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Imagine a time when the United States was split in two, and then had to put itself back together. It was a time of chaos and sometimes violence, as millions of people fought for the right to become citizens. Americans struggled over questions like, who gets to be a citizen? Who has the right to vote, to own property? In short, who belongs? This was Reconstruction, the era following the Civil War, when Americans ended slavery and expanded voting rights. But none of this was easy. Many people consider the promise of Reconstruction unfulfilled. Why? Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise is a podcast hosted by Malcolm Gladwell and featuring Barack Obama that tells the story of this era. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts or ad-free on Audible. The History Channel Original Podcast History This Week, June 28, 1971 I'm Sally Helm. It's hot and humid in New York City, a festive summer morning. At Columbus Circle on the southwestern corner of Central Park, vendors are hawking sandwiches and gelato and cold orange sodas to the gathering crowd. Forty-foot plastic banners in red, green, and white flutter beneath a statue of Christopher Columbus. In fact, the colors of the Italian-American flag are everywhere. On pennants, on hats, on buttons that read, Kiss me, I'm Italian. The rally will begin at noon. It's the second annual Unity Day celebration, sponsored by the Italian-American Civil Rights League. They're concerned with fighting discrimination against Italian-Americans and combating stereotypes. They say not all Italian-Americans are mafiosos. For most of us, the godfather isn't real life. And the thousands of people at this rally are here to make their voices heard as hardworking, law-abiding citizens. Discrimination against Italian-Americans is a real problem and has long roots in the United States. But it's nevertheless ironic that the head of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, the guy who really is the League, is a reputed mob boss himself, Joe Colombo. Colombo is there at the rally on this summer morning, greeting his supporters, taking photos with politicians. People call out to him as he weaves through the crowd. Joe! Hi, Joe! At around 11.45 a.m., Columbo approaches the podium to speak.

And then... Three shots ring out from the press area near the stage. There is a moment of eerie silence. And then... Chaos. Columbo has been shot in the head He's alive, but in critical shape His horn-rimmed glasses lie a few feet from his body near a growing pool of blood Today, the rise and fall of Joe Columbo How did this reputed mafioso become a noted civil rights activist? And why aren't there any more mobster celebrities today? In early 1970s New York City, when Joe Colombo was shot, the mafia was everywhere. Mafia meaning a network of organized crime groups that carried out all kinds of illegal money-making schemes and had a ton of influence.

Whether it was the Board of Education, construction programs, the refuse industry, every stone you turned over, there was a mafia connection.

That's Selwyn Robb, a former reporter for The New York Times. He covered organized crime for more than 50 years, including Joe Colombo, who comes on the scene at a pivotal moment in the history of the mob.

Joe Colombo was a forerunner of a new era for the American mafia.

Rob told us in the early days, the 1920s and 30s.

Most of the families were run by immigrants, mainly Sicilians, some from southern Italy. You can credit Benito Mussolini, who was a fascist dictator of Italy. He launched the first crackdown against the Sicilian mafia in the 20s.

That led to an exodus of mobsters. Who had to get out of Italy because there was no real future for them there. And they came to the U.S. and they were part of the nucleus of the American mafia.

Of course, the vast majority of the people who immigrated to the U.S. from Sicily and southern Italy weren't mobsters fleeing a legal crackdown. They were just regular people looking for a better life. In fact, this era is the origin of some of the Italian-American stereotypes that the Italian-American Civil Rights League will later fight against, including the stereotype that Italians are all mafiosos and criminals. Many Italian immigrants faced discrimination in the U.S. They had to live in cramped tenements, and they couldn't get hired for high-paying jobs. To make ends meet, some, again a small number, got caught up in the worlds of racketeering and organized crime, including Joe Colombo's father.

His father got involved in the rackets. He was a nickname, Two-Gun Tony, for the two pistols that he carried in his vest all the time.

That's Don Capria. He co-wrote a book about Joe Colombo with Colombo's son, Anthony. And he told us when Joe was about 14, his father was killed, allegedly as retribution for his involvement in a decade-old murder.

So at 14 years old on the streets of Brooklyn, Joe's dad is gone and the mother is petrified. She sends the kids to go live with her mother in Bensonhurst. And Joe changed high schools. And that was kind of the start of his life, I would say, going towards the dark side.

