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a beer, and let's talk some true crime. [Music] We are ready for part two of our
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interview with Don talking about Joseph Columbbo. Just a little recap here. At the height of Joseph Columbo's influence
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on June 28th, 1971, he was shot while standing inside a press barricade at Columbus Circle a few hours before an
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Italian American civil rights rally. The shooter, Jerome Johnson, was immediately
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subdued and handcuffed by police. Johnson had posed as a cameraman with official press credentials. Minutes
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after Johnson was subdued, he was shot and murdered while still handcuffed and surrounded by a sea of New York Police
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Department. >> Yeah. And Joseph Columbo would survive the the attack or the attempted
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assassination. He would end up in a coma for roughly about seven years. >> Yeah. And we we know who the shooter is,
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but the who was operating the strings, you know, on the puppet. >> What was the motive? And who and was
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this a hit? Was this a lone gunman? Was this a hit? Was this a conspiracy by the
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government? We're going to dive more into that right now. >> And the other thing too here, Captain,
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we got Jerome Johnson who's killed after the shooting and his murder's unsolved as well.
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>> So, hold on tight. Here it comes. Part two with Nick and Don. I agree with what Columbbo was trying to
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do, trying to keep the FBI under wraps and holding them to the the set of laws that they've created and been a part of.
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But don't we find this a little bit hypocritical? Because I mean, he's not really a lawabiding citizen himself. of
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I I mean, if you were to take everything in hindsight and look at all of it, was
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he the person that was supposed to be championing this cause? And you know, the the answer has to be yes, because
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who else had the balls and who had the courage and who had the people and who had the people behind organized crime to
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make something like this happen? But yes, when you're when you're looking at this through the mic, you know, if you
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look through, it's depends on what scope you're looking through this. If you look
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at through the microscope, you're saying, "No, this is not Joe Columbo's job. Joe Columbo is a criminal. Joe
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Columbo could have killed people. We just need to attack and go after people like him." And then if you do, if you if
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you if you cut him off from doing this, you know, did you have any community leaders at the time that would fight for
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something like this? So I think because what was happening to him and to his family and the fact that he may have
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been in this storm was the reason why he knew how hard you had to fight against these people to stop all this from
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happening. And it's it's it's a it's it's really difficult because you have to compartmentalize how you believe who
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you believe Joe Colbo was. Can you be the type of person that wakes up in the morning um goes to work uh collects
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money on a number racket, let's say, and I'm just I'm just putting this all out as example. These aren't things that I
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know that he was doing, but uh you know, collecting on lone sharking and then going in to the FBI and saying, "Hey,
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you guys are you know, you're you can't come and search my home without a warrant and you shouldn't be wiretapping
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my phone and you shouldn't, you know, have people sitting in a car watching people go to eat and that's not what
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taxpayer money should be for." So, it's really it's a it's definitely a thing that leans into is he a hypocrite for
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doing this? Um, but I have to say that, you know, the reason that he's doing this because I think he's he's a victim
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of this. So, he has to he has to do this. I think he was backed into this. >> So, Joe Columbo decides to pick a fight
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with Jay Edgar Hoover, one of the most powerful men in America. That takes some balls.
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>> Yeah. Um, Joe had uh had no fear. That was definitely something a lot of people
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had told me about him. Um, you know, he was short in stature, but he was very large in heart and strength. And this
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was a guy that would he went after the probably the scariest human being in the United States at the time above the
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president. Um, and when he did this, he did this with intelligence. Um he knew that the strength of the people and the
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mob meaning the folks you know like Roman mob could change things in society. And what really probably
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affected the FBI and and the Justice Department was when Joe made an example and he marched 200,000
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people into Columbus Circle and then rallied and took tens of thousands of those people to the FBI offices and it
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started getting to the point where it was the crowd control was not even legal to be handled by the police department
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and Joe had to calm everyone down and send everybody home. and he started to see that, you know, Joe wasn't just
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going after the FBI, he was going after them with a weapon that could not be um could not be silenced, which was the
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voices of all these people and the action of all these people. So Hoover, as big and as powerful as he is, he is
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only one person. And and after that rally, the first unity day rally in in 1970,
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um President Nixon had to have uh they made a speech and it was at the attorney general, actually,
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John Mitchell, who who made the announcement on national television that the words Lakota Nostra and Mafia would
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no longer be used in any government uh paperwork or any government dialogue because it was defamatory against the
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Italian-American people. And Joe's crime cry for this. But why he was fighting against those words so much was because
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he felt that there if there's crime, there's crime everywhere. There's crime in the community amongst Latinos.
