Christopher Colombo was nine years old when his father, Joseph Colombo, Sr., was shot at a rally in Columbus Circle, in 1971. His father was the boss of the Colombo crime family, one of the five families of the Italian American Mafia in New York City. Joe reportedly oversaw some two hundred soldiers, whose activities ranged from numbers running, bookmaking, and hijacking cargo, to the construction industry, the garment trade, and night clubs, with occasional beatings and worse for those who crossed them. In 1970, he also launched a crusade against the F.B.I., alleging that its operations against the Mob were an excuse to target Italian Americans. Many saw Joe’s campaign as a tactic to get the F.B.I. to back off of the Colombo family. But his movement gained traction: the U.S. Attorney General decided that the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. would stop using the term “Mafia.” The producer of the movie “The Godfather” also scrubbed the word from the scripts.
A year later, the Italian American Civil Rights League, a group that Joe founded, was getting ready to hold its Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle. Shortly before the rally, Joe Colombo was shot three times in the head and neck, leaving him paralyzed and in a semi-comatose state from which he never recovered. Chris, his youngest son, was at home watching television with his nanny. When the news flashed across the screen, his nanny told him, “Your father’s a good man,” Chris recalled.
Recently, I visited Chris at his house in Blooming Grove, fifty miles north of New York City. It is the same house where he first learned about his father being shot, and where his dad lingered for the last seven years of his life. Despite his father’s mission to end ethnic stereotyping, Chris, now sixty years old, has fashioned himself in the style of someone whom Hollywood would happily cast as a gangster heavy. At five feet seven and two hundred and eighty pounds, he has the build of a street-corner mailbox. He used to compete as a powerlifter. “My best bench press was four hundred and seventy-six pounds,” he told me. “My best dead lift was seven hundred and seventy-five.” His round head is topped by a thin cover of hair transplants, and he often wears a large diamond pinky ring. His voice also fits the part, his larynx having been sandblasted by a steady stream of Newport cigarettes.
Joe Colombo built the house in Blooming Grove on a sprawling compound of rolling hills. Chris still owns thirteen acres. There’s a barn, a carriage house, and a large paddock, although the herd of horses kept by his dad, an avid rider, is down to just two, a miniature palomino and a thoroughbred named Thunder. Occasionally, Chris races the horse around the paddock in a golf cart. “They need the exercise,” he explained. There’s also a handball court and an in-ground swimming pool, where he tried to demonstrate a backflip off the diving board. In the yard, there are large bronze statues of a family of gorillas. “I love gorillas. They are my spirit animal. They are family-oriented, protective, loyal,” Chris said. “King Kong was my childhood hero.”
Chris has kept the home as a shrine to his father’s memory. The living room is furnished with sofas, drapes, and lighting fixtures that look like they’re straight out of the nineteen-fifties. There’s a black-and-white photo of Joe Colombo holding a newspaper, declaring him the man of the year, and a pastel sketch of the mobster, his arms folded, looking slightly perturbed. The drawing was made while Joe was waiting to meet his friend Frank Sinatra, who had just finished a performance. “Sinatra was late,” Chris said. “My dad hated to be kept waiting.”
Before he became a Mob boss, Joe Colombo was part of the Profaci crime family. His specialty was crap games and, according to police, he was also a hit man. In the early nineteen-sixties, the family’s boss ordered him to assassinate rival Mob bosses, including Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese. Joe told Gambino about the plot, and, as a reward, in 1964, the Commission, the Mafia’s decision-making body, gave Joe control of the Profaci family—renamed Colombo—and a seat on the Commission itself. The promotion made him, at forty years old, one of the youngest leaders of an organized-crime family.
A fictionalized version of Joe Colombo appears in “The Offer,” a recent TV show about the making of “The Godfather.” Joe was initially opposed to the filming of “The Godfather,” concerned that it would give Italians a bad name. In the series, he is portrayed by the actor Giovanni Ribisi as a crude, snarling gangster who wears poorly cut suits and threatens the movie’s producer. “They play him like a cross between Quasimodo and Dom DeLuise,” Chris said. “Everything Joe Colombo stood for they undermined.”
