Thursday,
May 03, 2007
Jerry Orbach, Don
Rickles, David Steinberg ALL "Mobbed Up"
with "Crazy Joey Gallo"??
The
ANNOTICO Report
Merely
having an Italian surname, makes you "Mobbed up". And as if to
indelibly etch that into the minds of the General Public, every
"petty" Thief with an Italian surname, is a automatically a member of
"The Mob", and given headline status by the Media.
And
as more "Evidence" of the omnipresence of "The Mob", nary
an article written about an Italian singer fails to mention any social
gatherings that both may have been seen at "together" (on opposite
sides of the room) at a Church or Charity function, going back fifty years ago!
Actually,
from a practical sense, it was very difficult for ANY Entertainer (Italian
or Not) NOT to associate with the Italian and Jewish mob, as they owned so
many, or had influence on so many of the small and big time Night Clubs and
Casino's, where the singers or comics would be chosen, or NOT to
Perform.
It
was "what you had to do" to succeed. Sinatra HAD to do it to make comeback
vs. the "blackball" of a certain
And,
I wish I had a nickel for every Italian who 'Claimed' to be in "The
Mob" when he otherwise felt impotent in order to gain respect or fear
-- If you REALLY are -- you don't go around making those claims. Instead you
insist you are in a legitimate business. Import is good. :)
The
Media has done such an effective job, that at an Italian Polenta Dinner the
other night, a nice, mature, and religious lady was astounded (and seemed
disappointed) that the Mafia was History. She was not aware that the Russian
Jewish Mafia, the Israeli "Kosher Nostra", the Columbian, and Mexican
Cartels, and the MS -12 had taken over.
But,
Tell me....What is the excuse of the Hollywood
Celebrities that yearn for the "excitement" to rub elbows with
"Mobsters”???
The
issues rises again , now that the widow of Crazy Joey Gallo, Sina Essary, is
coming out of seclusion, to get notoriety to promote the gallery opening of her
"Photography Collection", and is retelling her story, with some
literary license to make her appear as a poor naive young girl, misled, and
devastated by Crazy Joey's death, and reminding readers how well known he was,
so as not to allow the reflect "glory" on her not to dim.
She
sold her Fifth Avenue Apartment with the rooftop rose garden, and her box
at the Metropolitan Opera, She is now merely scratching out a living "mucking"
stalls of her beloved horses on her Tennessee Ranch. Poor
Thing.
In
telling her story, she reminds us that Celebrities were hooked on Joey. There
was an aspect of danger about Joey that appealed to show business people. Being
with Joey gave them a vicarious sense of living the romantic life depicted in The Godfather, which had
just opened to acclaim and unprecedented box office. The movie ushered in an
intense new public fascination with the underworld. Joey exuded excitement, and
people loved it.
‘He loved
walking into Sardi’s,” Sina recalls. “You could hear a pin drop when he came
in.”
In addition, many
people knew about the
Jerry Orbach soon became fast friends with Crazy Joey after
Jerry portrayed him in The
Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, as did Sina and Orbach’s wife,
author Marta Curro, who had discovered that Joey
was "a great person, brilliant, absolutely charming"
It
was at the Orbach apartment that Gallo married Sina Essary, who
he knew from eleven years ago, before he went to jail, although in her latest
version she says they only recently had met.
In
fact, on April 6, 1972, "Crazy" Joey Gallo celebrated his 43rd birthday, with Jerry
and Marta Orbach, David Steinberg, comedian Don Rickles and Joey’s usual crowd of
celebrities and hangers-on, at the Copacabana. Later that night, at a pre
dawn dinner Gallo died a mob death at Umberto's
Clam House.
Actress
Joan Hackett
found [Joey Gallo] fascinating well before she knew of his Mafia connections.
"I liked him completely apart from any grotesque glamorization of the
underworld," she recalls. "I thought he was the brightest person I've
ever known."
[Joey
was an illiterate who could talk about art, theater, politics, philosophyonly because he had read about them in
prison.
Reading
a book and mouthing its contents doesn't make you an intellect, but it doesn't
take much to impress the superficial
Take
Everything you read below with a grain of salt. Sina is Self Pitying and Aggrandizing, and the author is a
Sensationalist Hick.