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There's crime in the community amongst the Jews. There's crime in the community amongst the blacks. If if one or two
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people conspire to commit a crime together, well then at that point you have a conspiracy or you have an
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organization. And it seemed that the Justice Department only wanted to lock up, go after and and sit and watch
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Italian-Americans and mafia. And not only through the the Justice Department, but also through television media. Um,
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we've seen plenty of films come out up until this point. And they were all aimed at the Italian-American community
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and and mafia. And this is what people were being known for. any person that you saw on the street that was
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successful that had a a nice jacket and a nice car and wore gold, they were mafia. They were like Kosinostra and and
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Joe had a disdain for these two words and just felt that this was going to hurt his community for anyone to be
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successful and take it seriously. So, um he went after Hoover and he went after the Justice Department first. This is
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the biggest battle that he could have went after first. Um, he did this before he went after the media people, but he
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was successful and and that was definitely I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall if Nixon was
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having a meeting with John Mitchell and and Ed Jay Edgar Hoover discussing how they needed to take those words out and
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not only take them out but bow down and tell it to national television that those words would no longer be used.
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>> Now, this will play a big part in the attack that will happen later. But tell
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us what Unity Day is. Unity Day was the rally that was held in Columbus Circle on 1970. Um, and it was
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the first one was in in June on the 29th, I believe, in 1970. Um, this was this was what Joe wanted to do. He
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wanted to show the force of the Italian-American people. um he had been setting up lots of uh picketing at the
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FBI offices and then they started to realize that they needed to make a bigger statement. So, he decided that he
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was going to tell people to close their stores, um, have people take a day off of work, and they were going to rally.
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And for the f, you know, he had seen what the Sons of Italy had been doing, and he had seen what aid had been doing,
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and a lot of the Italian-American organizations, but he knew the power of the Italian-American people within the
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city. He knew that they were building the city. He knew that they were working in the education. He knew that they they
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they were such a strong part of the New York community, but they had never really organized. So he wanted to create
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unity day to unite all of these different Italian-Americans at one place at one time to show the strength of them
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in New York so they could be taken a little bit more seriously because the problems were that he wanted to combat
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with the Italian-American Civil Rights League went way beyond problems with how the Justice Department was treating
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criminals. They also had an education department that was run by Steve Ielo who later became the educations are
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under Ronald Reagan. And what Io and Columbbo were working on was the fact that with the almost 15th of the
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population in the school systems or I think it was even more than that there was no Italian-Americans that had any
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administrative jobs in the education systems in New York as a vice principal or principal and they wanted to see some
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change. They wanted action, you know, just like affirmative action. They wanted to see Italian-Americans in
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positions of power um so that they can they can have a voice and they they also wanted to help uh what was a major drug
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problem that was going on in the city for a lot of the youths uh in Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx at the time. And as
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Joe started to learn more and more going around as a community leader, he saw that if they could organize and if the
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Italian-American Civil Rights League could be a strong force, they could start knocking these problems out that
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the government may not be able to help knock out, but community can as a whole. And one of the major cases that they
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helped with, um, there was a young lawyer that was fighting, I don't know if you're familiar with the 69 Corona
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homes case, uh, where they were doing eminent domain and they were going to knock down these 69 homes in Corona,
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Queens so that they could put up school system, but all the homeowners had told them there's this huge parcel of land
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that they can use to just build the school and you don't have to take our homes from us. And they did not want to
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leave. But these people had no representation. So, it was a young Italian-American lawyer that was
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fighting this case, but on his own, showing up at city hall and and and trying to without any political power,
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he wasn't getting any leeway. And he went and spoke in front of the league at a league meeting. And then they got the
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support of the league and they got protesters and they went down to city hall and they ended up winning the case.
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And that young attorney was Mario Cuomo who ended up becoming governor of New York. Later on
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>> in 1971 there was that famous event that took place and Joe Columbo is attacked
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and he is shocked. Can you take us through that day and any events leading up to that day?
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>> Yeah. Leading up to that um was where a whirlwind of trouble started happening
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for Columbbo. Um one of the things was that Joe Gallo was released from from prison uh after serving about a 10-year
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sentence. And at this time Larry Gallow his brother had already passed away. So there was really no one in that
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organization that could say anything to Joe Gallow to sway his opinion. And he probably had suffered from poor impulse
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control. And he came home and he was making it well known that he had a problem with Joe. He had a problem with
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his Italian-American Civil Rights League. And I think that he also wanted to hurt Colbo. Probably a coup or some
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something to that effect. So there was a lot of um there was a lot of things leading up to this day that um were
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against Joe. And another one was that um the league was bringing a lot of heat to
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the organized crime families because they started to see like wow a lot of these figures that are helping out with
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all this we believe are involved in illegal activities. So I had mentioned earlier that there was a gentleman that
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mentored Joe as he was a little kid who was very close with Joe's father and Joe
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continued a relationship with that man throughout his entire life. Um that that man was Carl Gambino and Carl Gambino
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and Joe's relationship was that of a father-son relationship. And I think leading up to the the unity day, the
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second Unity Day in 1971, which which shooting happened, that Carl had expressed to Joe that he needed to step
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down from the league, that he he had chosen a path in his life already and he needs to follow that path without
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bringing the attention of the news media because by this point, Joe was already on television shows. He was doing radio.
