Joseph Colombo /// Part 2 /// 73 | Forensic Files

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[Music] crime we are ready for part two of our interview with Don talking about Joseph
Columbo just a little recap here at the height of Joseph Columbo's influence on June 28th 1971 he was shot while
standing inside a press barricade at Columbus Circle a few hours before an Italian American Civil Rights rally the
shooter Jerome Johnson was immediately subdued and handcuffed by police Johnson had posed as a cameraman with official
press credentials minutes after Johnson was subdued he was shot and murdered while still handcuffed and surrounded by
a sea of New York Police Department yeah Joseph Columbo would survive the the attack or the attempted assassination he
would end up in aoma for roughly about seven years yeah and we we know who the shooter is but the who was operating the
strings you know on the puppet what was the motive and who and was this a hit was this a lone gunman was this a hit
was this a conspiracy by the government we're going to dive more into that right
now and the other thing too here Captain we got Jerome Johnson who's killed after
the shooting and his murder's unsolved as well so hold on tight here it comes part two with Nick and
Don I agree with what Columbo was trying to 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 but don't we find this a little bit
hypocritical because I mean he's not really a law biing citizen himself I I mean if you were to take
everything in hindsight and look at all of it was he the person that was supposed to be championing this cause
and you know the the answer has to be yes because who else had the balls and who had the courage and who had the
people and who had the people behind organized crime to make something like this happen but yes when you're when
you're looking at this through the M you know if you look through it depends on what scope you're looking through this
if you look at through the microscope you're saying no this is not Joe Columbo's job Joe Columbo is a criminal
joeo could have killed people we just need to attack and go after people like him and then if you do if if you if you
cut him off from doing this you know did you have any Community leaders at the time that would fight for something like
this so I think because what was happening to him and to his family and the fact that he may have been in this
storm was the reason why he knew how hard you had to fight against these people to stop all this from happening
and it's it's a it's it's really difficult because you have to compartmentalize how you believe who you
believe Joe Columbo was can you be the type of person that wakes up in the morning um goes to work uh collects
money on a number bracket let's say and I'm just I'm just putting this all out as example these aren't things that I
know that he was doing but uh you know collecting on loone sharking and then going and to the FBI and saying hey you
guys are you know you're you can't come and search my home without a warrant and
you shouldn't be wire capping my phone and you shouldn't you know have people sitting in a car watching people go to
eat and that's come out with tax payer of money should before so it's really it's a it's definitely a thing that
leans into is he a hypocrite for doing this um but I have to say that you know the reason that he's doing this is
because I think he's he's a vict his family is a victim 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 with Jay Ed Hoover one of the most powerful men in America that takes
some balls yeah um Joe had uh had no fear that was definitely something a lot of people had told me about him um you
know he was short in stature but he was very large in heart and strength and this was a guy that would he went after
the probably the scariest human being in the United States at the time above the
president um and when he did this he did this with intelligence um he knew that the strength of the people and the mob
meaning the folks you know like Roman mob could change things in society and what really probably affected the FBI
and the justice department was when Joe made an example and he marched 200,000 people into Columbus Circle and
then rallied and took tens of thousands of those people to the FBI offices and it started getting to the point where it
was the crowd control was not even able to be handled by the police department and Joe had to calm everyone down and
send everybody home and they started to see that you know Joe wasn't just going after the FBI he was going after them
with a weapon that could not be um could not be silenced which was the voices of
all these people and the action of all these people so Hoover as big and as powerful as he is he is only one person
and and after that rally the first Unity rally in in 1970 um President Nixon had to have uh they made a speech
and it was the attorney general actually John Mitchell who who made the announcement on National Television that
the words laosan norra and Mafia would no longer be used in any government uh paperwork or any government dialogue
because it was defamatory against the Italian-American people and Joe's crime cry for this but why he was fighting
against those words so much was because he felt that there if there's crime there's crime everywhere there's
crime in the community amongst Latinos there's crime in the community amongst the Jews there's crime in the community
amongst the blacks if if one or two people conspire to commit a crime together well then at that point you
have a conspiracy or you have an organization and it seemed that the justice department only wanted to lock
