Books BY ANGELA MATUA Capria said. “I was turned on that there was such little information out there they kept reprinting. He was also interesting to me because of how diabolical he was. He was the first alleged mob boss to speak to news media. At the time of the shooting he had made enemies from everyone to the NYPD, FDNY and Justice Department.” Joe Columbo, who founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League after many Italian-Americans expressed unhappiness with the way the federal government and entertainment industry treated them, was shot three times at the second-annual Italian Unity Day rally on June 28, 1971. Thousands of people attended the rally at Columbus Circle but the shooting was shrouded in mystery. According to news reports, a man named Jerome Johnson was hired by Joe Gallo from prison to kill Colombo. He was offered $40,000 to do the job and two suitcases with the money was recovered at the scene. “What shooter is going to meet someone at the place they’re going to kill a man and exchange $40,000 in what was the most highly policed area at that time?” Capria said. For the book, he watched and read television and print news reports, spoke to friends and acquaintances of Colombo, looked through federal documents and spoke to an officer who tackled Johnson after the shooting. The officer said he saw the suitcases with cash but they were never put into NYPD evidence lockers. Former NYPD Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman previously said that Johnson could not have acted alone but soon changed his story. The investigation was closed even though Seedman or the NYPD could not adequately explain the presence of the $40,000. “In the decades since the shooting not one mob informant, and there have been quite a few, has corroborated Chief Seedman’s or the media’s assertion it was a mob hit,” Anthony Colombo wrote in the book. “An FBI plot to kill my father? Possibly. Law enforcement’s involvement? Most probably. Why the FBI? Why law enforcement?” These are some of the questions the 400-page book tries to explore. Capria argues that the case draws many parallels to current affairs today. In 1971, hackers broke into a Pennsylavnia FBI field office and leaked files about a program known as COINTELPRO. Agents in the program were supposed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize, and otherwise eliminate” any citizen that was “subversive.” “There is no question my father was viewed as subversive,” Anthony Colombo said. “I personally experienced how the FBI treated him, myself, our family, and anyone close to us. I have lived with the question for over forty-five years of how far would President Herbert Hoover and his agents go to “eliminate” a target such as my father?” That same year, Colombo was named New York Magazine’s top ten most powerful men in New York and was also featured on the cover of Time. He convinced the U.S. Justice Department to stop using words such as “mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra” when referring to Italians and shut down production of “The Godfather” for a short time. The film’s creators eventually collaborated with Colombo on the
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