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He was, you know, speaking to reporters and it was just it he was while he wasn't getting arrested but not
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convicted of anything, he was in in a little bit of a a heavy situation with with everything from the FBI to the, you
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know, the state investigators. So Carl asked him to publicly step down and and and leave this in the hands of
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his son Anthony and and Nat Maronei to let them run the organization. And Joe told him that he would. And Joe was
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going to take a back seat and have his son and Natt Maronei run this organization. And leading up to that
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rally, the rumors were also out that Joe Galla was going to do something to try to disrupt the rally. And there was
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definitely a lot of things flying around in the streets of New York. And that day
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prior to the start of the event, there was a gentleman Jerome Johnson who had press credentials. So he was in the the
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press circle right next to the stage. And this is about two hours before the event started. Um he had a Bolex camera
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and whether this weapon was on him or it was handed to him, many believe I believe that there was an accomplice, a
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female woman that was also at the event that day. um this German pistol when Joe
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turned around he pulled it out and shot it three times hit Joe all three times in the back of the head in the neck and
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Joe immediately went down to the ground. Um you can imagine the pandemonium of about 15 20,000 people in this this
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small congested area of Columbus Circle. Um many of them law enforcement. The shooter was tackled immediately by an
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officer named Giuliani Skeozi who smacked the gun out of his hand and then he was held down to the ground by about
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five to seven officers. You had FBI guys, you had um homicide detectives. I would even guess there was CIA there. I
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can't confirm that, but I can confirm hom New York homicide uh police officers and FBI. And within about a minute or
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two, while Jerome Johnson was handcuffed face down on the pavement, someone stuck
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a revolver to his back and shot him twice in the back. He wasn't killed immediately. He actually lived until he
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made it to Roosevelt Hospital. Joe was also taken to Roosevelt Hospital and with these three wounds, you know,
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expected to die. They did emergency surgeries on him. Um, and he did survive. He lingered in a coma for seven
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years following the shooting, but the shooting itself was fatal. Um, he ended up passing in 1978 upstate. Um, and
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Jerome Johnson, again, he was silenced that day. So, we never knew who pro who put Joe Jerome Johnson to
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shoot Joe Colombo. Who was the man behind this? Because there had to be a mastermind, especially after I learned
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more and more about Jerome Johnson. this was not the type of person that would just walk into Columbus Circle and shoot
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Joe Colombo for the sake of. And you know, in the book that I wrote, um the final chapter outlines four major
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theories that were spoken of um about who would be behind the shooting of Joe Colo.
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And I don't have a smoking gun, but I definitely have a loaded one because there's so much information that had
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been put out by the media at that time that had no backing. There was no evidence to back any of the things that
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the chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, was saying to the public. And every other week or so, he was saying he was
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very close to making arrest. Very that he had sources. Seedman never revealed his sources. He never made an arrest.
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And even what Seedman was saying and who Seedman was saying was behind the shooting, the head of the organized
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crime task force, Dennis Holman from the FBI was countering what Seedman was saying, telling him that this was not
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possible, that this was not that style of of of mob hit that he believed it was um for a specific amount of money. And
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let me get into the the money on that situation because when Joe Columbo was shot,
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a few things happened, right? You have the pandemonium. Imagine this. There's three bullets. Bang, bang, bang. The
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Jerome Johnson gets tackled within a minute. Bang, bang. Jerome Johnson shot in the back. as the police are are
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trying to secure a crime scene, what they could or the only thing that they could do with
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so many thousands of people around there was they grabbed the guns that were used. There was another gun laying on
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the floor. There was a briefcase laying next to Columbbo. And if you look online, you you can see a lot of these
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photos. Uh Getty Images probably has them. Um, so when they went to the hospital, Giuliani Skiozi, who I
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interviewed, the police officer that tackled Jerome Johnson and rode with him in the medical vehicle to Roosevelt
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Hospital, he sat with Jerome Johnson in the room when they came in and placed a tow tag on him. And he also had these
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two pistols and these two briefcases. And within those briefcases, Skozi knew that there was $40,000 in one briefcase.
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And then the other briefcase had another set amount of thousands of dollars, a little bit less. Um, Albert Seaman came
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in that day, looked at Jerome Johnson's body, looked at Skozi, and he had his homicide detectives with him. And while
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Skiozi said he never saw Seedman touch the guns, touch the money, when he walked out of the room, the money was
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gone, and that money never made it into the evidence lockers. And Seedman always
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said he knew how much the hit was for. It is my belief that Seedman knew how much the hit was for cuz he thinks
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someone walked into Columbus Circle and dropped $40,000 there so Jerome Johnson would what? Shoot Joe Colombo in front
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of thousands of people and I believe over a thousand police officers were there that day. Grab a
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briefcase and walk off with the money. this theory and and what Seedman believes happened that day is very
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pedestrian and I I I love his book Chief and I think he's been behind a lot of great investigations in New York City,
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but this just never sat right with me. And this was also, you know, reading Chief and reading other books was one of
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the reasons I wanted to write this story and talk about Joe Colombo because this
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is a cold case. This is we're talking 40ome years ago. This is an unsolved murder in the streets of New York. While
00:22:03
the murder is solved in in the pedestrian sense that yes, Jerome Johnson is the shooter of Joe Columbo
00:22:10
and Jerome Johnson is dead. We don't know the plan. We don't know the blueprint of why all of this stuff
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happened. And you know, when I learned about Cointelp Pro and I learned about Hoover and and the dirty tricks that he
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was doing in the in the government against our own citizens, Hoover had learned all
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this stuff from the CIA and he had learned what we were doing in Iran and he had learned what we were doing in all
00:22:35
these other countries with counter intelligence and he was applying it here to the US to make sure that our
00:22:41
political system was not affected. So if there was any political dissident, they
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had tactics that would go in to disrupt those organizations. And there's documentation of these tactics.
