By Dan Bowens
NEW YORK - How can you know your
neighborhood if you don't know its secrets? For one neighborhood in Brooklyn, a
secret changed the course of New York City's organized crime in 1979.
It was a hot summer day in July.
Gabe Pressman, one of Channel 5's reporters at the time, reported from outside
of a little Italian café called Joe and Mary on Knickerbocker Avenue in
Bushwick.
"It was one of the major
gangland executions of recent decades," Pressman reported. "And yet,
most of the people around here didn't know who the big man was."
The big man. His name was Carmine
Galante. He was head of the Bonanno crime family. Known as "The
Cigar," Galante was widely feared for his cruelty.
His own assassination is the
focus of our latest case featured in our true crime series The Tape Room. We
dug into our archives for video footage of this infamous murder. It was a
brutal killing.
The killers entered the café and
shot Galante, 69, and two of his men as they ate lunch.
As Pressman reported, tomato
salad and wine were still on the table after the hail of bullets. One struck
Galante through the eye.
Pressman is a legendary New York
newsman. He was among the first on-air local TV reporters in the city and spent
most of his career at WNBC-TV. He worked at Channel 5 for only a brief stretch.
He died in 2017 at the age of 93.
In Pressman's story that aired on
Channel 5 that day, Galante's famed cigar was still clenched between his teeth
as he lay on the ground.
"It is believed that the hit
on Galante was a joint operation between a faction of the Bonannos and the
Gambinos," Geoff Schumacher, the senior director of content at the Mob
Museum, told us, referring to the Bonanno and Gambino crime families.
Back to the neighborhood—the same
block where it all happened. 41 years later, so much has changed. The stretch
of Knickerbocker Avenue is in the heart of Brooklyn—just a few minutes' walk
from the L train. Now you're more likely to find a boutique pet shop here than
old stories about mob wars.
"That's wild," said
Kat, a bartender at 3 Diamond Door located just a few doors down to what was
Joe and Mary café. It is a straightforward pub with many different beers on
tap.
"There must be so many
layers we don't think about or know about," she told us. "It's funny
how that happened right next door and no one knows it."
One of the patrons in the bar
when we visited was Wes Davis. We showed him footage of the story. In one clip,
a woman hangs out of a window inside the building where it happened. Davis told
us that he lives in that same apartment now
"It was a crazy time in New
York City," he said. "People rushing in with guns, taking people
out."
The neighborhood, once heavily
Italian American, had already been changing when the assassination happened.
It's now a reflection of modern city life.
"It's very mixed. It's
Puerto Rican, black, white people, younger white people," Davis said.
As for the crime itself,
Schumacher, the expert with the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said Galante's murder
was likely the result of his own ambitions.
"He saw himself as becoming
the boss of bosses. He was not a well-liked individual," Schumacher said.
"Not only did The Commission not want Galante to become head of family,
they certainly didn't want him to become Boss of Bosses. So it was determined
it was time for him to go."
The killing had a domino effect.
"The Galante murder really
opens and accelerated federal efforts to go after this heroin smuggling
ring," Schumacher. "Ultimately a couple of years later [it led to] a
mass of arrests... individuals involved in the heroin ring."
This is a story from long ago in
a city where just about every neighborhood has secrets.
Of the multiple people thought to
have planned and carried out Galante's murder, only one was ever brought to
justice, according to the Mob Museum.
Bruno Indelicato was convicted at
the mafia commission trial in 1986. He served 19 years in prison. Today, he's
back in prison on another Bonanno crime family murder.