Carmine Galante: The Life and Brutal Death of a Notorious Mob Boss

Jul 12, 2024
6 min read

Updated: Jul 31

Carmine Galante liked to say nobody would ever kill him. He genuinely seemed to believe it, right up until three men in ski masks walked into a Brooklyn restaurant garden and proved him wrong over lunch. What makes his story stand out, even in a criminal world full of larger-than-life figures, is a contradiction that runs through the whole thing: a prison psychiatrist once assessed him as having the mental age of a 14-year-old, and he still built one of the largest international heroin networks in American history, ran a small empire from behind bars, and reportedly quoted Descartes while doing it.

A Rough Start on the Lower East Side

Carmine Galante was born on 21 February 1910 at 27 Stanton Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, one of five children born to Sicilian immigrants Vincenzo Galante, a former fisherman turned laborer, and Vincenza Russo. He was christened Camillo, but schoolyard friends started calling him Carmine and it stuck for life. He dropped out of school at 15 and was already building an arrest record within a few years, picking up charges for robbery, assault and grand larceny well before he turned 20. By 1930 he'd been arrested multiple times, including in connection with a police officer shot during a robbery, and in January 1931 he was sent to Sing Sing Prison in connection with an armed robbery of a Brooklyn brewery.

4 men, one has been beaten and is being held up the other 3 — A young Carmine after being beaten by the police

It's what happened at Sing Sing that produced the strangest, most repeated detail of Galante's entire life. In 1931, at 21 years old, he underwent a routine psychiatric evaluation. According to his own FBI dossier, the examiner concluded he had a mental age of 14 and a half and an IQ of 90, describing him as emotionally dull and diagnosing him as a neuropathic, psychopathic personality with a poor prognosis. It's a genuinely strange thing to reconcile with the rest of Galante's life. This was a man later described as fluent in several Italian dialects, known for quoting Plato, Augustine and Descartes in conversation, and sharp enough to run international drug logistics from a prison cell. Whatever that 1931 evaluation actually captured, it clearly wasn't the whole picture.

Learning the Trade Under Vito Genovese

Released on parole in 1939, Galante went to work as an enforcer for Vito Genovese, and over the following years law enforcement suspected him of involvement in somewhere between 80 and 100 murders, a figure that says more about his reputation than it does about anything provable in court. One case researchers have tied to him with real documentary evidence is the 1943 assassination of Carlo Tresca, an Italian-American anti-fascist journalist gunned down on a New York street corner. District attorney files that surfaced later showed Galante and several associates had been paid roughly $9,000 for the hit, funneled through a Teamsters official connected to the Anastasia crime family, in what researchers believe was a favor to Italian fascist interests looking to silence one of Mussolini's most vocal critics in America. It's a strange, half-buried footnote to an already strange career: one of the mob's most feared killers, moonlighting as a political assassin for a foreign dictatorship.

Former NYPD detective Ralph Salerno, who spent decades studying organized crime up close, later said

"Of all the gangsters that I've met personally, and I've met dozens of them in all of my years, there were only two who, when I looked them straight in the eye, I decided I wouldn't want them to be really personally mad at me. Aniello Dellacroce was one and Carmine Galante was the other. They had bad eyes, I mean, they had the eyes of killers. You could see how frightening they were, the frigid glare of a killer."

Coming from a man who'd made a career of looking dangerous people in the eye, that's a meaningful data point.

Building an Empire From Behind Bars

Handpicked by Bonanno family boss Joe Bonanno, a fellow native of the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo, Galante spent much of the 1950s establishing narcotics routes running from Sicily through Montreal into the United States, work that eventually earned him the nickname "The Heroin Don." In 1958 he was indicted alongside Genovese and several others for running an international smuggling ring bringing cocaine and heroin into the country through Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and in 1962 he was convicted on narcotics conspiracy charges and sentenced to 20 years.