Chris Colombo remembers his father as a well-mannered man who wore three-thousand-dollar suits and seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar shoes. “He didn’t drink or smoke,” Chris said. “He didn’t allow cursing. We had to be home for dinner at 6 p.m.” He was fiercely protective of his five children. His campaign against the F.B.I. began as a response to the indictment of one of his sons, Joseph, Jr., for melting silver coins into more valuable ingots. (Joseph, Jr., was later acquitted.) Joseph, Sr., picketed the agency’s Manhattan offices and went on TV denouncing their tactics. “I have always maintained and said there is no Mafia, there is no Cosa Nostra,” he told an interviewer, in 1971. Those terms, he said, were used to cast “Italian people as the scapegoat for each and every crime that’s committed in this country.”
He was shot a few months later, by a Black man named Jerome Johnson who was posing as a press photographer. No one got a chance to question Johnson, who was fatally plugged shortly afterward. But New York’s chief of detectives concluded that Johnson had been recruited by Joe Colombo’s crime-family rival Crazy Joe Gallo. Ten months later, when Gallo was felled by an assassin’s bullets while dining at a late-night clam house in Little Italy, the Mob-style killing seemed to support the theory.
But Chris Colombo doesn’t buy it. “Trust me, Joe Gallo did not kill my father,” he said. Chris claimed that the F.B.I offered his father a deal. “They told him, ‘Step down. You won. We’ll never pinch you again.’ ” His father declined. That was when “the cointelpro branch did it,” Chris continued, referring to the former F.B.I. counterintelligence program that promoted violent conflict within radical groups. “It was a conspiracy,” he said. “I have researched it quite good.”
His father spent the remainder of his life at the house in Blooming Grove, where his family cared for him. “It was a full-time job,” Chris recalled. They installed tilt tables so that they could turn Joe, Sr., to avoid bedsores, and lifts to keep his legs going up and down. He needed to be fed. “I was mad at God,” Chris said. “Those were my dark years.” In 1978, his father finally died.
A year later, Chris was attending Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, when some football players made a wisecrack about his name. “I fought the whole team,” he said. “I never bothered anybody but I was not running away. I would fight a T. rex.” He prided himself on his fighting skills. “I am a short, stocky guy. My reach is just this far,” he said, gesturing with a right jab. “But, if I get on the inside, it is all over.”
Not all fights were decided by punches. At the night clubs where Chris hung out, some of the tough guys who challenged him were armed. “I can’t tell you how many times I had a gun put to my head,” he said. “I think I was trying to get myself killed. It just didn’t happen.”
Joe Colombo, Sr., was adamant that his sons never follow him into organized crime. “My brothers and myself were supposed to be straight,” Chris said. Despite the father’s edict, each of his sons—Chris, Joe, Jr., Vincent, and Anthony—have done prison time. The eldest son, Anthony, appears to have been the only one to become a made member of the Colombo family, although Anthony, who died in 2017, long denied it.
“I never chose that path,” Chris said. But, if he didn’t join the family, he worked closely alongside it. He ran a bookmaking operation, taking illegal bets on sporting events. The challenge, he said, was to set the right betting line. “There are thousands of bets coming in,” he explained. “Half a point can kill you.” His operation grew so large that other bookmakers would lay off their bigger bets on him to reduce their chances of getting wiped out by a high roller’s winning wager. The government later claimed that Chris’s bookmaking network earned him as much as seventy thousand dollars a day. Part of the work was staying ahead of law enforcement. Since he figured it took a month of surveillance to obtain a court-ordered wiretap, he said, he’d move his offices “every twenty-eight days.”
He was arrested twice, the first time in 1995, on state charges that he settled with a fine. In 2004, the federal government went after him. Agents raided the house in Blooming Grove twice, using a battering ram to enter. (“I leave the key in the door now, they knocked it down so many times,” Chris said.) He was indicted on conspiracy, extortion, and bookmaking charges, along with Anthony and several others, a group that prosecutors referred to as “the Colombo Brothers Crew.” Chris won release on a million-dollar bond, and he was ordered to stay home and wear an ankle monitor until his trial.
