Who Shot Joe Colombo?

Gangland Wire

Gary Jenkins

Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime, History

4.6 • 647 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins examines one of the most puzzling events in organized crime history—the 1971 shooting of Joe Colombo. At the height of his influence, Colombo stood before a crowd of nearly 50,000 at Italian Unity Day in New York City when he was gunned down by Jerome A. Johnson, a man posing as a journalist with a camera. The brazen daylight attack shocked both the public and law enforcement, immediately raising questions about motive, planning, and whether larger forces were at work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	to cheer to celebrate a holiday.
0:03.0	What they found was death.
0:04.0	What they found was death.
0:16.0	The main speaker was fatally shot.
0:20.0	This crowd is speaker was fatally shot.
0:27.6	This crowd, infuriated by the shooting of their leader, just moments before this scene, raged into complete chaos.
0:31.6	Fighting broke out everywhere.
0:39.0	This man, totally unrelated to the assassination attempt, was caught up in a violent altercation
0:45.5	with the police.
0:49.2	Hey guys, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wars. Gary Jenkins, retired
0:53.7	Kansas, Missouri Police Intelligence Unit, Detective, and later Sergeant, I have guys good to be back here in the studio of gangland wars gary jenkins retired kensity missouri
0:54.7	police intelligence unit detective and later sergeant i have a mystery that i'm going to look at
1:00.3	a long as hell mysteries in the mob maybe and has never been solved and i don't think i can
1:06.3	solve it today but i'm going to look real close at the people that did try to solve this mystery and that's the
1:11.9	murder or the wounding and he eventually dies so you could call it the murder of Joe Columbo
1:17.0	and I'm getting this from a book that a man named Albert A. Seedman who was the New York City
1:24.3	Police Chief of Detectives wrote about his career.
1:29.6	It's called Chief.
1:30.5	It's a really pretty good book, and it goes into a lot of things besides this,
1:35.3	but he really goes into depth about the investigation of the shooting of Joe Colombo.
1:40.7	I couldn't need to call it shooting, but it it ended up he died and he died of his wounds,
1:44.6	so I really think you can call it to murder.
	...

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