Crazy Joe Gallo Tour Ends Here

May 9, 2009
Tom Folsom led the first of three walking tours of the neighborhood and discussed the subject of his new book The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld. For anyone who missed this one, Tom will reprise his tour on the next two Saturdays. Please RSVP if you'd like to attend.

Though the Gallo's compound and dormitory on President Street is now gone--swallowed up by a botched sewer line in the 1970s--Tom was able to recreate the world this infamous gangster family once patrolled and fought over. Mixing glamor and menace (Joey looked like Robert De Niro down to the mole on the cheek), the Gallos picked fights they couldn't possibly win, yet dodged numerous bullets throughout the 1950s and 60s--all the while mugging for Life Magazine photographers, hanging out with beatniks, and courting the media.

Since they were often as wide of the mark when taking shots at their enemies, Jimmy Breslin chronicled their comic scrappiness in his novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, adapted into a film in the 1970s (we will screen it at Jalopy on May 26 at 8 pm). No doubt Joey was a tough guy, but he stands out from the mob for his peculiar side tastes. Joey roamed the Village and married a bohemian--picking up a taste for existentialists, Reichian psychotherapy, and Schopenhauer along the way. One woman phoned us to say she took acting classes with Joey. Only after his gangland murder in 1972 did she realize that the classmate with whom she had a brief affair back in the 1960s was that Crazy Joe.

The tour tells just as much about the neighborhood as it looked back then, when Columbia Street was lined on both sides by shops and social clubs catering to longshoremen. And of course there are the tales of Mondo the Midget, Joey's lion walker. Come by the store to see some of those photos (Tom is seen to the left pointing out one of the destroyed "dormitory" where the Gallo gang went to the mattresses). And on May 30, Work Gallery will host an exhibit of other images from that period.

At the end of this tour my heroic roommate Brian helped out with the grill and cooked hot dogs for the participants. We make no promises, but it looks like we will offer them for the next tour. We're not sure it was Joey's favorite food, but he probably bossed around and extorted a few hot dog vendors in his lifetime.
--Peter Miller