New York Mafia could. The Colombo "assassination" reeks of government involvement. From cradle to grave (literally). It has the G's fingerprints all over it, regardless of how they tried to deflect a shining light from them. And in retrospect, 50 years later, after all the smoke has cleared from the room, it becomes crystal clear in my mind at least.

Law enforcement NEVER follows up on leads. They just wash everybody's face for a few weeks and then its forgotten about.

J. Johnson is reported to have a few cancelled checks from Lucchese associate Joe Brocchini when detectives make the obligatory "search" of his room. It means less than zero. It was a half-ass attempt to tie JJ to the mob. Supposedly he worked at one of Brocchini's Black Jack Book Stores in Times Square for a few weeks previously.

And I tell you this (From personal experience with friends). Nearly all Colombo soldiers and capos were spooked by what happened. Everybody started carrying guns on a daily basis. Because they didn't know where it came from. If it WAS a mob hit, word from the bosses would have eventually come down to calm the troops and explain the killing of a boss. THAT is Cosa Nostra. There is always an accounting between them. Especially when they kill a boss.........but THEY didn't kill him!

And I hate to say it, but a lot of these guys are not brain surgeons. They don't have the art of deduction. And in that era of turmoil, nobody even cared to sit down and think it out. Most (like all of you), just figured Gallo did it (with Gambinos' blessing).

I CALL BULLSHIT!
-------------------------
If you fellas have learned anything at all about the mob. Anything! You should realize by now that the mafia doesn't kill that way. Especially a top boss. Especially one who has nearly every news camera, television station, reporter, and law enforcement personnel "on the very scene" of the potential hit location. Are all of you nuts?? LOL

Many were growing disillusioned by Joe Colombo; members of his own family, those in other families, and Carlo Gambino himself. They felt the "heat" that was being brought down on all of them was very counterproductive to Cosa Nostra....and they were right of course!

In the previous year or so, the feds were breaking everybody's balls tremendously. Plus you gotta remember that only Joe Colombo was making any money from this cash cow called The Italian-American Civil Rights League."

It was very profitable, yet it belonged to him alone. He wasn't sharing the wealth. So what were the other bosses getting out of it? Zero thats what! So Gambino sent out word pulling back his support of Colombo's league. Others did as well. But that DOES NOT MEAN that they killed him.

During that last year Colombo had been buried under multiple indictments; major gambling charges, 2 contempt of court charges in Kings and Nassau Counties, and a jewel robbery conspiracy out on Long Island. He was definitely in trouble.

But the FBI hated him with a passion. So did their boss J.Edgar Hoover. For them, it had gotten VERY personal. Very, very personal indeed. And they wanted revenge. So did the Justice Department back in Washington. It was the Civil Rights Era. And the G was all fucked up from getting "backed up" by all these various civil rights groups. Colombo was in the very forefront of that movement. Nobody had ever fucked with them the way that Joe Colombo had. Ever!

Colombo had made them all look like fools. From J.Edgar right on down the line. The FBI had a hatred for him second to none.

He was a "symbol" more than anything. A symbol that the government wanted desperately to extinguish. Permanently! Not with a bullshit jailing where he would still be able to spout his BS about them. He had "de-balled" them.

No longer could they use the words Mafia, Cosa Nostra, The Brotherhood, Capo, soldier, underboss, consigliere, etc. etc. He had 'DE-BALLED' them. Get it fellas???

While he stayed in power all of their hands would be tied behind their backs. And their mouths taped and shut tight!.... The FBI could not allow that. Under any circumstances.

JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, etc.... Remember the "grassy knoll" theory?? LOL .....and also Rabbi Meir Kahane's assassination. Who was a very close friend of Colombo. They supported each others causes. The JDL, and the IACRL. The civil rights era was turning the "status quo" in America on its head. And there was NO greater figure who represented that, than Joe Colombo to them. Each of the names I mention above were killed under very mysterious circumstances. The way they were each killed is almost singular in their Modus Operandi to Joe Colombo's shooting.

Does it not ring a bell to all of you? The bell of truth??........ I make the statement here and now, that most, if not ALL of those killings (assassinations really), was the work of the government.

The FBI HAD to put a stop to them all. THEY JUST HAD TOO! And they did! ...Once and for all, permanently.

There is a lot more that I could say on this subject fellas, but enough is enough already.

.............I rest my case fellas! "TheOG"


PS: It is serious food for thought.

I always thought the government hit him. They hate civil rights, even white civil rights, lol

I understand where you are coming from, in so far as the I understand you appear to take a conspiratorial view of the government, and that is not entirely without entitlement. After all, we know the government can engage in conspiracy from time to time because we have ironclad proof of that - the Watergate incident being a clear example.

That being said, I think it's a hell of a stretch to lay all those infamous crimes at the feet of the FBI. I don't know enough about Colombo's shooting, or about Malcolm X's, to comment specifically with respect to what happened on those days.

But I know a lot about the Kennedy ones and enough about MLK to be confident in all three official stories.

That might sound naive to you, but I've actually stood in that window on the sixth floor of Dealey Plaza. That was not a difficult shot. If I'm being told to kill the president, then there is no question that the grassy knoll is the better shot of the two...but it doesn't mean it couldn't have been done from the Texas School Book Depository. You've got the two coworkers on the fifth floor who heard the shell casings hit the floor. You have the coworker he drove in with that day who saw him carry a package of "curtain rods" upstairs with him. Most of what has been suggested about Oswald's intelligence training has been greatly exaggerated based on only very small kernels of truth. Vincent Bugliosi's book "Reclaiming History" - if you can make it through all 1500 pages, is an excellent summation of the myths that have arisen over the years to suggest a conspiracy and a systematic debunking of them one by one.

I say all this as someone who believed in the conspiracy for years. But when I really challenged those views, they simply did not hold up to scrutiny.

In addition to Bugliosi's book, the Warren Report itself is another great source. Most people who believe in the conspiracy will spit at it's very mention...but oddly enough, I have found that most who do haven't bothered to actually read it.

Oliver Stone made a wonderful movie which I love for the performances, the score, the perfect capture of the look of the era and for how it got people talking about the event, but do not be sucked into using it as research material.

If we go back to Watergate as proof of the government being known to engage in conspiracy, ask yourself this: if the President cannot facilitate the burglary of a hotel room a few blocks from the White House, what are the odds that the Vice President had the President killed and nobody said a thing?

Happy to debate this respectfully; or if anyone would prefer instead to call me a stupid sheeple we could just as soon not debate it.

PS--- on one of my many trips to Dallas I also ate at Campisi's, the restaurant owned by the at the time Underboss of the Dallas mob! Campisi as you may know was the first man to visit Jack Ruby in jail. It's still owned by the Campisi family. Another little bit of American LCN trivia.

Eastside, that's the real beauty of these conspiracies. 50-60 years later and NO ONE truly has a clue about JFK, RFK, MLK, Colombo, etc.

If anybody still thinks that some lone whacko, or some numb skull pulled ANY of these off by themselves, then with all do respect to you and like minded thinkers, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell ya for $24.

Rabbi Kahane? I'm not so sure the fee-bees were involved in that one. But JFK, RFK, Colombo, Sam Giancana and Roselli. In my view, were all conspiracies that can be logically laid at the G's doorstep for one reason or another.

Either FBI, CIA, rogues in those agencies, (or approved plots that came directly from the top), etc.

But what evidence would show that Oswald couldn't have done it?

I do not doubt for one split second that Oswald was involved. But that fact doesn't mean that others weren't as well. And certainly doesn't preclude a "conspiracy"

If anything, it enhances one