00:22:52
Everything from sending letters to communists that there was organized crime people that wanted to bomb their
00:22:59
buildings to create tension between communists and organized crime people. And and these were all the things that
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Hoover was doing. And I I have to think that if this is the stuff that I'm reading in actual FBI documentation,
00:23:12
what was the stuff that was said and spoken about and done that wasn't printed on an FBI document? And and this
00:23:19
was a lot of the the interesting stuff that I unders I I discovered doing the investigation side, which I did about
00:23:27
two years of investigation and interviews before I even started writing the book. And I just had to believe that
00:23:33
there was so much more going on for the the political and the government and the
00:23:37
FBI side for Joe Colo's murder than just to believe John Q public story that this
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was a power struggle and Joe Gallow hired a black person. He met black people in prison and Jerome Johnson shot
00:23:49
him and then Jerome Johnson gets shot and then a year later Gallow dies and that's it. Case closed. Boom. Let's move
00:23:55
on. >> Wow. So let me get this straight. We have this attack. It takes place in front of thousands of people. Two guys
00:24:02
are shot. They're rushed to the hospital. One of them dies. There's two guns recovered. And then the money,
00:24:08
there's money, but it's lost. And Joe Columbo, he's a strong dude. Somehow he's shot he's shot in the head and yet
00:24:15
he survives. >> Yes, he had shot in the back of the head. Um, one of them was actually more
00:24:22
towards the lower throat area. Um, but yeah, he he was shot three times in the back of the head and he survived it. So,
00:24:29
just to get a clearer picture here, we have two people that have been shot. One is the shooter of the of the first
00:24:36
victim. Are they both taken to the same hospital? Are they both taken to Roosevelt?
00:24:40
>> Yes, both shooting victims were taken to Roosevelt. Joe upstairs to ICU immediately to have emergency surgery.
00:24:49
And as I was told, Jerome Johnson died either right at arrival or a few moments after arrival at Roosevelt.
00:24:59
>> So Joe Colomo survives the attack, but his shooter Johnson is dead. Now Columbo
00:25:05
lives for years. We don't know what Johnson would have said about this attack or who was involved or what the
00:25:10
motives could have been for for the shooting, but Columbo's still alive, but he's in a coma for years,
00:25:16
>> seven years after the attack. um seven years and and I wouldn't say that this
00:25:23
was just a coma because uh as Anthony has told me he had the ability to move his hands and fingers and I do believe
00:25:32
that there was communication that happened um with him and his family members throughout those seven years and
00:25:38
there were many surgeries as well. So, I'm I'm pretty sure that, you know, this was um something that even people in the
00:25:47
organized crime world and in the FBI were very afraid that Joel was going to recover from this and and come out and,
00:25:54
you know, he he needed for for a lot of people, he needed to be silenced. They needed this to be a murder. They didn't
00:26:01
need this to be a shooting that he ever recovered from. Because I I do believe that like a lot of the assassinations
00:26:08
that we have seen from Bobby Kennedy to JFK to Martin Luther King, when we see a
00:26:14
leader that has the control of the people and his opponents are trying to defame him and and trying to ruin his
00:26:23
name and ruin his credibility and they cannot. And this is what was happening for the 365 days before Joe's death. The
00:26:31
FBI and the Justice Department were going after him with everything that they had. He was in the newspaper almost
00:26:38
every single day leading up to that shooting. And arrests were made leading up to that shooting like never before.
00:26:44
But it was he was the teflon d. There was nothing that was affecting his power amongst the people. And when you have
00:26:52
the power of the people, you have all of the power. And and this is what I would
00:26:57
believe would be the breaking point for the Justice Department and for an organization like Cointelpro and for
00:27:04
Hoover to have to say this man has to go. This man needs to be taken out. Like the Black Panther leader, like Martin
00:27:11
Luther King, like anyone that has power that they cannot tap into. Don, do you believe had Joe Columbo been
00:27:38
able to see who shot him? He was shot in the back. If he would have been able to
00:27:43
see who shot him or if he would have not been in a coma, would he have been able
00:27:48
to tell us who was responsible for this attack or what organization was trying to take him down?