up go after and and sit and watch Italian Americans and Mafia and not only through the the justice department but
also through television media um we seen plenty of films come out up until this point and they were all aimed at the
Italian-American community and and Mafia and this is what people were being known
for any person that you saw on the street that was successful that had a a nice jacket and a nice car and wore gold
they were mafia they were laosan norra and Joe had a disain for these two words and just felt that this was going to
hurt his community for anyone to be successful and take it seriously so um he went after Hoover and he went after
the justice department first this was the biggest battle that he could have went after first um he did this before
he went after the news media people but he was successful and and that was definitely I would have loved to have
been a fly on the wall if Nixon was having a meeting with John Mitchell and and Ed Jay edger Hoover discussing how
they needed to take those words out and not only take them out but bow down and tell to National Television that those
words would no longer be used now this will play a big part in the attack that will happen later but tell us what Unity
day is Unity day was the rally that was held in Columbus Circle on 1970 um and it was 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 wanted to show the force of the Italian American people um he had been setting up lots of uh picketing at the
FBI offices and then they started to realize that they needed to make a bigger statement so he decided that he
was going to tell people to close their Stores um have people take a day off of work and they were going to rally and
for the fir you know he had seen what the sons of Italy had been doing and he had seen what Aid had been doing and a
lot of the Italian-American organ organizations but he knew the power of the Italian-American people within the
city he knew that they were building the city he knew that they were working in the education he knew that they they
were such a strong part of the New York Community but they had never really organized so he wanted to create Unity
day to unite all of these different italian-americans at one place at one time to show the strength of them in New
York so they could be taken a little bit more seriously because the problems were
that he wanted to combat with the Italian American Civil Rights League went Way Beyond problems with how the
justice department was treating criminals they also had an education department that was run by Steve iello
who later became the education Zar under Ronald Reagan and what ielo and Columbo
were working on was the fact that with the almost one fifth of the population in the school systems or I think it was
even more than that there was no italian-americans that had any administrative job in the education
systems in New York as a a vice principal or principal and they wanted to see some change they wanted action
you know just like affirmative action they wanted to see Italian Americans in 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
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 Joe
started to learn more and more going around as a community leader he saw that if they could organize and if the
American Civil Rights League could be a strong force they could start knocking these problems out that the government
may not be able to help knock out but Community can as a whole and one of the major cases that they helped with um
there was a young lawyer that was fighting I don't know if you familiar with the 69 Corona homes case uh where
they were doing eminent domain and they were going to knock down these 69 homes and Corona Queens so they could put up
school system but all the homeowners have told them there's this huge parcel of land 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 leave but these people had no
representation so there was a young Italian-American lawyer that was fighting this case but on his own
showing up at City Hall and and and trying to without any political power he wasn't getting any leway and he went and
spoke in front of the league at a league meeting and then they got the support of
the league and they got protesters and they went down to City Hall and they ended up winning the case and that Young
attorney was Mario Cuomo who ended up becoming governor of New York later on in 197 71 there was that famous event
that took place Joe Columbo is attacked and he is shot can you take us through that day and any events leading up to
that day yeah leading up to that um was where a whirlwind of trouble started happening for Columbo um one of the
things was that Joe Gallow was released from from prison uh after serving about a 10year sentence and at this time Larry
Gallow his brother had already passed away so there was really no one in that organization that could say anything to
Joe Gallow to sway his opinion and he probably had suffered from poor impulse control and he came home and he was
making it well known that he had a problem with Joe he had a problem with his Italian-American civil rights league
and I think that he also wanted to hurt Columbo probably a coup or some 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 against Joe and another one was that um
the League was bringing a lot of heat to the organized crime families because they started to see like wow a lot of
these figures that are helping out with all this we believe are involved in illegal activities so I had mentioned