Colombo ends up living around the corner from a friend of his dad's, Carlo Gambino, who is one of the most ruthless mobsters in history. But to Colombo, he's a mentor, a father figure.

Gambino helped him get odd jobs. You know, he worked for a butcher. He worked as a shop steward. Then he worked for a pocketbook company.

Then World War II breaks out, and Colombo joins the Coast Guard. This era sees a renewed surge of discrimination against Italian-Americans as the U.S. is fighting against the Axis powers, which included Italy.

So Italian-Americans were all caught up in this whole wave of racism. The FBI was literally banging down people's doors, pulling people out of their homes and giving people curfew and

seizing their money, freezing assets. Some hundreds of Italian-Americans were even sent to internment camps during this period. So young Italian-American soldiers, like Joe Colombo...

They're seeing their family members, their grandfathers, their parents go through this discrimination here during World War II. So there was a disdain for the FBI, I think, for a lot of Italian-Americans from World War II.

The FBI will soon become quite a large part of Joe Colombo's life. After the war, he moves to upstate New York.

He married his wife that he was with until he passed away, Jojo. Jojo and Jojo. Jojo and Jojo, yeah.

And at some point, Selwyn Robb told us, Joe Colombo gets caught up in the same organized crime world that got his dad killed. The 1950s and 60s are the beginning of a generational shift for the mob. It's still run in a highly organized way by the same five families, many of whom have their roots in Sicily. But a lot of the new mob guys had grown up in the United States.

Unlike the old-fashioned guys who were known as mustache beats, the newcomers, like Joe Colombo, spoke good English. They were born in America. They understood the culture better and the changing culture. And Colombo's opportunity came from the death of one of the original founders of the American mafia, Joe Profaci, who died in 1962.

Joe Profaci was the head of the Profaci crime family. The five big mafia families worked together in something called the Commission, which helped oversee their activities and mediate any conflicts that came up. After Profaci's death, a guy named Joe Magliocco takes over the family. And about a year later, he begins conspiring with another mob boss, another Joe, Joe Bonanno.

Who was also one of the old-fashioned mustache peets who had been around in 1931.

Bonanno's worried that Profaci's death is going to end up decreasing Bonanno's power on the commission. And so he decides to team up with the new guy, Magliocco, to take down some of their biggest... biggest

enemies. What he wanted to do was he wanted to bump off kill, hit what he considered essential rivals, old-fashioned rivals like Carlo Gambino, who was running the Gambino family. And Magliocco

says, I know who we should hire to do it. Joe Colombo. Sometimes historic events suck.

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By this point, Rob told us, Columbo has started to make a name for himself as a hitman. Like his dad. He's allegedly been working with the Profaci family. And Magliocco thinks he's the perfect guy for the job.

Little did he know, his mentor is Carl Gambino.

Don Capria again.

So what Joe did was, instead of carrying out the hit, he delivered the order and said to Carl Gambino, this is for you. They're going to try to take you out.

He went to Carlo, and he told Carlo what was up. And Carlo Gambino and the other remaining bosses cracked down on Bonanno to make sure they controlled the commission and therefore almost controlled the entire American mafia as a reward to Joe Colombo, who was a nobody practically at the time.

They renamed the family the Colombo crime family and they made Joe the patriarch of that family.

So he came out of the forest virtually, and suddenly at the age of 42, was reading one of the top five mafia families in the country.

Colombo himself would have denied up and down that he was the head of one of the top five mafia families in the country. Don Caprio told us, as far as his kids knew, he worked in real estate.

When I worked the book with Anthony, one of the first things that he told me, he says, look, I really don't have the stories of what my father did every day. He didn't come home from work and put a gun on the table and say, you know, today as a mob boss, I did such and such. He actually denied everything.

But meanwhile, the 1960s are the mafia's golden age. That's when Sel Robb was covering them as a journalist in New York City and seeing their fingerprints everywhere. Robb told us in some ways the mob was sort of a shadow city government. And they were making lots of money. They had influence in a bunch of unions, and that was lucrative. They also had a hand in gambling, loan sharking.

