Mob 101, Part 5: Carmine Galante

The more you know: Mob Adjacent brings you stories about the people whose names are synonymous with organized crime.

CARMINE GALANTE (1910 – 1979) ended his long life like a scene out of The Godfather. The man known as Lilo and Cigar ran the Bonnano crime family in New York. Galante started his criminal career at age 10 and spent time in reform school. By his teens, Galante was involved in bootlegging. By age 20, he was arrested for murdering a police officer.

It was said Galante had a cold, dead-eyed stare that betrayed complete indifference to human life. Men on both sides of the law feared the fearless Galante. Criminal charges racked up as the years and decades passed.
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Like Tony Accardo and Jackie Cerone, Carmine Galante got his start as a chauffeur. As Joe Bonanno’s driver/bodyguard, Galante got the inside track on the hierarchy and friction between New York’s five family, particularly the toxic relationship between Joe Bonnano and Carlo Gambino of the Anastasia crime family.  As he rose through the ranks, he picked up arrests for extortion, drug trafficking, murder and the mundane contempt of court. In 1962, Galante was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on narcotics charges.

He spent more than a decade in prison. His short-lived parole was revoked, and he went back to prison. In 1979, a judge ruled that the government illegally revoked Galante's parole and ordered his immediate release .

A stooped, bald, bespeckled Galante finished eating lunch on July 12, 1979 at Joe and Mary's Italian-American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Galante had eaten with Bonanno famaglia Leonard Coppola, and restaurant owner/cousin Giuseppe Turano. At 2:45 pm, three men in ski-masks entered the restaurant, walked into the patio, and opened fire with shotguns and handguns. Galante, Turano, and Coppola were killed instantly.

Fun fact: “Lilo” was Italian slang for a cigar, which Galante always had between his lips. When he was shot to death in a Brooklyn restaurant, his bloody corpse had a cigar clamped between its teeth.

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