The shooting of Joseph Colombo at a 1971 Italian American Civil Rights League rally, as recounted by Frank Sheeran, exposes the uneasy rules behind sanctioned mob violence: an attack might be approved, yet its manner could still violate protocol. Joey Gallo arranged the shooting at Columbus Circle, where Colombo was struck in front of his family and relatives. Colombo survived the attack but lingered in a coma for several years.

Background and Motive

Sheeran places the attack a couple of days before the July 1971 convention, where he says he put Jimmy Hoffa’s picture inside the convention center. In his account, Gallo enlisted an unnamed man from Harlem to carry out the shooting during a rally organized by the Italian American Civil Rights League.

The stated motive was Colombo’s growing public profile. His rallies and the publicity surrounding them were drawing attention to the alleged mob, and Sheeran says Colombo would not listen to people urging him to stop. The shooting was therefore described as sanctioned because Colombo’s public activity had become a liability. The account presents the violence not as a response to a single private grievance, but as a means of silencing a prominent figure whose visibility had become dangerous to the organization.

The Attack and Its Breach of Protocol

The setting made the attack conspicuous: Colombo was hit at a public rally and in front of his own family and relatives. Sheeran treats that circumstance as a violation of protocol. In his telling, Gallo may have had approval to attack a boss, but that approval did not extend to carrying it out in such a public, personally exposed way.

That distinction is central to Sheeran’s account. Authorization did not make every method acceptable; the setting and the presence of Colombo’s family mattered. The shooting left Colombo in a coma for years, turning what had been intended as a sanctioned removal into a prolonged and highly visible aftermath.

Reactions and Significance

Sheeran says he was certain that Russell Bufalino would have voted against sanctioning the attack had he been on the Commission. Bufalino’s position carries particular weight in the recollection: he had his own chapter of Colombo’s Italian American Civil Rights League in upstate Pennsylvania, and Sheeran had received the organization’s Man of the Year award. Sheeran says the plaque was still in his room. These details set Bufalino’s local association with the League against the decision to silence its leader, while making clear that Sheeran himself had been honored within the organization.

The episode also contains an irony in its stated rationale. Colombo’s rallies were criticized for bringing unwanted attention, yet the attack on him at one of those rallies placed violence before his family and left him comatose for years. As Sheeran tells it, the decision answered one source of publicity by creating another, and the breach of protocol lay not simply in the violence but in the exposed, public way it was done.