Carmine Galante – July 12 1979

“No one will ever kill me, they wouldn’t dare.”

Carmine Galante was shot dead on July 12th 1979 while eating lunch on the outdoor patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in the Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn. He was 69 years old and had been acting boss of the Bonanno crime family for less than two years.

Why Was Galante Killed?

Galante had spent years in federal prison for narcotics trafficking and emerged in 1974 with ambitions to dominate the heroin trade coming in from Sicily. His Sicilian connections — he had cultivated relationships with the Sicilian Mafia known as the Zips — gave him a supply chain that other families lacked. He began moving enormous quantities of heroin into the United States and keeping the profits largely within the Bonanno family rather than sharing them through the Commission structure.

He was also making open moves to position himself as a dominant force over all five families — a claim to power that the other bosses had no intention of accepting. His arrogance, combined with the heat his narcotics operations were generating from federal law enforcement, made him a threat to every family’s stability.

The Commission sanctioned his murder. His own Bonanno captains were complicit — several of them were present at the restaurant when the gunmen arrived, and some left the patio moments before the shooting began. The most famous photograph from the scene shows Galante dead in his chair, a cigar still clenched between his teeth.

Three men were convicted of the murder in 2005 — more than 25 years after the killing. The iconic image of Galante with the cigar became one of the most reproduced photographs in the history of American organised crime.