00:27:53
>> I no, because I believe this this was the government. I think he would have known this and I think he would have I
00:28:02
think he would have went for the throat still with the same tenacity that he was
00:28:06
prior to the shooting. But I I don't think that he would have had I think it was the plan obviously was successful
00:28:14
because here we are 40some years later and and even after you know Hoover had passed away and they learned about
00:28:22
Cullen Telpo and they learned about all the illegal activities and the I don't want to say his name wrong but Senator
00:28:28
Keover or Coffover had had the hearings in 1978 where FBI members that were active in the 60s and the 70s had to
00:28:36
come and speak about the illegal activities. It was before one of those committee
00:28:41
hearings that seven men within a six-month period ended up dying before they spoke at those committee hearings.
00:28:49
So, we're we're talking about and I and I I hate to put tinfoil hat on here, but
00:28:54
this is very real stuff that has happened in the United States and with our government and with the power,
00:29:02
whether it be the military complex or the FBI that, you know, we can't we we cannot show the blueprint. Joe could not
00:29:09
come out of this coma and say, "This is what happened. A happened, then B, then C, then D, and it equals this." And and
00:29:16
I think that's the biggest problem with with any of the people that are out there today that they can't believe any
00:29:21
of these stories is because we don't have enough evidence. But even even with the evidence that we see sometimes we
00:29:29
just don't want to be distracted with our everyday lives to look at this kind of stuff and believe that it happened.
00:29:33
And I would say that that is relevant today with the situation of Julian Assange and Snowden. these people that
00:29:40
are telling you your government is doing illegal activity on you, spying on you,
00:29:45
and doing and we're all just waiting for the next iPhone to come out, keeping up
00:29:50
with the Kardashians, watching movies, watching football, getting involved in politics arguments, and leaving all this
00:29:58
very real stuff alone. >> They're very good at keeping us entertained so our minds don't wander.
00:30:02
Meanwhile, they're keeping tabs on us the whole time. >> Yeah. They either they Well, they either
00:30:06
keep you entertained or they keep you injured. And how they keep us injured is we're either financially injured or
00:30:13
we're injured by our health. And if if you're not, then you're entertained. So it's it's either one or the other that
00:30:20
keeps us kind of let's just say it's sedated by these drugs, the drug of injury or the drug of entertainment. And
00:30:26
and with that and and then also the easiest tactic that any ruler uses on its people is divide and conquer. And
00:30:34
we've seen one of the biggest divide and conquer situations here with this last political campaign, Trump versus Hillary
00:30:41
Clinton, where you have this nation versus against each other, you know, and here we are of thinking there's going to
00:30:50
be a change with what happens when we we I hope you know that there's really not
00:30:56
going to be a great change in what happens. They're just going to, you know, it's a two-party system and it it
00:31:01
creates a lot of uh news media hype and then here we go for another four years. >> I guess I'm lucky that I'm entertained
00:31:08
and not injured. Your book presents several good theories as to what actually took place and who took down
00:31:15
Joe Colombo. Could you go through one of those theories for us? One of the theories is the lone gunman theory that
00:31:22
uh Jerome Johnson was this uh wandery kind of you know in the weeds human being who oh wanted to be a filmmaker
00:31:32
and just wanted to be someone that people knew his name. He wanted his you know five minutes of fame and he had
00:31:40
done all these he was a criminal. He was he was arrested many times and at at I show evidence also in the book that it
00:31:47
was probably it's to surprise that he was even out in the streets and not locked up at the time of the shooting
00:31:54
because he must have there there's things that he was arrested for that he should have gotten jail time that he
00:32:00
didn't. So, um the lone gunman theory as I'm investigating that I'm starting to see more and more that there was
00:32:06
probably someone in the justice department helping him along. Um, and the lone gunman theory states that he
00:32:12
would have he had plane tickets to travel out of the country and he would buy rent this Bolex camera with $2,000
00:32:19
that he didn't have in Boston a few days before, drive down to New York City, take the Bolex camera in, he got himself
00:32:27
fake press credentials, um, and he had this German pistol and he goes and he shoots Joe Colombo and he was either
00:32:37
going to walk off or it was a su suicide mission goddess and and I I look at that
00:32:42
theory and I think this just doesn't add up. And then you can you could always go
00:32:49
and pull the insanity card and just say well insanity does not add up. Insanity is just insanity. There is no motive
00:32:55
needed. It is just because the man is crazy. But that doesn't add up either because he didn't make crazy moves. He
00:33:03
wasn't a lunatic. He wasn't someone that showed signs of a lunatic. was just someone that wanted to be someone. He
00:33:09
wanted to be a filmmaker. He had a lot of women that he slept with and used for different things. And this this is not a
00:33:16
lunatic. He was he was a um a charismatic dreamer. So the lone gunman theory never sat with me. Um, the other
00:33:25
theory was the the Gallo and Gambino theory, which was that Gallo had gotten the blessing from Carl Gambino to send a
00:33:37
shooter into Columbus Circle and kill Joe Colombo. Now with with this theory the the holes that are in it and
00:33:46
that's what I instead of saying why the one theory works more than the other mine was kind of the analization of
00:33:52
taking away why this doesn't work and the the first thing that I I noticed about the Gambino Gallow theory was just
00:34:00
that the commission let's say you know the organized crime commission they would sanction hits and if if Gambino
00:34:07
was sanctioning Joe Colbo to be murdered in Columbus Circle in front on 20,000. This is
00:34:13
against what the commission does. They put a law into effect um after the castle liberated wars that mob murders
00:34:21
would not be public murders anymore. And you could see if you looked throughout history that people were shot in a bar.