Married to the Mob
By Wayne Christeson
May, 3, 2007
Sina Essary is the widow of
When gunfire erupted in
Umbertos Clam House, Sina Essary
watched her husband of three weeks throw over the dinner table, absorb three
bullets to his frail body and stumble out into
Today, largely unknown among her neighbors, Sina lives on a small farm in rural Leipers
Fork, surrounded by a barn full of horses and rescued dogs and cats. Most
people know her, she says, only as that crazy woman from
But in the early 1970s, at the height of
gangster chic, the petite woman with the snapping dark eyes was at the center
of a maelstrom. She was both a celebrity and a target. As the wife of one of
Now, safely sequestered among the peaceful
hills of
I havent told it before, Sina Essary laughs, firing up a
Benson & Hedges and fending off her three-legged cat, because Ive been too busy wiping horses asses on the farm. But
Ive been writing my memoirs in my head while
Im shoveling manure!
Sina began her adventurous life as a pregnant nun. No
kidding. She attended Catholic schools and entered the convent of the Sisters
of St. Joseph when she was only 18. I was very, very religious as a
youngster, she says. While Joey Gallo was growing up to join the
Outside the convent walls on a sick leave,
however, she got together with an old boyfriend. Before you knew it,
she says in her deep chuckle, I wasnt a
virgin anymore. She became pregnant from that single encounter and her
short life in the convent was over.
Sina married the old boyfriend, had a child with him,
divorced him and found herself a single mom working in a jewelry store. But her
daughter, Lisa Essary, now a Hollywood casting
director, was a theatrical prodigy. She soon became a child star on Broadway,
changing Sinas life for the better.
As Lisas career grew, Sina fell in love with Lisas music coach, a man who
was destined to become a conductor of the New York City Opera and the Houston
Grand Opera. She wanted desperately to marry himshe still calls him the
love of my lifebut she adds with a laugh, What I didnt
know was he was gay!
With a track record like that, it was perhaps
inevitable that the nun would become a gangsters moll.
Joey Gallo was a
Joey had flair. In 1947, he saw Richard Widmark in the film Kiss of Death, and with his
drowsy, heavy-lidded appearance Joey began to pattern himself after Widmarks giggling psycho Tommy Udo.
He began to dress and act like Udo and could recite
long passages of the movies dialogue. But despite his theatrical
posturing, Joey was still a violent and deadly man. Writing after Joeys
death, the legendary New York Post columnist Pete Hamill
said of the young Joey:
He might have been a fresh
twenty-one-year-old kid dressed in a zoot suit, but
the eyes were ancienteyes devoid of time or any conventional sense of pity or
remorse. [H]e would joke with the cops and smile for the reporters, but the
eyes never changedtormented eyes.
In 1957, Joey became a made man in
the Joe Profaci organization by (it was said)
assassinating Albert Anastasia, one of Profacis
enemies and boss of the notorious Murder Incorporated. According to
witnesses, Anastasia was having his hair cut in a
Profacis business was run by coercion, and Joey was his
top enforcer. Multiple beatings and murders were attributed to Joey during the
late 1950s, and Time magazine claimed that he stabbed one target to
death with an ice pick. But nothing against him was ever proven. The Mafia code
of omertasilenceprotected Joey among his own.
In time, though, Joey became disenchanted
with the way Profaci was dividing the family profits.
So along with his two brothers and several other Profaci
henchmen, he converted a
Joey built his winnings into a small empire
based on violence and extortion. For years he evaded punishment. But finally,
in 1961, he was taken down for threatening to kill a
Joeys time in prison was marked by the
Then in 1971, after serving almost 10 years,
Joey was released and began parlaying his newfound education and refinement
into a fresh image around
Thats when he met Sina.
Even though she grew up in a large Italian
American community, Sina knew very little about the
Mafia. Born into a close-knit family in
Sinas maternal grandfather had come to
Her aunt Dorothy attended Juilliard and later
sang with the San Francisco Opera. I was raised listening to opera, Sina says. My earliest recollection as a baby was
hearing my aunt sing Un bel
di to me in my high chair. Even today I keep Live From
the Met and WPLN playing in the barn to keep the horses company.