earlier that there was a gentleman that mentored Joe as he was a little kid who was very close with Joe's father and Joe
continued a relationship with that man throughout his entire life um that that man was call Gambino and call Gambino
and Joe's relationship was that of a father son relationship and I think leading up to the the unity day the
second Unity day in 1971 which which shooting happened that Carl had expressed to Joe that he needed to step
down from the league that he he had chosen a path in his life already and he needs to follow that path without
bringing the attention of the news media because by this point Joe was already on
television shows he was doing radio he was speaking to reporters and it was just it he was while he wasn't
he getting arrested but not convicted of anything he was in in in a little bit of
a heavy situation with with everything from the FBI to the you know the state investigators so Carl asked him to
publicly step down and and and leave this in the hands of his son Anthony and and Nat Marone to let them run the
organization and Joe told him that he would and Joe was going to take a back seat and have his son and Nat Marone run
this organization and leading up to that rally the rumors were also out that Joe
Gallow was going to do something to try to disrupt the rally and there was definitely a lot of things flying around
in the streets of New York and that day prior to the start of the event there was a gentleman Jerome Johnson who had
press credentials so he was in the The Press Circle right next to the stage and this is about two hours before the event
started he had a blex camera and whether this weapon was on him or it was handed
to him many believe I believe that there was an accomplice a female woman that was also at the event that day um this
German pistol when Joe 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 Joe immediately went down to the ground um you can imagine the pandemonium of about 15
20,000 people in this small congested area of Columbus Circle um many of them law enforcement the shooter was tackled
immediately by an officer named Giuliani skoi who smacked the gun out of his hand
and then he was held down to the ground by about five to seven officers you had FBI guys you had um homicide detectives
I would even guess there was CIA there I can't confirm that but I can confirm hom
New York homicide uh police officers and FBI and within about minute or two while
Jerome Johnson was handcuffed face down on the pavement someone stuck a revolver
to his back and shot him twice in the back he wasn't killed immediately he actually lived until he made it to
Roosevelt Hospital Joe was also taken to Roosevelt Hospital and with these three
wounds you know expected to die they did emergency surgeries on him um and he did
survive he lingered in a coma for seven years following the shooting but it the shooting itself was fatal um he ended up
passing in 1978 Upstate um and Jerome Johnson again he was silenced that day so we never
knew who Pro who put Joe derome Johnson to shoot Joe Columbo who was the man behind this because there had to be a
mastermind especially after I learned more and more about Jerome Johnson this was not the type of person that would
just walk into Columbus Circle and shoot Joe Columbo for the sake of and you know in the book that I wrote um
the Final Chapter outlines four major theories that were spoken of um on who would be behind the shooting of Joe
Columbo and I don't have a Smoking Gun but I definitely have a loaded one because there's so much information that
had been put out by the media at that time that it had no backing there was no evidence to back any of the things that
the chief of detectives Albert seedman was saying to the public and every other week or so he was saying he was very
close to making arrest very that he had sources seedman never revealed his sources he never made an arrest and even
what seedman was saying and who seedman was saying was behind the shooting the head of the organized crime task force
Dennis Holman from the FBI was countering what seedman was saying telling him that this was not 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
let me get into the the money on that situation because when Joe Columbo was shot a few things happened right you
have the pandemonium imagine this there's three bullets Bang Bang Bang the Jerome Johnson gets tackled within a
minute bang bang Jerome Johnson shot in the back as the police are are trying to secure a crime scene what they could
the only thing that they could do with so many thousands of people around there there was they grabbed the guns that
were used there was another gun laying on the floor there was a briefcase laying next to Columbo and if you look
online you you can see a lot of these photos Getty Images probably has them um so when they went to the hospital
Giuliani skoi who I interviewed the police officer that tackled Jerome Johnson and rode with him in the medical
vehicle to Roosevelt Hospital he sat with Jerome Johnson in the room when they came in and placed a toe tag on him
and he also had these two pistols and these two briefcases and within those briefcases ski knew that there was
$40,000 in one briefcase and then the other briefcase had another said amount of thousands of dollars a little bit
less um Albert Sean came in that day looked at Jerome Johnson's body looked at ski and he had his homicide
detectives with him and while ski said he never saw seedman touch the guns touch the money when he walked out of
the room the money was gone and that money never made it into evidence lockers and seedman always said he knew