00:34:28
People just disappeared. There was no more public display of murder until 1990s when um Paul Castalano was shot in
00:34:35
front of Spark steakhouse because John Gotti wanted to bring back the old school style of murder. Now, even that
00:34:41
in itself, a public display of murder is not what we're talking about here. We're
00:34:45
talking about Carl Gambino commissioning Joe Gallow to commission a nonorganized
00:34:51
crime figure, Jerome Johnson, a black man, to go into Columbus Circle with a gun. We don't know what this guy's
00:34:59
marksmanship is like and shoot this gun with 20,000 people standing around, including the women and children of
00:35:06
organized crime people and anyone in the Italian-American community and police officers. So for someone who is
00:35:14
respected and and probably goes down in history as one of the smartest organized
00:35:18
crime leaders in our history, Carl Gambino, for him to be involved in this plot, I cannot believe it. I just I
00:35:26
can't think something like like that should. It just doesn't add up. And not only me, but this is where the FBI um
00:35:35
the FBI leader Daniel P. Holdman was challenging uh Albert Seedman about the murder. So
00:35:44
there's there's a lot of stuff with that theory that just didn't add up to me. As
00:35:47
well, >> there's got to be a second motive here. I mean, Columbo does not strike me as
00:35:52
the kind of person that's very hard to get to. I mean, he's very public. He's out there all the time. Why does this
00:35:58
crime why does this murder have to take place in front of thousands of people? I
00:36:02
mean, is is there a second motive behind making it a public murder? >> Well, now I'll go and I'll just ask you
00:36:10
and I'll ask the listeners out there, where have we seen this before? you know, again, if if this is an organized
00:36:17
crime and and the the organized crime figures want to see Joe Colombo silenced, they're going to do this the
00:36:24
way that they've silenced other leaders and organizations as well, and they're just going to make him disappear. And
00:36:30
with the the Gallow motive and and um there's a book out there called The Five Families by Pete the Greet Theopoulos.
00:36:38
And I actually in my book, you can read a lot about what I'm going to cite from that book as well. The Gallas were just
00:36:44
as surprised that Joe Columbo was killed, Joe Gallo was, and his his his crew that day as well because they were
00:36:52
plotting to kill him. And they actually made an attempt two times before Unity Day to kill Joe Colombo. And they wanted
00:36:59
to kill him, but they wanted to kill him in the style that someone was killed before where it was like, you know, he
00:37:04
was shot on a street, he was shot on the way home. You know, you find you you scope him out and you find out what his
00:37:09
routine is. you find out what the clean they want to do a clean hit. They want to make sure because remember these
00:37:15
organized crime people, they they wanted to make sure when they killed someone, he was dead. So sending in a black
00:37:21
shooter that you don't even know how this guy holds a pistol in to kill a man in front of 20,000 people surrounded by
00:37:29
police officers, not knowing how his nerves are, it just does not add up. But if we go back and we look, like you
00:37:37
said, the second motive, this is polarizing to kill Joe Colombo was to make a statement to the Italian-American
00:37:45
community. You kill him at unity day in front of all of these people, national headlines. It's on the TV news every
00:37:52
single night. Now you just it's that's ethnic cleansing. This is this we are destroying everything that he has built
00:38:00
up until this day. And we are telling people or any leader who thinks he's going to be the next Joe Colombo, this
00:38:05
is the fate of your community. This is the fate when you don't do things according to
00:38:13
I want to say status quo, but when you don't, you know, you don't do things um in the way of the political system that
00:38:20
we have in place for you. >> Making this murder take place in front of thousands of people, it kind of puts
00:38:24
the it hands the shooter and the guilty party to the masses on a silver platter.
00:38:30
really it really just kind of solves it and wraps it all up for the rest of us for it causes us to believe that what we
00:38:37
saw is real. >> Yes. Because there's really, you know, who what plan is in place and again I I
00:38:44
have to say that the only plan that could be in place that Jerome Johnson felt he was going to get out alive was
00:38:49
if he was in cahoot with with law enforcement and he had an FBI agent telling him, "Look, you're going to go
00:38:56
in there. You're going to shoot this guy. We're going to cuff you. we're gonna throw you in the back of a car.