Sinas only exposure to organized crime came from a
family legend she heard from her grandparents. After her grandfathers
business began to prosper, she says, figures from a local syndicate came to him
and demanded that he surrender part of his business as tribute. He refused. As
a result, both he and Sinas grandmother were
beaten. Her grandfather stood firm, however, and eventually the gang gave up.
He had a strong temperament, and Sina inherited it.
In due course, Sina
and Lisa moved to
Life was good. Sina
never dreamed she was about to meet, and marry, a man like Joey Gallo.
While Joey was still languishing in prison,
his old enemy Joe Profaci died. Control of the Profaci mob passed to Joe Colombo, one of the new
Mafia dons who knew something about politics and public relations. He formed an
organization he called the Italian American Civil Rights League and used it to
rally support against the FBIs claim that he was a mobster. With the league
as his mouthpiece,
The Profaci
organizations racketeering remained profitable too, but many of
Into this unsettled world, Joey arrived fresh
from prison, bearing a 10-year grudge against the Profaci
family. Joey might have been flashing his new cleaned-up image in public, but
in secret he was re-energizing the Gallo gang. He planned to depose
On June 28, 1971, just four months after
Joeys release from prison,
No one ever discovered who Johnson was
working for. As fate would have it, he was immediately shot and killed by yet
another never-identified gunman.
Joey claimed that the FBI was behind the
By July 1971, one month before he met Sina, Joey had less than a year to live.
The obvious question is why a respectable
former nun like Sina Essary
would fall for a mobster with a price on his head. Sina
chuckles and says, The story is kind of
complicated.
Sina first saw Joey on her apartment buildings
elevator. She lived in the penthouse and Joey happened to live in an apartment
downstairs. Joey was smitten by Sina, but she was not
immediately attracted to him. The first few times she encountered him, with his
retinue of bodyguards, she says he appeared extremely frail and pale. He
looked like an old man. He was a bag of bones. What Sina
didnt know was that
Joey still bore the marks of 10 years in prison.
Still, Sina says,
Joey had an attractive aspect.
You could see the remnants of what had
been a strikingly handsome man in his youth, she remembers. He had
beautiful featuresbeautiful nose, beautiful mouth and piercing blue eyes.
Joey also had a special charisma, she adds.
People were mesmerized by him, she says. He had that quality
that attracted people to him, no matter who they were. He was extremely
intelligent and he could talk about anything. He could talk about art, theater,
politics, philosophyall the things he had been reading
about in prison.
Joey launched an immediate pursuit of Sina, even though he had recently remarried his former
wife, Jeffie. She looked like a movie star,
Sina says. But nothing stopped Joey, and during the
following weeks he began to win Sina over with gifts
and plates of Italian food. Before long, their children were playing together
and Sina was having dinner at Joeys apartment.
Because Joey was married, Sina felt safe from a more
complicated relationship.
Sina gradually learned of Joeys past, but he told her
he wasnt in the rackets anymore. He still
carried bodyguards out of necessity, he said, but he was no longer
strong-arming anybody. It didnt bother me
much that he had been in the Mafia, Sina
recalls. He told me he was through with the mob. I thought, so what, this
is
What Joey really wanted, Sina
says, was to get into show business. Several years earlier, Jimmy Breslin had written a comic send-up of the Mafia called The
Gang That Couldnt Shoot Straight,
supposedly based on Joey and his gangland pals. The book spawned an equally
popular movie starring Jerry Orbachthats right,
the same Jerry Orbach who played Lenny Briscoe on Law
& Orderas a Joey-like character named Kid Sally Palumbo.
Joey didnt like the way the film portrayed him,
but he liked Orbach and wanted a meeting. They
quickly became friends, as did Sina and Orbachs wife Marta.
From that point forward Joey was hooked on
celebrities, and before long they were hooked on him too. There was an aspect
of danger about Joey that appealed to show business people. Being with Joey
gave them a vicarious sense of living the romantic life depicted in The
Godfather, which had just opened to acclaim and unprecedented box office.
