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Gangland Wire

Crazy Joey Gallo Part 2

Gangland Wire

Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6623 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gary and Camillius “Cam” Robinson examine the entire life of Crazy Joe Gallo from the perspective of his henchman Pete the Greek Diapoulos. This is Part 2. Pete the Greek was a childhood pal of Crazy Joey Gallo who remained a part of his crew and was actually sitting with Crazy Joey Gallo that fateful night at Umberto’s Clam House when unidentified gunmen entered and walked directly to their table firing their guns. Pete the Greek had a handgun and he was wounded as he returned fire. the government will charge Peter Diapoulus with having a gun and he will spend a year in jail. These same cops never charged anybody with the murder of Crazy Joey Gallo. Pete the Greek collaborated with a well-known writer named  Steve Linakis. Venmo me @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup  click here Guys called Crazy Joey Gallo “Joey the Blond” because he had blond chest hair. Around 1950 when Gallo had a charge pending, the court had him diagnosed with mental illness at the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. They believed he had schizophrenia. During this time, the cops started calling him Crazy Joey. He was a violent maniac who might beat down somebody just because he didn’t like the way they looked. He went to prison for about ten years, where he learned the Evelyn Wood speed reading technique. He read, read, and read, giving himself a graduate degree level of knowledge in just about everything. After he got out of prison that last time in the early 1970s, he dressed the part of a New York hipster of the 1950s. He liked a dark shirt, white tie, and pinstripe suit. He would wear sunglasses inside. He became friends and the pet of many sophisticated New Yorkers like David Steinberg, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, playwright Neil Simon, and Joan Hackett. Just before his murder, a TV show called, How They Cover Me was about media coverage of celebrities. He was to appear with Gore Vidal, Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger, and Bella Abzug. Cam and I tell the Joey Gallo story and the First and Second Colombo War. A famous book by New York Columnist Jimmy Breslin titled The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight is about the Gallos and their war with first the Persico family and then the Colombo family. Mario Coppola used many of the situations and incidents in the Colombo wars in the Godfather. Peter Diapoulos tells in “The 6th Family” how he first met Crazy Joey. He was leaving their grade school, and he saw Gallo fight with a much bigger kid. Diapoulos said he started to step in when Gallo told him to lay back. He then grabbed a large flower pot and broke it over the bigger kid’s head, knocking him out. He started hanging out with Joey, Frankie “Punchy” Illiano, and a guy called Mike the Bandit at a candy store on 36th and 14th Avenue. Later in his life, Punchy will move to the Genovese crew with Joey’s brother Albert “Kid Twist” Gallo and live out his life as a mobster. They started burglarizing neighborhood homes and graduated to robbing small businesses. He told a story about how Mike the Bandit got a massive 1939 LaSalle. They used to pick up this neighborhood girl named Marilyn, and they would take turns doing her in the back seat. He told a story about them renting horses in Prospect Park. When Gallo’s horse was balking, Crazy Joey got off and punched the horse several times. He was also hanging out with Larry “Kid Blast” Gallo, Joey’s brother. They used to get into fights at Prospect Hall, where they had Knights of Columbus-sponsored dances. To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here, please give me a review and help others find the podcast.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You are listening to Gangland Wire, hosted by former Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective, Gary Jenkins.

0:19.0

Welcome all your wiretappers out there, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire.

0:22.9

I say the same thing over again, but I think people like that familiarity.

0:27.0

I have on a Zoom call and be on the audio podcast too, my good friend that part-time co-host.

0:35.1

Really, Cam Cam Camden,ulus Robinson. Welcome, Cam.

0:39.8

Hey, Gary, how you doing? Glad to be back. Well, welcome back, folks, to the second half of the Crazy Joey Gallo story.

0:46.2

Immediately, what he starts doing is planning on killing Joe Colombo, because he thought he ought to be the boss of their old Proffizi family.

0:54.0

So Pete DeGreek started to tell him stories about some of the many plies to kill Joe Colombo

0:58.4

before he actually gets killed, which is, you know, one of those stories to this day is argued

1:03.7

about on who did that and how that went down, which it is.

1:08.4

It's one of the strangest stories to me and mobbed them.

1:12.4

Absolutely.

1:13.1

It's just like, what the hell?

1:14.8

I mean, remember at the time reading it in the newspapers, like, what the hell?

1:19.3

I kind of wondered Frank Shearin did it.

1:21.6

Really?

1:22.3

Yeah.

1:23.9

And then killed Jerome Johnson.

1:26.4

Right.

1:28.6

Gave him up as a scapegoat, kind of like the, it's kind of like the

1:32.3

JFK killing.

1:35.2

Lee R.V. Oswald, you know, they just shoved the black guy in there and reached around him

...

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