Joseph Anthony Colombo was born on June 16, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. His father, Anthony Colombo, was born in Brazil to Italian parents; little information on his mother is available. After the family moved to the United States, Anthony drifted into the organized crime orbit of Mafia boss Joseph Profaci. In 1938, when Joseph was fifteen, his father was found strangled to death in a car, apparently the victim of a gangland execution.
Colombo attended New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn for two years and joined the Coast Guard during World War II.
Discharged after three years with a mental disability, he began a career in crime. He was arrested several times for gambling and other minor offenses. His legitimate jobs, of longshoreman and meat salesman, stemmed from Mafia contacts. Colombo stood five foot six and had a round, pleasant face. His talents were more of the diplomat than the thug, although he was widely believed to have participated in several murders sanctioned by Profaci. He rose steadily in the crime family as a loan shark and truck hijacker until the early 1960's, when he became a caporegime, or captain, under Profaci's successor, Joseph Magliocco. Colombo helped negotiate an end to a rebellion by a faction led by "Crazy Joey" Gallo of Brooklyn's Red Hook section. Meanwhile, a plot was afoot to kill the bosses of two other New York City Mafia families, Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese. The plotters allegedly included Magliocco and Joseph Bonanno, head of another crime family. Colombo apparently warned Gambino, who foiled the plot and helped Colombo become Magliocco's successor when Magliocco died in 1963. Colombo was easily the city's youngest Mafia boss. "What experience has he got?" asked New Jersey mobster Simone DeCavalcante in a conversation secretly recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "What does he know?" In 1970, Colombo's twenty-three-year-old son Joseph Junior was arrested by federal agents for allegedly conspiring to melt down old silver coins and sell the silver, profiting from the disparity between the coins' face value and the prevailing price of silver. Claiming his son was being harassed, Colombo led picketing outside the FBI's New York office and founded the Italian-American Civil Rights league. Joseph Cantalupo, a crime family hanger-on who later became an FBI informer, said the boss was genuinely outraged. The government, he heard Colombo complain shortly after his son's arrest, "ain't satisfied going after me, they gotta go after my kids. This is discrimination, that's what it is. It's because the kid's named Colombo, because his name ends in a vowel. They want to screw Italians. You don't see them do this to Jews or the Irish. . I'm not gonna let them get away with it. " The campaign that followed flagrantly violated the spirit of omerta, the Mafia's traditional vow of secrecy, and Colombo received commensurate attention from the news media. In speeches and interviews, Colombo repeated three themes: He and his relatives were not criminals, there was no such thing as the Mafia, and the government was discriminating against Italian-Americans. The league succeeded in having the terms "Mafia" and "La Cosa Nostra" (in Italian, "this thing of ours") deleted from the script of the film The Godfather and from the television series The FBI. Attorney General John Mitchell directed Justice Department employees to stop using such terms on the ground that they offended "decent Italian-Americans. " After the Staten Island Advance printed a series of articles about reputed mafiosi who lived on the island, league members picketed the newspaper building and interfered with delivery trucks. The New York Times was also picketed. The league raised large sums of cash through dues and testimonial dinners. A "Unity Day" rally at Columbus Circle in Manhattan on June 29, 1970, drew about fifty thousand people, including many politicians. A concert by Frank Sinatra and others at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum raised a reported $500, 000. Informers told the police that other mob bosses, notably Gambino, were appalled by the publicity generated by Colombo's crusade. The government, meanwhile, refused to back off. Colombo was arrested in connection with a jewel theft that had occurred in 1967. He allegedly mediated a dispute between participants in the $750, 000 heist and collected a commission of $7, 500. He also was arrested with several other men and charged with operating a gambling operation. He was released on bail and immediately went to FBI headquarters to picket. At the Unity Day rally on June 28, 1971, a black man posing as a news photographer approached Colombo shortly before the event was to begin. He pulled out a gun and shot him in the head and neck. The gunman, Jerome A. Johnson, immediately was shot to death, possibly by a Colombo bodyguard. No arrests were ever made in the shootings, and investigators disagreed on whether Johnson had been hired or had attacked Colombo for his own reasons. Police said Johnson had a criminal record but no known organized crime connections. Suspicion focused on Joey Gallo, who had been released from prison in May. In a characteristic departure from Mafia custom, Gallo had made friends behind bars with several black inmates. Some investigators believed he had hired Johnson through these prison contacts, presumably with Gambino's approval. Almost totally paralyzed by the shooting, Colombo spent the rest of his life far from Brooklyn, at his estate in Blooming Grove. A court-ordered medical report in 1975 described him as able to move only the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. A year later, he was reported to be able to utter a few words and recognize people. He died of a heart attack less than a month shy of his fifty-fifth birthday. In the months that followed, Joey Gallo's men began moving in on Colombo rackets, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront. On April 7, 1972, Gallo was celebrating his birthday at Umberto's Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy when three gunmen entered the restaurant and opened fire, killing Gallo and wounding his bodyguard.
His wife was Lucille. They had five children.