The movie ushered in an intense new public fascination with the underworld.
Joey exuded excitement, and people loved it.
He loved walking into Sardis, Sina recalls.
You could hear a pin drop when he came in.
In addition, many people knew about the
Pretty soon the former nun and the gangster
became lovers. Sina was a beautiful 29-year-old, and
Joey had just spent 10 celibate years behind bars. For Sinas
part, she says, Part of me was craving that sexual thing which I hadnt had for 10 years. Id been divorced for 10
years and all the men I ever hung around with were gay!
Joey soon began insisting that they get
married and, after Joey sent Jeffie packing, they
did. The wedding was held in the Orbachs
apartment in March 1972. The ceremony was performed by the same pastor who
had married Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson show, Sina says, laughing. Joeys best man was the comedian
David Steinberg, and the small ceremony was reported the next day in the pages
of the New York Post and the
But in three weeks Joey would be dead.
Not long after the ceremony, Sina began to realize that Joey was not entirely free of
his past. On April 5, 1972, three weeks after the wedding and two days before
Joey died, the apartment buildings doorman buzzed Sina
to say that a deliveryman was in the lobby with a package for her. Sina told the doorman to send the man up, but when Joey
overheard her he got angry. At his instruction, two of his bodyguards
intercepted the deliveryman at the elevator and attacked him, pulling a gun and
choking him.
Joey feared that the package contained a
bomb, Sina says, but it turned out to be a
Tiffany ice bucket for me from the producer Bruce Jay Friedman.
Joey blew up at Sina,
throwing her into a chair and raging at her. He screamed at her never to do
something like that again, with a ferocity that Joeys associates in the
mob knew well. For Sina, it was an abrupt and
terrifying wake-up call.
I didnt
know this was part of the deal, Sina says.
I realized there was something I didnt know
about going on, there was something bigger than me. That was the day I knew it
was over, that I couldnt live like that. So
she threw Joey out of her apartment. If this is what my life with you is
going to be, she told him, you have to leave.
The following day, howeverApril 6, 1972was
Joeys 43rd birthday, and there was a celebration planned at the
Copacabana with the Orbachs, Steinberg, comedian Don Rickles and Joeys usual crowd of celebrities and
hangers-on. Still intending to leave Joey, Sina
nevertheless relented and agreed to go to the party with him.
Late on the evening of the 6th,
Joeys group picked Lisa up from her performance in Voices at the
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (she had third billing behind Julie Harris and Richard Kiley), and they drove to the Copa.
It was a great night. Rickles introduced Lisa from
the stage, and everyone sat and drank champagne until almost 4 a.m. Then the Copa closed and they all went in search of breakfast.
The party now consisted of Joey, Sina and Lisa, along with Joeys sister and a single
bodyguard, Pete The Greek Diapoulos. Another bodyguard, Robert Bobby Darrow
Bongiovi, had left earlier in the evening with a
woman from the Copa. By then, it was early morning,
April 7, 1972.
The search for breakfast took them to
Umbertos Clam House at the corner of Hester and Mulberry streets in Little
Italy. No one in the party had been to Umbertos before, but it was the
only place open at that hour. We were all sitting around a big heavy
table, with Joey facing the door and Lisa and I sitting next to the wall, Sina remembers. Joey thought the food was excellent
and ordered seconds for everybody.
Without warning, several gunmen burst through
the door and began firing. Accounts vary as to how many shooters were involved,
but Sina swears there were five.
When the shooting started, Joey turned the
table over to protect the others while Sina dragged
Lisa to the floor and covered her with her coat. In a matter of seconds, more
than 20 shots were fired. Joey was struck three timesin his arm, his spine and
finally in his carotid artery. He staggered out the door, followed by his assailants fire, and collapsed on the pavement. When
the shooting stopped, there were 17 bullet holes in the wall behind Sinas and Lisas chairs. Joey lay dying in the
street.
Joey had an intense sense of
destiny, Marta Orbach says. If he was truly
marked for dying, this old-fashioned wayin stylewould have been a point of
honor with him. Joeys death would have appealed to his sense of
drama. Pete Hamill called it a supreme
I thought I was observing all this
through the eyes of death, Sina says today.