how much the hit was for it is my belief that seedman knew how much the hit was for because he thinks someone walked
into Columbus Circle and dropped $40,000 there so Jerome Johnson would what shoot
Joe Columbo in front of thousands of people and I believe over a thousand police officers were there that day grab
a briefcase and walk off with the money this Theory and and what sedon believes happened that day is very pedestrian and
I I I loved his book Chief and I think he's been behind a lot of great investigations in New York City but this
just never sat right with me and this was also you know reading Chief and reading other books was one of the
reasons I wanted to write the story and talk about Joe Columbo because this is a
cold case this is we're talking 40 something years ago this is an unsolved murder in the streets of New York while
the murder is solved in in in The Pedestrian sense that yes Jerome Johnson is the shooter of Joe Columbo and Jerome
Johnson is dead we don't know the plan we don't know the blueprint of why all of this stuff happened and you know when
I learned about centel Pro and I learned about Hoover and and the dirty tricks that he was doing in the in the
government against our own citizens Hoover had learned all this stuff from CIA and he had learned what we were
doing in Iran and he had learned what we were doing in all these other countries
with Counter Intelligence and he was applying it here to the US to make sure that our political system was not
affected so if there was any political dissidence they had tactics that would go in to disrupt those organizations and
there's documentation of these tactics everything from sending letters to Communists that there was organized
crime people that wanted to bomb their buildings to create tension between Communists and organized crime people
and these were all the things that Hoover was doing and I I have to think that if this is the stuff that I'm
reading in actual FBI documentation what was the stuff that was said and spoken about and done that wasn't printed on an
FBI document and and this was a lot of the the interesting stuff that I un I I discovered doing the investigation side
which I did about two years of Investigation and interviews before I even started writing the book and I just
had to believe that there was so much more going on for the the political and the government and the FBI side for Joe
Columbo's murder than just to believe John Q public story that this was a power struggle and Joe Gallow hired a
black person because he met black people in prison and Jerome Johnson shot him and then Jerome Johnson gets shot and
then a year later Gallow dies and that's it Case Closed let's move on wow so let
me get this straight we have this attack it takes place in front of thousands of
people two guys are shot they're rushed to the hospital one of them dies there's
two guns recovered and then the money 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 he survives yes he had shot in the back of the head um one of them was actually
more towards the lower throat area um but yeah he he was shot three times in the back of the head and he survive it
so just to get a clearer picture here we have two people that have been shot one
is the shooter of the of the first victim are they both taken to the same Hospital are they both taken to
Roosevelt yes both shooting victims were taken to Roosevelt Joe upstairs to ICU immediately to have emergency surgery
and as I was told Jerome Johnson died either right at arrival or a few moments after arrival at R of
so Joe Columbo survives the attack but his shooter Johnson is dead now Columbo lives for years we don't know what
Johnson would have said about this attack or who was involved or what the motives could have been for for the
shooting but Columbo's still alive but he's in a coma for years seven years after the attack um seven years and and
I wouldn't say that this 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 that there was communication that happened um with him
and his family members throughout those seven years and 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 organized crime world
and in the FBI were very afraid that Joel was going to recover from this and and come out and 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 need this to be a shooting that he ever recovered from because I I do believe that like a lot of the
assassinations that we have seen from Bobby Kennedy to JFK to Martin Luther King when we see a leader that has the
control of the people and his opponents are trying to defame him and and trying to ruin his name and ruin his
credibility and they cannot and this is what was happening for the 365 days before Joe's death the FBI and the
justice department were going after him with everything that they had he was in the newspaper almost every single day
leading up to that shooting and arrests were made leading up to that shooting like never before but it was he was the
Teflon D there was nothing that was affecting his power amongst the people and when you have the power of the
people you have all of the Power and and this is what I would believe would be the breaking point for the justice
department and for an organization like coel Pro and for Hoover to have to say this man has to go this man needs to be
taken out like the Black Panther leader like Martin Luther King like anyone that
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Cellular when Freedom calls we're here to answer call us at 1888 freedom Don do you believe had Joe Columbo been
