After a few weeks of negotiation, Profaci and his consigliere, Charles "the Sidge" LoCicero, made a deal with the Gallos and secured the peaceful release of the hostages.
A bootlegger during Prohibition, Umberto invested his earnings into a loan-sharking racket and did little to discourage his three sons from participating in local criminal activity.
[2] Although he would remain deeply entwined with South Brooklyn in the popular imagination throughout his criminal career and often frequented the area as a youth because of familial ties, Gallo was actually raised in the borough's Kensington section (then customarily characterized as a subsection of Flatbush), where his family owned and operated Jackie's Charcolette, a greasy spoon at 108 Beverley Road which capitalized on foot traffic from the nearby Church Avenue business district and IND subway station.
As late as 1964, a United States Senate dossier on organized crime identified the family home at 639 East 4th Street as Gallo's permanent residence.
Shortly thereafter, Gallo sustained head trauma in an automobile accident, resulting in the manifestation of a "nervous tic"; by this juncture, he and lifelong associates Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas and Frank Illiano had begun to contemplate various criminal schemes while frequenting Church Avenue's Ace Pool Room and a candy store on 36th Street and Fourteenth Avenue in the nearby Borough Park section.
[6] In 1949, after viewing the film Kiss of Death, Gallo began mimicking Richard Widmark's gangster character "Tommy Udo" and reciting movie dialogue.
[7] Albert Seedman, the head of New York City Police Department's Detective Bureau, called Gallo "that little guy with steel balls".
In addition to helping to manage his father's loan-sharking business and Larry Gallo's vending machine and jukebox operations (with the latter often perceived as the "crown jewel" of the family's rackets), he directly oversaw a variety of enterprises, including floating dice and high-stakes card games, extortion shakedowns and a numbers game.
He maintained his headquarters at "The Dormitory", a three-story brick tenement at 51 President Street (within the boundaries of Brooklyn's contemporary Carroll Gardens) that previously housed the Gallo family's vending machine interests; there, he allegedly kept a pet lion named Cleo in the basement.
In 1957, Profaci allegedly asked Gallo and his crew to murder Albert Anastasia, the boss of the Gambino crime family.
[8] The following year, Gallo and his brothers were summoned to Washington, D.C., to testify before the McClellan Committee of the United States Senate on organized crime.
After a few weeks of negotiation, Profaci and his consigliere, Charles "the Sidge" LoCicero, made a deal with the Gallos and secured the peaceful release of the hostages.
[15] Larry survived a strangulation attempt by Persico and Salvatore "Sally" D'Ambrosio at the Sahara Club in East Flatbush after a police officer intervened.
[23] Gallo predicted a power shift in the Harlem drug rackets towards black gangs, and coached Barnes on how to upgrade his criminal organization.
[2] According to Donald Frankos, a fellow inmate at Auburn, Gallo was "articulate and had excellent verbal skills being able to describe gouging a man's guts out with the same eloquent ease that he used when discussing classical literature.
His connection started when actor Jerry Orbach played the inept mobster Kid Sally Palumbo in the 1971 film The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a role based loosely on Gallo.
[33][32] Gallo reportedly told the family representatives that he was not bound by the 1963 peace agreement and demanded $100,000 to settle the dispute, which Colombo refused.
[39] Earlier that evening, the Gallo party had visited the Copacabana with Jerry Orbach and his wife, Marta, to see a performance by comedian Don Rickles and singer Peter Lemongello.
[9] Rickles and Lemongello, whom Gallo had invited to join them at Umbertos, managed to find an excuse to get out of the engagement, possibly saving their lives.
[39] Between seafood courses, Luparelli asserted that the four gunmen walked into the dining room and opened fire with .32- and .38 caliber revolvers.
[42] Brandt further speculates that Luparalli's confession was most likely disinformation ordered by his Colombo family superiors intended to defuse tensions after the Gallo shooting.
[42] A differing but equally disputed[43] account of the murder was offered by Frank Sheeran, a hitman and labor union boss.
[42] Furthermore, an eyewitness at Umbertos on the night of the incident, later a New York Times editor who spoke on condition of anonymity, also identified Sheeran as the man she observed shooting Gallo.
[42] Jerry Capeci, a journalist and Mafia expert who was at Umbertos shortly after the shooting as a young reporter for the New York Post, later wrote if he were "forced to make a choice" about who shot Gallo, Sheeran was the most likely culprit.
[46][47] Former Colombo family capo Michael Franzese, also disputes that Sheeran was the killer when reviewing the scene depicting the assassination in The Irishman, claiming that he knows "for a fact what happened there" based on his personal involvement with the Mafia at the time.
[43] Gallo's funeral was held under police surveillance; his sister Carmella declared over his open coffin that "the streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!
"[49] Looking for revenge, Albert Gallo sent a gunman from Las Vegas to the Neapolitan Noodle restaurant in Manhattan, where Yacovelli, Alphonse Persico, and Gennaro Langella were dining.
An increasingly paranoid Luparelli fled to California, then contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and reached a deal to become a government witness.
[55] Author Jimmy Breslin's 1969 book The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight was a fictionalized and satirical depiction of Gallo's war with the Profaci family.
Based on newspaper articles by reporter Nicholas Gage, the movie was directed by Carlo Lizzani and starred Peter Boyle as the title character.