00:39:00
You're gonna do a little bit of time in jail and then we're gonna send you to live in Ohio for the or in Kansas for
00:39:04
the rest of your life. So, yeah, you have to believe the lone gunman theory, but his psyche doesn't add up to the
00:39:12
lone gunman theory. So, it it it definitely was, like I said, a successful and wellthoughtout plan by
00:39:19
whoever put this into place. If it is not the insane shooter who walks into Columbus Circle and just wants to kill
00:39:25
someone and get on the news and die because, you know, if you look at all the other
00:39:31
assassinations that were were set up like this, all we ever get is is breadcrumb trails. We never really get
00:39:37
to where, you know, from JFK, Martin Luther King, we just we get breadcrumb trails. We get stories that have
00:39:42
changed. We get so many things that you can, you know, it depends on how you perceive the conversations
00:39:50
because they're all hearsay. We don't know these conversations that happened behind closed doors with the people that
00:39:55
were involved. All we get is a story that is told to us. And it's the same thing here in the Columbbo shooting. We
00:40:01
we have a story which is made up of multiple stories which is made up of multiple motives. But if you were to
00:40:08
look at the government side and the CIA side, you know, they win in so many different ways with this shooting, they
00:40:17
put a muzzle on the Italian-American community. They placed the blame on Joe Gallow and organized crime, which allows
00:40:24
them to appropriate more funds to fight organized crime because it went to the street into a public display. Then they
00:40:31
create a war amongst the mobsters because you have the Columbos versus the gallows again and that's going to create
00:40:38
a street war which again appropriates more money to fight organized crime, bigger government. So that the same
00:40:44
things that Joe was saying was happening. They kind of just said, "Oh, really? You don't like this? Well, let's
00:40:50
pump steroids into it and let's make it even bigger than it was before. Let's make the let's make what we're doing
00:40:56
blatantly obvious, but we're going to use the evidence of this war and the evidence of this shooting as our
00:41:03
platform to do all of this. And if you take that micro archetype and you say, well, where has government done this
00:41:11
before? Look at Vietnam. Look at any false flag operation that had happened. And in the book, if you read back, there
00:41:19
are so many small stories leading up to this shooting that show the evidence of what was like a false flag where they
00:41:26
plant evidence into a crime scene so they can get a grand jury hearing. With the grand jury hearing, they know they
00:41:32
can get these men into a room, get indictments for small, you know, they they would use all of these small
00:41:38
inciting incidents to create what they needed and to make it put it on a platform on a bigger scale and and allow
00:41:45
them to get the funds so they can make more arrests so they can make the government bigger and bigger.
00:41:50
>> Joe Columbo's in this coma for seven years now. How does he pass away? Do is this a pull the plug situation or does
00:42:00
his health take a turn >> a a post there was a surgery and um the complications of that had led to his
00:42:06
death in 1978. So there were there were many before but um it was it was at the point where there was you know as time
00:42:13
grew I think there may have been more medical advancements on different things that they can do to try to because this
00:42:19
is neuro this is in the bullets in the brain and um I I think it was just complications after the surgery that
00:42:26
caused him to fail where there was no actual plug to pull or anything. >> You were able to write this book with
00:42:31
the help of his of Joe's oldest son Anthony and the Columbbo family. Could you talk about Anthony and the Columbbo
00:42:39
family? >> He is definitely his father's son. Um, you know, and and as he's telling me and
00:42:45
describing his father, I'm seeing it in him. And especially when I think of anything that would be family related.
00:42:51
Um, Anthony is still married to his childhood sweetheart. Uh, he has a very close relationship with all of his
00:42:59
children. Um, so as the leader of the household and and a person that is so family orientated, he adopted all that
00:43:08
from his father. And I I think that uh Joe learned that probably from his father and the tradition of family uh
00:43:16
never left the Columbos is when it came from Anthony then Joe Columbo and then Anthony who I worked with of course
00:43:23
they're named after you know their father the first son. Um so yes, a lot like his father and definitely a leader.
00:43:30
Um his his leadership qualities as a boy even was recognized by his father and why his father appointed him to be the
00:43:37
leader of uh the vice president of the Italian-American Civil Rights League. He wanted Anthony to work in politics and
00:43:44
he I think he was priming him for that with the league and introducing him to politicians at a very young age and you
00:43:51
know pushing him right into public speaking. Uh Anthony has had so much media experience at a very young age
00:43:58
that this this is only because of the identity of his father that lives in him. So I I definitely say there's a lot
00:44:05
of comparisons between Joe and his son. >> Was there any apprehension on your part
00:44:09
going into this? You are writing a book that's dealing with a powerful event that could implicate some powerful
00:44:16
organizations. You know, we have the FBI and the the crime families. Was there any apprehension on your end?
00:44:25
>> Um, I think you don't there's no real line that you cross going into something
00:44:31
like this. Like this is definitely something I'm passionate about. And I'm passionate as a writer and I believe
00:44:36
stories need to be told no matter how graphic, no matter um, you know, how popular they are or unpopular they are.