able to see who shot him he was shot in the back if he would have been able to see who shot him or if he would have not
been in a coma would he have been able to tell us who was responsible for this attack or what organization was trying
to take him down I know because I believe this this was the government I think he would have known this and I
think he would have I think he would have went for the throat still with the same tenacity that he was prior to the
shooting but I I don't think that he would have had I think it was the plan obviously was successful because here we
are 40 something years later and and even after you know Hoover had passed away and they learned about colel proo
and they learned about all the illegal activities and the I don't want to say his name wrong but Senator kefover or
cough over had had the hearings in 19 1978 where FBI members that were active in the 60s and the 70s had to come and
speak about the illegal activities it was before one of those committee hearings that seven men within
a six-month period ended up dying before they spoke at those committee hearings so we're we're talking about and and I I
hate to put tin foil hat on here but this is very real stuff that has happened in the United States and with
our government and with the power power whether it be the military complex or the FBI that you know we can't we we
cannot show the blueprint Joe could not 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 I think that's the biggest problem with with any of the people that are out
there today that they can't believe any of these stories is because we don't have enough evidence but even even with
the evidence that we see sometimes we just don't want to be distracted with our everyday lives to look at this kind
of stuff and believe that it happened and I would say that that is relevant today with the situation of Julian
Assange and Snowden these people that are telling you your government is doing illegal activity on you spying on you
and doing and we're all just waiting for the next iPhone to come out Keeping Up with the Kardashians watching movies
watching football getting involved in politics arguments and leaving all this very real stuff alone they're very good
at keeping us entertained so our minds don't wander meanwhile they're keeping tabs on us the whole time they either
well they either keep you entertained or they keep you injured and how they keep
us injured is we're either financially injured or 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 keeps us kind of let's just say it's Sedated by these drugs the
drug of injury or the drug of entertainment and and with that and and then also the easiest tactic that any
ruler uses on his people is divide and conquer and we've seen one of the biggest divide and conquer situations
here with this last political campaign Trump versus Hillary Clinton where you have this
nation versus against each other you know and here we are thinking there's going to be a change with what happens
when we we I hope you know that there's really not going to be a great change in
what happens they're just going to you know it's a two-party system and it 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 and
not injured your book presents several good theories as to what actually took place and who took down Joe Columbo
could you go through one of those theories for us one of the theories is The Lone Gunman theory that uh Jerome
Johnson was this uh wandery kind of you know in the weeds human being who oh want to be a filmmaker and just wanted
to be someone that people knew his name he wanted his you know five minutes of fame and he had 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 was probably it's to
surprise that he was even out in the streets and not locked up at the time of the shooting because he must have there
there's things that he was arrested for that he should have gotten jail time that he didn't so um The Lone Gunman
Theory as I'm investigating that I'm starting to see more and more that there was probably someone in the Justice
Department helping him long um and the lone gunman theory states that he would have he had plane tickets to travel out
of the country and he would buy rent this blex camera with $2,000 that he didn't have in Boston a few days before
drive down to New York City take the blex camera in he got himself fake press credentials um and he had this German
pistol and he goes and he shoots Joe Columbo and he was either gonna walk off or it was a suicide mission jihadist and
and I I look at that theory and I think this just this just doesn't add up and then you can you could always go and
pull the insanity card and just say well Insanity does not add up insanity is just Insanity there is no motive needed
it is just because the man is crazy but that doesn't add up either because he didn't make crazy moves he wasn't a
lunatic he wasn't someone that showed signs of lunatic he was just someone that wanted to be someone he 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
lunatic he was he was a um a charismatic dreamer so the lone gunman Theory never
sat with me um the other theory was the Gallow and Gambino Theory which was that
Gallow had gotten the blessing from Carl Gambino to send a shooter into Columbus
Circle and kill Joe Columbo now with with this Theory the holes that are in it and that's what I instead of saying
why the one Theory Works more than the other mine was kind of the analyzation of taking away why this doesn't work and
the the first thing that I I noticed about the gambino Gallow theory was just that the commission let's say you know
