On July 12, 1979, however, Galante was sent to his maker at the hands of others: murdered by close-range shotgun blasts just as he finished eating lunch in the back garden of Joe &Mary’s restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick. He’d been dining with his cousin, Giuseppe Turano, and his bodyguard, Leonard Coppola.
Then along came the shooters — Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, Dominic “Big Trin” Trinchera, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Cesare “CJ” Bonventre, and Louis “Louie Gaeta” Giongetti — and the rest became pictorial history. The tabloids captured a photograph of the late Mr. Galante sprawled in his own blood in the garden at Joe & Mary’s, cigar firmly clenched between his teeth.
Considerably irritated at losing the Carmine Galante project after so much investment of his professional time, Mad Dog did a few robberies and freelance killings until he was arrested by an FBI task force in Rochester in early 1982; they collared him for an alleged bank job. The feds were confident they could send Mad Dog out of the state, namely to the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where John Gotti was incarcerated until shortly before his death in 2002.
Mad Dog credited an excellent pair of lawyers — recruited by his friend Ramsey Clark, naturally — for getting him acquitted on the Rochester bank robbery charge. But he would not so easily escape state prosecution.
The state hauled Mad Dog back into court for several homicides and assorted other violent crimes, culminating in a long murder trial in 1982, which ended in conviction and his being sentenced to eighty-seven years and six months, plus ninety-nine months to life.
But this is not the end of my story. There’s an epilogue.
What goes around comes around. Every cop subscribes to this philosophy. Which is relevant here because of an Irish cop I’ll call Danny.
When I was working the Bushwick precinct, Danny was assigned to the 9th in the East Village, my own first assignment in 1968–69. We used to drink together in Murphy’s Bar in Greenpoint, the very Brooklyn neighborhood where we were both raised.
Danny was a big, gentle guy who shouldn’t have been drinking; he couldn’t handle it. Neither could I. I quit the drinking life on New Year’s Day 1980. Danny didn’t.
Some years later, while he and his sergeant were bouncing in bars in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day, Danny fell into an alcoholic blackout and shot the sergeant to death.
Danny had no recollection of the shooting and put up no defense at his trial for second-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.
State prison is a hard road for a police officer. Normally, a cop inmate is kept segregated from the general population. But Danny chose not to be confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. Instead, he went into general population and was soon confronted in the yard by a wiseguy of the Genovese persuasion, whose ass he proceeded to kick.
This earned Danny a mob contract on his life, whereupon the prison authorities transferred him immediately to another maximum-security facility — where, as fate would have it, he met Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
Mad Dog approached Danny in the yard to tell him that he’d heard how he kicked the wiseguy’s ass, and to tell Danny that he heartily approved. If the story he’d heard was true, Danny was further told, then he could take his place on Mad Dog’s personal work gang.
To go it alone in prison is to invite rape or death. Danny quickly confirmed the story.
Danny survived, unmolested. Actually, he was freed after eight years in prison when his conviction was overturned because of errors at trial. Instead of another trial, he was allowed to take a guilty plea in return for time served.
What motivated Mad Dog to save Danny’s life? Was it their shared Irish heritage? Or the fact that Mad Dog’s father was, of all things, a first-grade detective with Brooklyn’s 78th Precinct in Park Slope until his early death by natural causes in the 1950s? Or was it Mad Dog’s disdain for the Genovese family, which had turned a deaf ear to his appeals for help when the FBI task force was closing in on him back in Rochester?
Who knows.
One more thing, which is a grievance I have with Gail Sullivan.
In her book, she wrote that many law-abiding citizens, including an investigator for ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, describe Mad Dog as “one of the most respected inmates” in the New York State system. That may be so, and I accept that Mad Dog has done many good deeds while behind bars upstate; the rescue of my old pal Danny, for one, was a corporal work of mercy, as Roman Catholics say.
But just how is it that while Mad Dog lives so vividly in my memory, our fateful meeting rates nary a line in his autobiography?
Makes you feel like a blind date, a one-night stand, you know?
True confessions
by Dennis Hawkins
Brooklyn Heights
Have you ever heard a retired cop or prosecutor tell a war story, or write a memoir, where he wasn’t the hero? I haven’t and I’m tired of listening to all the air-bags blather on for fun and profit.
So I’ll tell you a tale of failure, with all the hope that confession is good for the soul. Bless me Father for I have sinned:
There was a time before I became a legend in my own mind for my piece of the action in the 77th Precinct investigation, the Howard Beach case, the capture of “Gaspipe” Casso, the first death penalty case in Brooklyn, the Colombo wars — yadda, yadda, yadda.
Back in spring of 1988 I was a green prosecutor, and I failed miserably during a trial called The People of the State of New York v. Gilbert Ortiz, this being the case of an alleged 77th Precinct grass-eater, which is a term of art in the police profession meaning a cop of ordinary corruption as opposed to a meat-eating hog.
And Gil, let me apologize now for telling this sad tale. It’s the mid 1980s in New York City. Mayor Ed “How’m I doing?” Koch appoints Ben Ward as the city’s thirty-fourth police commissioner in early ’84. According to Jet magazine, “Ward oversaw the nation’s largest police department during the rise of the crack cocaine epidemic and a sharp increase in crime and murder.”
What an understatement. The way I remember it, the city was a sewer, the precincts in the poorest neighborhoods were free-fire zones, and no one gave a shit about crime in the ghetto because the social scientists absolved us from effective law enforcement by telling us that the only way to cure crime was to remedy the root cause — poverty. Don’t hold your breath.
Imagine for a moment being a cop in one of the precincts in the heart of Brooklyn during those times — the 75th in East New York, the 73rd in Brownsville, the 77th in Crown Heights. Brian O’Regan, who committed suicide rather than surrender at the end of the 77th Precinct investigation, wrote in the note he left behind, “The precinct is hell.” And it was hell, in Brian’s opinion, because no one really cared what happened in the ghetto. I think he was correct.
If the 77th Precinct was indeed hell, the lords of hell were two sets of partners, so far as I know from evidence uncovered: William Gallagher and Brian O’Regan, and Henry Winter and Anthony Magno. They were the veterans, the leaders — except for O’Regan, the ultimate follower — and they set the standard for corruption in the precinct. It was a very low standard, nickel-and-dime compared to the thieves of Enron and thieves of Baghdad yet to be discovered in Iraq.
Petty the officers were, but so very corrosive to the oath they took to uphold the law. They robbed from the drug dealers, from the dead, from the violated. As a fireman of my acquaintance once said, they would steal a hot stove with both hands.