00:44:44
So I think you you know as this story happened and you know in the beginning do I believe the FBI did it? you know,
00:44:51
okay, well, I'm I'm I'm just in the shallow end of the water. And all of a sudden, you end up and you're in the
00:44:57
deep end with what you're saying, which is, yeah, there's some real heavy people
00:45:00
and some big players involved in the story that I'm telling. And you don't really respect it in the beginning, but
00:45:07
then once you're in it, you have to have the same respect for storytelling uh as
00:45:11
you do or just, you know, go uh swing a hammer or get behind a desk and do something else. So I I think that uh I
00:45:21
just it just came to be what I w what I wanted to tell and keep telling. So I didn't have any apprehension in the
00:45:27
beginning, but I definitely felt the the gravity of the situation as I got further and further.
00:45:34
>> Well, I want to thank you, Don, for coming on the show and talking about your great book, Columbbo, the Unsolved
00:45:39
Murder. >> Nick, I I appreciate you. This was great and I I hope I did well for you and for
00:45:44
the show and I really appreciate you making you picking this and making time for me.
00:45:56
All right, a big thank you to Don for taking the time out and talking with Nick for the show. This is really
00:46:00
interesting. The crime family, the whole five crime family thing is is very uh fascinating to me. And then this whole
00:46:07
case in general, I mean, you have possibly a lone gunman and that he's killed right after. It's very similar to
00:46:15
like a Kennedy assassination. >> Yeah. We, you know, we heard Dawn talking about the different conspiracy
00:46:21
theories, right? But he really only went into one of them, the lone gunman theory
00:46:26
that he went into to detail about. Uh, of course, that doesn't seem like super likely, right? because we have the
00:46:34
shooter who's killed immediately afterwards and that makes sense because you know the re retaliation from Joe
00:46:40
Colombo's guys >> right is I mean it's a public event too >> but what throws a whole wrinkle in that
00:46:46
theory is the money you know why why is there money the money makes that definitely make a whole lot of less
00:46:53
sense some of the other theories that he discusses in his book is the also the Gallow theory uh the general thought
00:47:00
here is that Joe Gallow hated Columbbo wanted Columbo out of power and when Gallow went to prison, he made a lot of
00:47:07
connections and associates in the African-American community and that he somehow teamed up with them and that's
00:47:12
why we have Jerome Johnson as the shooter. Another theory is the Gambino theory. Uh there's also the Brat theory.
00:47:20
Uh and Brat stands for the black radical attack team. And of course there is the
00:47:27
FBI CIA theory. Oh >> yeah. which is a very interesting angle. And I I've been listening to this book
00:47:34
on audio tapes. Well, I call it audio tapes. I guess it's audiobooks, but uh it's definitely interesting. Something
00:47:40
that I've been diving into this week. >> And a real quick update here. Uh Joe Gallow. Um you know, whether or not Joe
00:47:47
Gallow had anything to do with Columbbo's shooting. Columbo would end up outliving crazy Joe Gallow. Yeah,
00:47:53
Gallow was shot several times in 1972 in a New York City restaurant. Uh this is when a gunfight broke out. He and his
00:48:02
bodyguard were there. They were attacked in between seafood courses uh by several
00:48:07
mob members. Crazy Joe Gallow was killed at the age of 43. >> So of course the recommended reading is
00:48:15
>> Columbbo the unsolved murder by Don Capria and Anthony Colombo. Um, and again to this is this is Anthony Colomo
00:48:23
telling his whole story about his father and his family to Dawn and because there's a lot of things that don't come
00:48:30
out in the news about this shooting. You know, we hear about the shooting, we hear about the mob boss, but this is a
00:48:36
guy that was a great husband. He was a great father. He was a community leader. Uh, and he was gunned down. He was
00:48:42
murdered and >> he was also fighting for equal rights. >> Yeah. And the whole thing is unsolved.
00:48:47
And at the time at the time of the case, you have the the one of the lead detectives who has an opinion on what
00:48:55
took place and then you have the leader of the of the he's like the mob detective and they have two different
00:49:02
versions of what they think happened and how it went down. So that that's caused
00:49:06
to want to investigate this further. So check out Columbbo the Unsolved Murder and you can do that by going to our
00:49:12
website true crimegar.com and click on the recommended page. And as you can see, sometimes we release one show a
00:49:19
week, sometimes it's two a week. One week we did three. Quit guessing how many shows we're going to come out with.
00:49:25
Quit refreshing on your on your device there. Just >> quit refreshing. >> Just subscribe so they're already there
00:49:31
waiting for you when you're ready to listen. And so hopefully us putting out two episodes this week helped you
00:49:36
through your work week and your commute because you guys mean a lot to us. >> All right. Now, you did the lead in, so
00:49:42
you have to do the lead out. Let's hear him try it. >> All right. Be kind. Be good.
00:49:47
>> No. >> Okay. Try it again. What is it? >> Until next time. >> Until next time. Be kind. Be good.
00:49:55
>> That's terrible. Until next time. Be good. Be kind. And don't litter. >> It's close enough, bro.
00:50:02
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