If you wanted sometimes a loan, you couldn't get, you were a small business or a business that was in trouble and couldn't get a bank loan, you'd go to a loan shark. So they were providing a service. And at most times, except for the occasional killings, they were part of the fabric of the New York civilization. And as long as they didn't really threaten anybody, they profited.

If the mob did want to threaten somebody, the guy to do it would be low-level.

So if they got busted, it was nothing. A mafia boss didn't have to pull a trigger, didn't have to extort personally from anybody else. So he didn't commit anything. All he did was get the wealth.

We also talked about Columbo with Jeff Schumacher, who runs the exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. He told us Columbo really cared about the Mafia's image, and he was a shrewd, effective leader.

Columbo was really a very smart boss, and that's not always true in the Mafia. Sometimes a person becomes the boss because they're the toughest or, you know, because of just a logical ascension, they're the next in line. In the case of Columbo, his success was largely created because there was a facade of respectability for a lot of his people, because they worked in other legitimate jobs.

Colombo did too. He was a salesman for a real estate company, a partner in a funeral home and a florist shop.

These were legit things that he was doing. And they also kept a very low profile, which is always important. And so they got away with a lot, at least until Colombo changed his mind later.

Yes. Becoming the head of a major Italian-American civil rights organization is not consistent with keeping a low profile. But as the 1960s progress and Joe Colombo becomes a more and more important mafia figure, a spirit of activism is sweeping the country.

Mass protests occurring over civil rights, Vietnam War.

women's rights. You know, it was probably only logical that Italian-Americans who had been discriminated against for decades would join this movement. It was just particularly odd that the person who led it was someone who was involved with the mafia.

Colombo had witnessed discrimination in his community, and he'd seen law enforcement overreach during the World War II era. Now, of course, the FBI is his major adversary for other reasons, the agency had recently begun to take the mob much more seriously.

It decided to go all out and dedicate, you know, hundreds and hundreds of agents to focus on this. So Colombo is seeing this and he's seeing that the FBI is targeting Italian Americans. And so his ethnic awareness really becomes evident. And, you know, while some mafia bosses may have said, let's just lay low, let's not, you know, raise our head above the ground so that they'll see what we're doing and put us in prison, Columbo decided to fight back in public.

This is part of the reason that Sel Robb calls Columbo the beginning of a new era for the mob. He turns that traditional script of secrecy upside down. Things come to a head in 1971, when Colombo's son, Joe Jr., is arrested. The government accuses him of being part of a scheme to melt down U.S. coins into silver. But Joe Colombo thinks it's all part of a plan to put pressure on him. Here's Don Capria.

The attack, Joe felt, was personal. He also felt it didn't belong within the government to penalize these people that don't have anything to do with organized crime. So at that moment, he started the Italian American Civil Rights League. I think this becomes the midpoint in his life, you know, that point in the film where there's no turning back.

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Less than two months after Joe Colombo's son is arrested, the new Italian-American Civil Rights League holds a major public event, the first annual Unity Day rally at Columbus Circle, June 29, 1970. Columbo is the league's leader, and he has a lot of pull.

People in New York knew who Joe Columbo was, right? And so, you know, the idea that you would fight him or that you would oppose him or that you would ignore him if you were a politician or a shopkeeper or, you know, the governor of New York. You needed to keep Joe Colombo on the right side.

When the day of the rally arrives, the city is ready. In fact, the area around Columbus Circle is partially shut down.

Not everybody came willingly. Goons visited many of the merchants to insist that they shut down for the day.

But a lot of people do show up willingly. As many as 200,000 people come out to Columbus Circle. Don Capria told us.

Joe tapped into this vein that was explosive. You know, it was just, it was just, this moment was waiting to happen.

I thank God that I was born of Italian birth.

But today, this day belongs to you, the people. You are organized. You are one. Nobody could take you apart anymore.

After the rally, the crowd marches down to protest in front of the FBI's office, led personally by Joe Colombo, a man the FBI was pretty familiar with because they were currently tapping his phones. All that summer, the league's profile continues to rise.