the organized crime commission they would sanction hits and if if Gambino was sanctioning Joe Columbo to be murdered
in Columbus Circle in front of 20 this is against what the commission does they put a law into effect um after the
castle liia Wars that my murders would not be public murders anymore and you could see if you looked through history
that people were shot in a bar people just disappeared there was no more public dis of murder until 1990s when um
Paul castalano was shot in front of spark steakhous because John Gotti wanted to bring back the old school
style of murder now even that in itself a public display of murder is not what we're talking about here we're talking
about K Gamino commissioning Joe Gallow to commission a nonorganized crime figure Jerome Johnson a black man to go
into Columbus circle with a gun we don't know what this guy's Marksmanship is like and shoot this gun with 20,000
people standing around including the women and children of organized crime people and anyone in the Italian
American community and police officers so for someone who is respected and and probably goes down in history as one of
the smartest organized crime leaders in our history Carl Gambino for him to be involved in this plot I cannot believe
it I just I can't think something's like like that sh just doesn't add up and not
only me but this is where the FBI um the FBI leader Daniel P Holdman was challenging uh Albert seedman about the
murder so there's there's a lot of stuff with that theory that just didn't add up
to me as well there's got to be a second motive here I mean Columbo does not strike me as 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 crime why does this murder
have to take place in front of thousands of people I mean is is there a second motive behind making it a public murder
well now I'll go and I'll just ask you and I'll ask the listeners out there where have we seen this before you know
again if if this is an organized crime and and the the organized crime figures want to see Joe Columbo silenced they're
going to do this the way that they' silence other leaders and organizations as well and they're just going to make
him disappear and with the the Gallow motive and and um there's a book out there called the five families by Pete
the Greek theopolis and I I actually in my book you can read a lot about what I'm GNA cite from that book as well The
Gallows were just as surprised that Joe Columbo was killed Jo Galla was and his his his crew that day as well because
they were plotting to kill him and they actually made an attempt two times before Unity day to kill Joe Columbo and
they wanted to kill him but they want kill him in the style that someone was killed before where was like you know he
was shot on a street he was shot on the way home you know you find you you scul him out and you find out what his
routine is you find out what the clean they want to do a clean hit they want to make sure because remember these
organized crime people they they wanted to make sure when they killed someone he
was dead so sending in a black shooter that you don't even know how this guy hold the pistol in To Kill A man in
front of 20,000 people surrounded by police officers not knowing how his nerves are it just does not add up but
if we go back and we look like you said the second motive this was polarizing to
kill Joe Columbo was to make a statement to the Italian-American Community you kill him at Unity day in front of all of
these people National headlines it's on the TV news every single night now you just it's that's ethnic cleansing this
is this we are destroying everything that he has built up until this day and we are telling people or any leader who
thinks he's going to be the next Joe Columbo this is the fate of your community this is the Fate when you
don't do things according to 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 we have in place for you making this murder
take place in front of thousands of people it kind of puts the it hands the shooter and the guilty party to the
masses on a silver platter it 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 saw is real yes because there's really you know
who what plan is in place and again I I have to say that the only plan that could be in place that Jerome Johnson
felt he was Gonna Get Out Alive was if he was in caho with with law enforcement and he had an FBI agent telling him look
you're gonna go in there you're gonna shoot this guy we're gonna cuff you we're gonna throw you in the back of a
car you're gonna do a little bit of time in jail and then we're gon to send you to live in Ohio for the or in Kansas for
the rest of your life so yeah you have to believe the lone gunman Theory but his psyche doesn't add up to
the lone gunman Theory so it it definitely was like I said a successful and wellth thought out plan by whoever
put this into place if it is not the insane shooter who walks into Columbus Circle and just wants to kill someone
and get on the news and die because you know if you look at all the other assassinations that were were set
up like this all we ever get is is breadcrumb Trails we never really get to where you know from JFK Martin Luther K
we just we get breadcrumb Trails we get stories that have changed we get so many
things that you can you know it depends on how you perceive the conversations because they're all hear
say we don't know these conversations that have happened behind closed doors with the people that were involved all
we get is a story that is told to us and it's the same thing here in the Columbo
shooting we we have a story which is made up of multiple stories which is made up of multiple motives but if you
