Subject file
Joseph Colombo
Known as Joe
Colombo was given a family in 1963 for informing on a plot, spent 1970 holding public rallies demanding that the government stop saying the Mafia existed, and was shot in the head in front of a crowd and news cameras in 1971.
He was a capo when he learned of a plan against Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. He told Gambino. The plot failed, the men behind it lost everything, and Colombo — not yet forty — was given the Profaci family as payment.
The league
In 1970 he founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which picketed FBI offices and argued that the word Mafia was an ethnic slur used to defame Italian Americans.
The League drew genuinely large crowds and had real support among people with no connection to organised crime, because the underlying complaint about how Italian Americans were portrayed was not invented. It was also run by a sitting Cosa Nostra boss, and that is the whole difficulty.
The League got a major film studio to drop the word Mafia from a picture then in production, and it got the Justice Department to stop using it in press releases. Those are real outcomes.
They were achieved by an organisation led by a man who at that moment was the boss of a criminal family, in order to make life harder for the agency investigating him. Both halves are true, and an archive that reports only one of them is not being careful, it is taking a side.
Columbus Circle
At the League's second rally on 28 June 1971, a man with press credentials shot Colombo three times in the head at close range and was immediately shot dead by someone who has never been identified.
Colombo survived, paralysed and unable to speak, and lived another seven years. He died on 22 May 1978. Nobody was ever tried for the shooting, and the family he had been given carried his name from then on.
Sources
- Selwyn Raab — Five Families (2005)
- New York City Police Department records (1971)
- contemporary reporting in the New York Times (1970–1971)
Stories
- The Boss Who Held Rallies Joseph Colombo ran a crime family and a civil rights movement at the same time, drew tens of thousands to Columbus Circle, and was shot in the head at his own rally in front of the cameras he had invited.