The word on the street was, like, if you had a problem and you were an Italian-American, you go to a league meeting at the Park Sheraton Hotel on a Wednesday night And you get to stand and you get to say your problem to them and they will help you. So a young lawyer in 1970 goes and he tells about the city planning commission who wanted to bulldoze homes to put an athletic field in an athletic building.

These homes were in Corona, Queens, a neighborhood where many Italian-Americans lived. And the Italian-American Civil Rights League starts protesting the demolition.

gather in massive numbers at City Hall, and they're ultimately successful. That young lawyer who showed up at the meeting became a hero. His name was Mario Cuomo. He turned out to be the future governor of New York. Colombo and the League also start a somewhat ironic campaign to get important people to stop using the word mafia. They also want to stamp out the use of the phrase la cosa nostra, translated to our thing, which was a Sicilian term for mafia. They said this language was helping to perpetuate the stereotype that Italian Americans were criminals and made it seem like all organized crime in the U.S. was organized by Italians. And later that year, 1970, Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell did ban those words from Justice Department communications. There is nothing to be gained by using these terms, Mitchell said, except to give gratuitous offense to many good Americans of Italian-American descent.

Here's Jeff Schumacher. Mitchell saw that politically it would be wise to make a gesture to win over Italian-Americans. Everything in the Nixon administration was politically oriented. Nixon believed that the mob had helped John F. Kennedy win an election back in 1960. So I'm sure Nixon, wanting to be re-elected, certainly didn't want the Italian-Americans on the other side.

This is a pretty big victory in the war on words, but a perhaps even more important battle would soon be fought in Hollywood. In 1970, production began on what would become one of the most famous films of all time, The Godfather. It was based on a book of the same name that had become a massive bestseller. Columbo was very invested in the film and how it would portray the mafia. What was his role on The Godfather? Like, how did he get involved with that movie and why?

He wrote the script, as you guys know. I'm just kidding. He wanted to meet with the film producers and they didn't want to meet with him.

But Columbo knew how to apply pressure. He used his clout with the unions to help get the producers' attention. And also, the movie's director, Francis Ford Coppola, wanted to film on location in New York, in Little Italy. So one day...

When they went down to Little Italy to look at locations, they brought this brand new cinemobile truck that had all these brand new lenses and whatnot in it.

Coppola and his team go have lunch at Umberto's Clam House, a famous spot in the neighborhood. And after they finished...

They walk back up to Hester Street and the truck is gone.

Wait, wait, what happened to the truck?

It was stolen.

By who?

I don't know. I really don't.

But whoever stole the truck.

I think that was like the final straw of like, hey, you're going to talk to us.

One of the film's producers ends up meeting with Columbo and members of the League to hear their concerns. Then he meets with Columbo again and agrees to remove the one appearance of the word mafia from the script. And Columbo's even able to get some of his associates cast as extras. The Italian-American Civil Rights League brings its war on words to the press, too. One time, they even blockade the New York Times building in protest and won't let the delivery trucks leave. Selwyn Robb remembers what this era was like.

Every newspaper in New York had a mafia element. It was either in the printers or in the deliverers, especially in the deliverers. So they had that weapon that sometimes stories were rewritten. No question about it. I had difficulties when I worked for the New York Times. They would want to alter lines because the deliverers of somebody else complained.

Colombo was personally able to use the media to his advantage in other ways, too.

He liked the attention. I mean, he was the first mafia boss, probably since Al Capone in more innocent days, who cultivated the media.

Colombo sat down for interviews, went on talk shows. Here he is speaking to reporters.

Is this happening because you are Joe Colombo or because you're a Italian-American defense? I say there's a conspiracy in this country against all Italian-Americans.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with CBS News.

I have always maintained and said there is no mafia, there is no Rosa Nostra. And I said that this was only a harassment of the Justice Department, of the administration, and the law enforcement agencies. For no other reason than to hate people, to hate children, and to brainwash and use the Italian people as the scapegoat for each and every crime that's committed in this country.

Putting his face out there like this was a huge change from the previous secretive eras of organized crime.

It came at a cost.

He became too conspicuous.