were to look at the government side and the CIA side you know they win in so many different ways with this shooting
they put a muzzle on the Italian-American Community they place the blame on Joe Gallow and organized
crime which allows them to appropriate more funds to fight organized crime because it went to the street into a
public display then they create a war amongst the Mobsters because you have the columbos
versus The Gallows again and that's going to create a street War which again appropriates more money to fight
organized crime bigger government so that the same things that Joe was saying was happening they kind of just said oh
really you don't like this well let's 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 blatantly obvious but we're going to use the evidence of this war and the
evidence of this shooting as our platform to do all of this and if you take that micro archetype and you say
well where government done this before look at Vietnam look at any false flag operation that had happened and in the
book If you read back there are so many small stories leading up to this shooting that show the evidence of what
was like a false flag where they plant evidence into a crime scene so they can get a grand jury hearing with the grand
jury hearing they know they can get these men into a room get indictments for small you know they would use all of
these small inciting incidents to create what they needed and to make it put it on a platform on a bigger scale and and
allow them to get the funds so they can make more rests so they can make the government bigger and bigger 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 his
health take a turn a PO a post it was a surgery and um the complications of that
had led to his 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 grew I think there may have been more medical advancements on different things that they can do to try
to because this is neuro this is in the get Bullet in the Brain and um I I think
it was just complications after the surgery that caused him the fail where there was no actual plug to pull or
anything you were able to write this book with the help of his of Joe's oldest son Anthony and the Columbo
family could you talk about Anthony and the Columbo family he is definitely his father's son um you know and and as he's
telling me and describing his father I'm seeing it in him and especially when I think of anything that would be family
related um Anthony is still married to his childhood sweetheart uh he has a very close relationship with all of his
children um so as the leader of the household and and a person that is so family orientated he adopted all that
from his father and I I think that uh Joe learned that probably from his father and just the tradition of family
uh never left the columbos is when it came from Anthony then Joe Columbo and then Anthony who I worked with of course
they're named after you know their father the first son um so yes a lot like his father and definitely a leader
um his his leadership qualities as a boy even was recognized by his father and why his father appointed him to be the
leader of the vice president of the Italian American Civil Rights League he wanted Anthony to work in politics and
he I think he was priming him for that with the league and introducing him to politicians at a very young age and you
know pushing him right into public speaking uh Anthony has had so much media experience at a very young age
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 of
comparisons between Joe and his son was there any apprehension on your part going into this you are writing a book
that's dealing with a powerful event that could implicate some powerful organizations you know we have the FBI
and the the crime families was there any apprehension on your end um I think you
don't there's no real line that you cross L going into something like this like this is definitely something I'm
passionate about and I'm passionate as a writer and I believe stories need to be
told no matter how graphic no matter um you know how popular they are or unpopular they are 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 okay well I'm just in
the shallow end of the water all of a sudden you end up and you're in the deep end with what you're saying which is
yeah there's some real heavy people and some big players involved in the story that I'm telling and you don't really
respect it in the beginning but then once you're in it you have to have the same respect for storytelling uh as you
do or just you know go uh swing a hammer or get behind the desk and do something else so I I
think that uh I just it just came to be what I want what I wanted to tell and keep telling so I didn't have any
apprehension in the beginning but I definitely felt the the gravity of the situation as I
got further and further well I want to thank you Don for coming on the show and talking about your great book Columbo
the unsolved murder Nick I I appreciate you this was great and I I hope I did well for you and for the show and I
really appreciate you making you picking this and making time for me all right a big thank you to Don for
taking the time out and talking with Nick for the show this is really interesting the crime family the whole
five crime family thing is is very uh fascinating to me and then this whole case in general I mean you have possibly
a lone gunman and that he's killed right after it's very similar to like a Kennedy assassination M yeah we you know
we heard Don talking about the different conspiracy theories right but he really
