Bob Dylan sounded very sorry for murdered mobster Joe Gallo in “Joey,” the 11-minute epic from his 1975 album Desire. In those days Gallo and his brothers, Kid Blast and Larry, were celebrated as outlaw heroes. Jimmy Breslin had already written his satirical novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight from the material of the Gallos’ lives; gruff-voiced Jerry Orbach played Joe in the movie version.
The pop culture and cinematic connections don’t end or begin with Dylan or Breslin, according to biographer Tom Folsom. In The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld (published by Weinstein Books), Gallo—a child of poverty in Flatbush—styled himself after Richard Widmark’s dapper gangster in the film noir Kiss of Death. It’s possible that the Gallos’ struggle for control over organized crime in NYC informed several episodes from The Godfather. And many extras for TheGodfather were recruited from the Italian-American Civil Rights League, a Mafia front. Folsom reminds us that the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic coincided with the Mob-led ruse that there was no Mafia and all talk to the contrary was an ethnic slur against Italians.
Joe Gallo knew better. Rackets were his way of life, which didn’t prevent him from embracing Baudelaire and Existentialism at Attica where he was influenced by the prison rabbi, whom he admired more than the Catholic priest. Folsom provides no footnotes or notes on sources, so it’s impossible to track many of his assertions. Known for sure is that Joe enjoyed life in Greenwich Village and became the toast of Manhattan’s intelligentsia. He was considered hip, even though he hated Baby Boom rock and tossed a copy of the Byrds’ “Chestnut Mare” down an incinerator chute, shouting, “I don’t want to hear any fags singing about any f_ing horse!”
Orbach later regretted his role in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, where he depicted Joe as a farcical character. After meeting him, Orbach called Gallo “a very intelligent man” conversant with Camus and Sartre. Joe hung around Elaine’s, an Upper East Side joint frequented by Woody Allen and Ben Gazzara, and pitched a screenplay to MGM. The movie was never made and Joe never lived to see The Godfather, having been gunned down in a turf war with another New York crime family.