That year, the “Sopranos”-era boom in Mob-focussed entertainment was in full swing, and Chris decided to try and turn his experience into a TV show. He was able to leave his house to meet with his attorney, so he brought her on a filmed tour of his favorite locales: his Bronx tailor, where he was fitted for a black pin-striped suit that would make any man proud at a Mafia funeral; a strip club, where he nuzzled with bare-chested dancers; and a church, where he told the priest that he couldn’t confess everything because the government might be listening. The footage was used to make a documentary called “House Arrest,” which aired on HBO.
The escapade made the judge “a little mad” at him, Chris said. Nevertheless, the jury didn’t convict him on the top counts of conspiracy and extortion. He was, instead, convicted of two charges of bookmaking and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
What would his father, who had forbidden a criminal life style for his sons, have thought about his bookmaking? “He wouldn’t have cared,” Chris said. “Why would it bother him, taking a bet?” He spoke with pride about those years: the non-stop action, his hundreds of customers, and his personal table at Rao’s, the tiny and exclusive gangster haunt in East Harlem. “It was the greatest life in the world,” he said.
Afew years ago, Chris summed up the current state of organized crime with a kind of wiseguy bon mot: “Too many dogs, not enough bones.” His friend Murray Richman, a New York criminal-defense lawyer known for representing mobsters, liked the quote so much that he had it framed.
After the big racketeering cases of the eighties and nineties sent bosses such as Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and John Gotti away to die in prison, Mafia prosecutions sharply fell. The five families are still operating, but at a greatly reduced level. “They are all pretty much broke,” J. Bruce Mouw, a former F.B.I. supervisory special agent whose team sent Gotti to prison, told me. “They’re not making money like they did in their heyday.” This is partly a result of the digital age. As Mouw said, “Now you don’t need your neighborhood bookie. You can do it online.” But government efforts to rid unions like the Teamsters of organized-crime influence have also hobbled the Mob’s once strong footholds in trades such as the construction industry and the private sanitation business.
Most conspicuous are knuckleheaded younger would-be mobsters. In January, 2021, a twenty-seven-year-old named Peter Tuccio pleaded guilty to setting fire to a car belonging to a man who owed money to the Gambino family. One of Tuccio’s partners managed to set himself on fire while they were torching the victim’s Mercedes-Benz. The men were arrested after being spotted on a hospital surveillance camera.
Nowadays, Mob killings are rare. “There is some talk that the Commission said they can’t do hits anymore,” Mouw said. “They’re still doing the beatings and the strong-arm stuff. But, as far as Mob hits, they’re not happening.” New York’s last true gangland rubout occurred in the Throggs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx, in November, 2013, when Michael Meldish, a member of a freelance criminal outfit called the Purple Gang, was shot to death. In 2019, the top leaders of the Lucchese crime family, the acting boss Matthew Madonna and his underboss Steven Crea, were convicted of the murder, along with two other men. Sentenced to life in prison, they are appealing the conviction.
There were fears of a new Mob war when the reputed boss of the Gambino family, a low-profile man named Francesco Cali, was gunned down in front of his Staten Island home, in March, 2019. But the slaying stemmed from a new kind of mayhem: the alleged killer, a QAnon follower, had become convinced that the mobster was a “deep state” representative. According to the accused’s lawyer, the man saw himself as a vigilante for President Trump. (He has been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial.)
Chris Colombo told me that his own days of crime are done, but he still looks over his shoulder. As the son of one of New York’s most famous mobsters, he believes that he remains a rich target for the law. “I’m a ten-point buck in their eyes,” he said.
In recent years, he has worked in the restaurant and construction industries, and he is currently a financial consultant. (“I was always good with numbers,” he told me.) In his spare time, he volunteers at a nonprofit that teaches reading and science to underprivileged youths. “You are only as good as your last deed,” he said. “If you take the crime out of what they say is Italian organized crime, the ethics are really very good.” ♦
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