The FBI starts ramping up its efforts against Colombo. They're able to charge him with a number of small crimes, but none of the charges stick. And Colombo's rivals also don't like to see how public-facing he's become. They think this could be bad for all of them. So as Colombo is planning the second annual Unity Day rally, he's feeling the pressure from all sides. Finally, Don Caprio says, Colombo tells his family,

Look, I'm going to do the event, I'm going to show up, and I'm going to support, and I'm going to step down, and I'm going to disappear from this for a while to make a lot of you happy.

On June 28, 1971, a crowd once again gathers at Columbus Circle. The weather is perfect. Columbo's there, checking on things before the program begins.

Joe had just finished talking to someone, put a little fire out about someone that was selling some kind of ice cream without having the permit.

Then he walks over to the press area to greet some reporters. A man named Jerome Johnson is there with press credentials. And at about 11.45, as Columbo is moving towards the stage...

Jerome Johnson shoots him in the back of the head when his head is turned three times.

Columbo falls to the ground. Some officers tackle the shooter, but then there's another shot. Somehow, someone manages to shoot Columbo's assassin, and then that second shooter slips out of the crowd. Both men are rushed to the hospital. The shooter, Johnson, dies, and Columbo goes into surgery. The rally at Columbus Circle does proceed, but listlessly. The crowd gets periodic updates on Columbo's condition. And after six hours of surgery, Columbo does survive.

He lasted, I think, seven years. But he was paralyzed. He was a living corpse.

The Italian-American Civil Rights League never recovered either.

It couldn't last without Joe Colombo. He was the guy to keep it alive and running. It was his connections. It was his forceful, never-take-no-for-an-answer attitude towards it. So everything changed after those three bullets.

There are many different theories out there about who shot Joe Colombo and why. A lot of people, including Selwyn Robb, say it's most likely this grew out of Columbo's life in organized crime. Rival mobster Joey Gallo had recently gotten out of prison and had a long-standing feud with Columbo. About seven months after Columbo was shot, Gallo went out to a restaurant.

It was on his birthday party at a restaurant in Little Italy, early in the morning, 2 or 3 a.m. He was having dinner with friends and his bodyguard, And they spotted him there and they bumped off, they took care of Joey Gallo.

A lot of people, both within law enforcement and the mafia itself, believe that the they here is Colombo loyalists taking revenge. But there are other theories out there. Don Capria thinks the FBI themselves might have had something to do with Colombo's death. The FBI declined to comment for this story. But no matter who shot Joe Colombo, we can say that the era he represented for the mafia is now over. Organized crime has gone back underground.

You won't find any mob boss anybody knows of. They're so inconspicuous. Even law enforcement is often unsure who's running each family. They've withdrawn. The new mafia has also recruited, because they consider them more loyal and steadfast and will never rat, a lot of Sicilians. So some of the families today are actually run by Sicilian immigrants.

Just as they were in the pre-Columbo era. Jeff Schumacher also told us that movies like The Godfather, which Columbo tried so hard to influence, ended up having an impact not just on how the public saw the mob, but also on how the mob saw themselves. He said if you listen to FBI wiretaps from the 1970s.

This weird thing kind of developed with the younger mafia guys where they weren't natural anymore. They were acting as if they were in the movie, right? The movie was more real than the actual life.

Joe Colombo may not have predicted this, but he knew the influence movies and pop culture could have on the public image of Italian-Americans. And he tried to make that image as favorable as he possibly could.

possibly could. But the mob movies and TV shows didn't stop. The Sopranos is one of the most popular series of all time, and it's a show about the mafia. In The Sopranos' fourth season, Joe Colombo himself actually comes up in conversation when Tony Soprano's associate explains why he supports Colombo's cause. I'm an Italian-American, and I pay money to the

Italian Anti-Defamation Coordination Council, Ambosta. We're the victims here. Oh, you write a check, too. Don't. Let's not forget. It was a friend of ours, Joe Colombo, who founded the first Italian-American anti-defamation organization.

Colombo might have been glad that this show was focusing on his civil rights work. But they also call him a friend of ours, meaning a fellow member of the mafia. even though Columbo went to his grave claiming to be just a regular guy who wanted to take care of his own. Press, and me, Sally Helm. McKamey Lynn is our senior producer, and our editor and sound designer is Jonathan Seary. Our researcher is Emma Fredericks. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz and Ted Butler. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.