only went into one of them the lone gunman theory that he went into to detail about uh of course that doesn't
seem like super likely right because we have the shooter who's killed immediately afterwards and that makes
sense because you know the retaliation from Joe Columbo's guys right it's I mean it's a public event too but what
throws a whole Wrinkle in that theory is the money you know why why is there money the money makes that definitely
make a whole lot of less sense some of the other theories that he discusses in his book is the also the Gallow Theory
uh the general en thought here is that Joe Gallow hated Columbo wanted Columbo out of power and when Gallow went to
prison he made a lot of connections and Associates in the African-American community and that he somehow teamed up
with them and that's why we have Jerome Johnson as The Shooter another theory is
the gambino Theory uh there's also the brat Theory uh and brat stands for the black radical attack team and of course
there is the FBI CIA Theory oh yeah which is a very interesting angle and I I've been listening to this book audio
tapes well I call it audio tapes I guess it's audio books but uh it's definitely
interesting something that I've been diving into this week and a real quick update here uh Joe Gallow um you know
whether or not Joe Gallow had anything to do with Columbo's shooting Columbo would end up outliving crazy Joe Gallow
yeah Gallow was shot several times in 1972 in a New York City restaurant uh this is when a gunfight broke out he and
his bodyguard were there they were attacked in between Seafood courses uh by several mob members crazy Joe Gallow
was killed at the age of 43 so of course the recommended reading is Columbo the unsolved murder By Don capria and
Anthony Columbo um and again two this is this is Anthony Columbo telling his whole story about his father and his
family to Dawn and because there's a lot of things that don't come out in the news about this shooting you know we
hear about the shooting we hear about the mob boss but this is a guy that was a great husband he was a great father he
was a community leader uh and he was gunned down he was murdered and he was also fighting for equal rights yeah and
the whole thing is unsolved 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 took place and then you have the leader of the of the he's like the mob detective and they
have two different versions of what they think happened and how it went down so that that's caused to want to
investigate this further so check out Columbo the unsolved murder and you can do that by going to our website true
Crim garage.com and click on the recommended page and as you can see sometimes we release one show a week
sometimes it's two a week one week we did three quit guessing how many shows we're going to come out with quit
refreshing on your on your device there don't quit refreshing subscribe so they're already there waiting for you
when you're ready to listen and so hopefully us putting out two episodes this week helped you through your work
week in your commute because you guys mean a lot to us all right now you did the lead in so you have to do the lead
out let's hear him try it all right be kind be good no okay try it again what is it until next time until next time be
kind be good that's terrible until next time be good be kind and don't litter it's close enough
[Music] bro you can start your day off right when you find a professional on Angie to get
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Joseph Colombo /// Part 2 /// 73

Part 2 of 2

Being the leader of one of New York's five crime families does not come without problems. Joseph Colombo was the boss of the Colombo mafia but he was also a family man and a community leader. Coming up through the ranks was tough though. Joseph's father was killed by a rival gang when he was just a teenager. In 1970 he created the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Joe arranged for the community to picket against J Edgar Hoover and the FBI as they harassed and used questionable tactics to arrest Italian-Americans. In 1971 Colombo was gunned down at a rally in one of the most publicized assassinations in New York's history. The shooter was quickly hand cuffed and shot in front of police. Jerome Johnson shot Colombo but who shot Johnson? Was it the police, was it one of Colombo's men or was it the FBI? Author and director Don Capria joins us in the garage to discuss the biggest conspiracy in New York mafia history.

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Brief Summary

Joseph Columbo's assassination attempt raises questions of conspiracy and organized crime involvement.

Key points

Mattress Financing Options. Ashley offers top mattress brands with financing options to help you sleep better.
True Crime Garage Introduction. Hosts welcome listeners with humor and camaraderie, setting the tone for the episode.
Joe Columbo's Unity Day Rally. Columbo organized a rally to unite the Italian-American community and fight for civil rights.
The Shooting of Joe Columbo. Columbo was shot during a rally, leading to chaos and questions about the shooter’s motives.
Media Coverage of Columbo's Shooting. Discussion on the conflicting narratives and lack of evidence in the media surrounding Columbo's assassination.
The Mystery of Joe Columbo's Murder. Joe Columbo was shot in front of thousands, but the motives remain unclear.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

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1:56WatchNov 16, 2023

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