Joe Colombo shooting

The Joe Colombo shooting was a sanctioned attack on the Colombo crime family boss during a public rally in 1971, carried out in front of his family. In Frank Sheeran’s recollection, the episode joined a political dispute over publicity to a breach of mob protocol: Colombo survived the shooting but lingered in a coma for several years, while the man associated with the attack, Joey Gallo, soon became a conspicuous source of attention in his own right.

Background and Motive

A couple of days before the July 1971 convention, Colombo was shot at a rally of the Italian-American Civil Rights League at Columbus Circle. Sheeran understood the attack as having been sanctioned because Colombo’s rallies were drawing attention to the alleged mob. Colombo, he said, would not listen to those who wanted him to stop holding them. The violence was therefore presented not as an unconnected eruption but as a response to a public profile that powerful figures considered a liability.

Sheeran’s account places Russell Bufalino at a remove from the decision but suggests he would have opposed it. Had Bufalino sat on the commission, Sheeran was certain he would have voted against the sanction. Bufalino had his own chapter of the Italian American Civil Rights League in upstate Pennsylvania, and Sheeran had received the chapter’s man-of-the-year award; he kept its plaque in his room. That personal association makes Sheeran’s assessment more specific than a general claim about mob politics, while still presenting Bufalino’s position as his own judgment rather than a recorded vote.

The Attack and Its Breach of Protocol

The attack struck at Colombo in public and in front of his relatives. Sheeran describes the method through the mob’s euphemism of kissing a target, but stresses that the setting violated protocol. He believed Gallo had approval to attack a boss such as Colombo, yet not to do it before Colombo’s family. In this telling, authorization and conduct were separate matters: the attack could be sanctioned while the way it was carried out remained an offense against the rules governing violence.

Colombo did not die at the scene. He lingered in a coma for several years, a consequence that distinguishes the shooting from a cleanly completed assassination. The account’s language of protocol thus surrounds an act whose lasting result was bodily incapacitation, not an immediate death.

Gallo and the Publicity Reversal

Sheeran’s account turns from the attack to the attention Gallo attracted afterward. Gallo appeared in New York newspapers and moved among show-business figures, movie stars, writers, and the city’s nightlife; photographers followed him, and he went to plays and out on the town. The man associated with the attack was, in Sheeran’s telling, drawing even more publicity than Colombo had. A measure intended to suppress unwanted attention had become entangled with the conspicuous life of the figure who carried it out.

The account also links Gallo’s lifestyle to a reported shakedown of a restaurant in Little Italy, Manhattan. Sheeran says he had heard that Gallo was extorting the restaurant to afford his rich-and-famous social life, and presents interference in the neighborhood as especially unacceptable. This adds a local and criminal dimension to the publicity problem: Gallo was not merely visible in the papers but was reportedly imposing himself on a place where such activity was out of bounds.

Retrospective Significance

The episode is narrated as part of Sheeran’s recollection of the people and rules surrounding organized violence. Its central contrast is between public exposure and controlled action: Colombo’s rallies were described as provoking the sanction, yet his shooting before family crossed a boundary, and Gallo’s subsequent celebrity made him an even greater publicity concern. The account preserves the distinction between what Sheeran says was sanctioned, what he regards as a protocol violation, and what he reports hearing about Gallo’s later conduct.