In fact, I thought I was dead. Her next thought was an irony that
struck her in light of their earlier fight.
Fancy that, she thought,
somebody was trying to kill him. My God, he wasnt
kidding!
Today Sina tells
her stories in the living room of her modest farmhouse, surrounded by
photographs of her family and friends. These include a prominently placed
picture of Joey. At 65, she still retains her classic Italian beauty and charm.
She lives alone and maintains only a few close friendships. Hearing her relate
her stories in the quiet of her living room or outside her sunny barn is a
surreal but wholly believable experience.
Sina came to
But she had good reasons to keep quiet. One,
she says, was the possibility that she herself might be marked for murder. She
had been a witness to Joeys shooting, after all, and might have identified
the killers. For a long time afterward, she was followed by FBI agents, the
NYPD and members of the Gallo gang in what she calls an unholy alliance
to protect her from the
For Sina, the
attraction of
Sina admits that her move to
Sina has no fear from the Mafia today. Those days have
passed, and the principal actors have died. She still speaks and corresponds
every month with the only remaining member of the Gallo gang she knows, Bobby Bongiovi, the bodyguard who left early on the night Joey
was killed. Bobby, movie-star handsome in his youth, is old, sick and now
serving a life sentence in Dannemora for the murder
of another mobster, Sam Wuyak, the year after Joey
died. Bongiovi denies killing Wuyak,
but he told Sina, There is plenty of other stuff
they could have sent me up for. According to press accounts, when Bongiovi received his sentence at the hearing, Sina Essary was there, brushing
away tears.
Joeys life has been written about a
number of times, but the accounts have not always been consistent. Some facts
are hard to come by, and arguments about Joey still simmer among scholars of
the Mafia life. Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of Joeys career
is the Aronson book, though Sina says that it too
contains errors.
But Joeys death only hastened his
passing into myth. In 1974, Italian director Carlo Lizzani
made a biopic called Crazy Joe starring the young Peter Boyle as Joey,
with Eli Wallach, Paula Prentiss and even Henry Winkler in supporting roles. It
was a spaghetti-Western take on gangland life, but critic Jerry Renshaw called it a gema rawer Scorsese without the
polish or panache, relying instead on pungent dialogue and gritty performances.
By 1976, the fallen mobster had been
rehabilitated as the romantic hero of Joey, from Bob Dylans 1976
album Desirea combination Tom Joad and
Pretty Boy Floyd whose closest friends were black men cause they
seemed to understand / What its like to be in society with a shackle on
your hand. In 1993, soon after Sinas move
to
More measured accounts of Joeys life
have revised the romantic image he carried while he was alive. He was a man
capable of ruthless, and remorseless, brutality. His war with the
Still, Sina has no
regrets about marrying Joey. Its part of life, she shrugs.
Joeys funeral was huge, front-page news
in all the papers. Pictures showed Sina and Lisa,
grieving, standing on the steps of the church. The local parish priest refused
to bury Joeywhether for doctrinal reasons or fear of
Along the route to the cemetery, the
sidewalks were jammed with people paying their respects to Joey Gallo. They
strained to catch just a glimpse of his gleaming copper casket. Because of the
attendance of so many gangland figures, police lined the streets and the
rooftops to head off further violence.
Looking back, in the faraway seclusion of her
A former nun should know. [Pleaseeeee. A resident in a covenent
is NOT a nun!!! She MAY be an Initiate.!!!!!!!!]
SISTER SITES:
City
Pages | LA
Weekly | OC
Weekly | Seattle
Weekly | Village
Voice
Westword | < A href="http://www.newtimesbpb.com/">Broward New Times | Cleveland Scene | Phoenix New Times | The
Pitch
SF
Weekly | East
Bay Express | Houston
Press | Dallas
Observer | Miami
New Times | River
Front Times
(Time
Magazine April 17, 1972) http://www.time.com/time/
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed and are Fully Archived
at:
Italia
USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly
Italy at St Louis)
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed at
Italia
Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Blogspot: http://annoticoreport.blogspot.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net