Most criminal careers would have ended there. Galante's barely paused. He served his sentence at Alcatraz before being transferred through Lewisburg, Leavenworth and finally Atlanta, and at Lewisburg he effectively ran what other inmates called Mafia Row, a tightly organized bloc of roughly 400 Italian prisoners who controlled the prison's underground economy, its bookmaking operation, and a network of guards who could be counted on for favors. Galante himself reportedly worked in the prison greenhouse, kept pet cats, and arranged for better cuts of meat from the prison butcher, all while running his own rules of conduct over the rest of the yard. He was released in January 1974, technically still on parole until 1981, and came home with no intention of staying quiet.

Frank Costello mugshot, black and white, NYC Police 66994, 1947.

A Bid to Become Boss of Bosses

Galante's timing was good. While he'd been locked up, Joe Bonanno had been forced into retirement by the Commission, the shadowy governing body of the American Mafia, and the family he came home to had only an interim leader in place. Galante moved fast, taking de facto control of the Bonannos in what amounted to a swift internal coup, and then overreached badly by styling himself capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses of the entire New York underworld, a title the Commission had never granted him and had no intention of granting anyone.

He surrounded himself with a crew of Sicilian-born drug traffickers, nicknamed the Zips, for protection and muscle, made little effort to share his narcotics profits with the families whose cooperation he needed, and held the Gambinos in particular contempt over their long rivalry with the Bonannos and their growing interest in his drug territory. The Commission viewed his self-promotion as open defiance. From behind bars, Bonanno's successor Philip Rastelli reportedly began plotting Galante's removal with the Gambino and Genovese families, and by the summer of 1979, Galante's days as a free man were numbered.

Lunch at Joe and Mary's

On 12 July 1979, a sweltering 87-degree afternoon, the 69-year-old Galante went to Joe and Mary's Italian-American Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, owned by his cousin Giuseppe Turano, to have lunch and see Turano off before a trip to Sicily. He sat in the restaurant's quiet back garden with Turano, Bonanno captain Leonard Coppola, and two bodyguards, Baldassare Amato and Cesare Bonventre. They ate fish and salad, and Galante, true to form, lit a cigar.

At around 2:45pm, three men in ski masks walked into the garden and opened fire with shotguns and handguns. Galante was hit in the chest and through the left eye and killed instantly, along with Turano and Coppola. His own bodyguards, Amato and Bonventre, walked away completely unharmed, having made no apparent attempt to intervene, a detail investigators found more than a little suspicious at the time. Photographs of the scene, published on front pages around the world, showed Galante on the ground with his cigar still clenched between his teeth, an image that became one of the defining photographs in American Mafia history.

Photographed from above, two men lay on the ground — The scene of the crime 12th July 1979

A Killing Nobody Was Fully Punished For

Federal investigators concluded a hit of that scale, on a sitting Bonanno boss, could only have happened with the blessing of a majority of the Commission, likely a joint operation between factions of the Bonanno and Gambino families. Only one man was ever charged: Anthony "Bruno" Indelicato, a member of Galante's own family. The getaway car turned up two days later, but fingerprints inside matched none of the suspects investigators already had in their sights. The notorious contract killer Richard Kuklinski later claimed he'd carried out the hit for Gambino associate Roy DeMeo, a claim at least one mob historian has dismissed as little more than the kind of story Kuklinski was known for embellishing in his later interviews. In 1984, one of Galante's own bodyguards from that day was found murdered in a New Jersey warehouse, in what investigators believe was an effort to guarantee his permanent silence.

Outside of a restaurant a man on a stretcher is being carried out. — Carmine is removed from Joe and Mary's Italian-American Restaurant

It's a fitting, if grim, ending for a man whose entire career sat in that same gap between what the mob knew internally and what law enforcement could ever prove, not unlike the fate of Abe Reles, the Murder Inc. hitman whose own death remains disputed to this day. Galante spent decades being the man other criminals were afraid to look in the eye. In the end, the only people who fully understood what actually happened to him were the ones who arranged it, and none of them were ever made to answer for it in full.