JOE COLOMBO GETS HIS

6/28/1971 - During an civil rights rally in New York City protesting their portrayal in the media as being gangster people, American born 48-year-old mob boss Joseph Colombo Jr., the leader of the Joseph Profaci Mafia family (the mob family Mario Puzo used to create the fictional Corleones) is shot ... just like in the movies!

                                             
                                                     Boss Colombo

Approaching the speaker's podium set up in Manhattan's Columbus Circle to address thousands of attendees at the second Italian-American Unity Day, Colombo takes three automatic slugs to his head and neck, bullets that leave the criminal leader a comatose drooling vegetable with permanent brain damage (he will eventually suffer a heart attack and die in a New York City's St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital in 1978).

                           
                                                           Shot

The culprit in the attack is Jerome A. Johnson, a 25-year-old black hoodlum from Brooklyn carrying photojournalist press credentials ... and reaping what he sowed, Johnson himself is shot a second gunman who vanishes into the crowd and is never identified, an act that makes it obvious that the shooting was more than just Johnson having a bad day.

                                            
                                                       Johnson

Never solved, the list of suspects and motives include Colombo's ongoing war with Profaci Family killer "Crazy" Joey Gallo, mob leaders upset with the attention Colombo's Italian-American League is bringing to the Mafia, Colombo assisting Paramount Pictures in the making of The Godfather, payback for an argument with Carlo Gambino in which Colombo spits in the face of his Syndicate leader, and the power grab of capo Carmine Persico.  who is in turn gunned down by irritated Colombo bodyguards) ... a hit contracted by the Gambino crime family (orchestrated by hitman "Crazy" Joey Gallo) as a show of displeasure at the attention law enforcement agencies are giving to Colombo's civil rights activities.  No such thing as the Mafia ... nice try Don Colombo!!!!!!!!!!!!

         
                                                                   Coma

ADIOS BUGSY

6/20/1947 - "We only kill each other!"  Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's death proves the validity of his own statement when the mobster is gunned down in Beverly Hills, California, for failing to properly oversee Mob investments in Las Vegas, Nevada.

A shooting star of organized crime, Siegel grows up hard in Brooklyn and parlays the lessons he learns on its violent streets into a career in which bullets from his gun will kill mob boss Joe Masseria and end the Castellammarese War, he will protect his boyhood friend Al Capone from a murder rap by hiding him at a family member's home until charges are dropped as witness after witness lose their memories or vanish, and his muscle helps Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky form a national crime syndicate in which he founds the group of contract killers known as Murder, Inc.

                           
                          
                                                            Siegel

Sent to California to handle the Mob's activities on the West Coast, the move will prove to be Siegel's undoing when he falls under the spell of the Hollywood lifestyle (among others he will be welcomed as a friend of studio heads Louie B. Mayer and Jack Warner, along with stars Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, George Raft, and Italian Countess Dorothy DiFrasso) and begins an affair with Virginia Hill, a femme fatale known for secretly moving money for the syndicate in Chicago and for teaching sexual tricks to a host of bad boy gangsters.

                                              
                                                                Hill

Dreaming huge dreams that will come true for others, Siegel comes up with the idea of a desert paradise of entertainment and gambling that the mob will control and begins building the first Las Vegas casino, the Flamingo Hotel (Flamingo being his nickname for Hill).  Lacking building and management skills however, the project soon becomes a horrible money drain (over $6,000,000 of syndicate money is pumped into the project), and when it is additionally discovered that some of the lost money has been skimmed into the pockets of Siegel and Hill, the die is cast for the killer to be killed and Meyer Lansky okays the execution of his childhood friend as ordered by an extremely upset Lucky Luciano at a meeting of criminal leaders that takes place in Cuba.

                                  
                                                    Bugsy's dream

Relaxing in Hill's Beverly Hills mansion while his mistress is on a shopping spree in Paris, at 10:30 in the evening as Siegel sits on a sofa talking to associate Allen Smiley and reads the Los Angeles Times, a syndicate murder squad firing from just beyond a living room window makes good on the death contract and three 30.30 rifle bullets to the head turn the once handsome mobster into a dead and very gory mess (one of the rounds takes out the gangster's left eyeball)!

                     
                                                                   Ouch

Dead at the young age of only 41, Siegel is buried in an expensive $5,000 silver-plated casket at a funeral attended by only five mourners: his ex-wife Esta, daughters Barbara and Millicent, his brother Maurice, and his sister Bessy.  Officially, the murder is never solved!

                                    
                                                        Rest in Peace
                                                   

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ

6/11/1962 - Horribly drowned or successfully free?  

 
C. Anglin, J. Anglin, and Frank Lee Morris

After over two years of using smuggled kitchen utensils to chip away at cement near ventilation holes in their cells, and time also spent creating dummy heads made of soap, concrete, paint, and barbershop hair to fool passing guards, producing fake grills out of cardboard, and manufacturing life preservers from waterproof prison raincoats, Alcatraz convicts AZ1475 John Anglin, AZ1485 Clarence Anglin, and AZ1441 Frank Lee Morris (played by actor Clint Eastwood in the movie "Escape From Alcatraz"), exit their cages, climb up a utility corridor three stories to the top of their cellblock, force their way through a fan opening onto the roof, shimmey down a drainpipe, surmount a 15-foot fence of barbed wire, and escape into the chilly 54 degree waters of San Francisco Bay ... never to be seen again!


Escape head left as if sleeping in cell

Raincoat life preserver

Adios hole

Did they make it?  At 7:15 the next morning the alarm is sounded and a massive search for the missing bank robbers begins in which police soon find remnants of a raincoat raft, a paddle, and personal effects of the Anglin's on Angel Island, two miles to the north of Alcatraz.  A manhunt that lasts decades, in 1979 the trio is officially declared dead and the FBI closes it's books on the case, but in 1993 the U.S. Marshal's Service reopens the quest to locate the men when former Alcatraz inmate Thomas Kent tells Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted" that Clarence Anglin's girlfriend was meet the men and drive them to Mexico.  Arrest warrants still open, planned by an inmate with a 133 IQ (Morris), Angel Island evidence, fellow inmate Clarence Carnes receiving a postcard with the code that meant the outlaws had made it (it reads simply. "Gone Fishing"), and a successful recreation of the swim on the TV show Mythbuster all point to the possibility that the Anglin's and Morris did what none of their fellow inmates could ... escaped from Alcatraz!