The Zionist Mafia has been Exposed

In which I explore an obscure chapter of Mafia history by means of comparison

Hey Folks,

As October 7th approaches, I’ve felt some pressure to come up with something suitable to mark the occasion. But what could I possibly say that hasn’t been said before?

What could I possibly say about the horrors of the ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza? I don’t have any personal knowledge of it, and to be honest, I’ve turned away for the sake of my mental health.

There are only so many images of dead, mutilated, and maimed children I needed to see before I got the message, and I probably reached that point by November of last year. The current Israeli regime is evil and must be destroyed. There are no if, ands, or buts about that.

As we come up to one year of utter brutality, I’m honestly just sad. I want to think the best of humanity, but we’ve stooped extremely low in the past year. It’s depressing.

As inappropriate as it might be, I want to look for a silver lining in all of this barbarity, and believe it or not, I think I’ve found one.

Don’t get too excited. It’s not much, all things considered, but it is something. And sometimes something is better than nothing, right?

Okay, in order to find this silver lining, I want to take you back to a warm summer day in New York City back in 1971, a day that has gone down in history with one of the most ironic monikers in modern history - Italian-American Unity Day.

On that day, a businessman and activist by the name of Joe Colombo, founder of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, was shot three times. He survived, but was paralyzed and died some years later due to complications from his injuries.

If by now you’re wondering whether a Italian-American New York businessman by the name of Colombo might have something to do the Mafia, the answer is yes. Joseph Anthony Colombo Sr. was the boss of the Colombo crime family, one of the Five Families of the American Mafia (a.k.a. La Cosa Nostra).

Truly, there is something to be said for brazenness. Joe Colombo, who cast himself as the champion of his honest and earnest community when he addressed a throng of New Yorkers on Italian-American Unity Day, was himself a mafioso.

Most of the people assembled there that day probably didn’t know that Colombo was a gangster. Clearly, there was a widely-felt sentiment that Italians were the victims of racist denigration. Many presumably law-abiding Italians felt that they were unfairly-maligned due to the widely-held belief that a significant number of them were criminals and gangsters.

And yet the rally was set up by one of the very biggest Italian gangsters in the entire world. Joe Colombo railed against prejudiced views towards Italians in American culture, but he himself was a leading figure in the very organization that gave Italian-Americans a bad name.

The irony’s so thick you couldn’t cut it with a knife. You’d need power tools.

If you want to see a mob boss masquerading as a champion of civil rights, it’s worth checking out this footage:

Oh yeah, did I mention they also picketed an FBI building? Can you imagine? The Mafia protesting the police?

Today, Wikipedia has this to say about the Italian-American Civil Rights League:

The Italian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL) was originally formed as a political advocacy group created in New York City in April 1970… Its stated goal was to combat pejorative stereotypes about Italian-Americans, but in actuality, it operated as a public relations firm to deny the existence of the American Mafia and improve the image of mobsters.

On the second-ever Italian-American Unity Day, Joe Colombo was shot three times by an assassin who was subsequently shot dead, probably by the mob boss’s bodyguards. He is believed to have been killed by rival Mafioso Crazy Joe Gallo, who may have been jealous about all the attention Colombo was getting.

Italian-American Unity, indeed.

The real reason that I’m writing this is because I clearly see the parallels between the Italian-American “Civil Rights Movement” and the Zionist lobby in the U.S., Canada, and other countries.

For those of us who have long known about Israel’s crimes against humanity, the 2023-2024 genocide in Gaza isn’t particularly surprising. Much of the world has long expected Israel to attempt to “drive them into the sea” one day.

The response in the West has been underwhelming, to say the least. Although there has been some inspiring moments, such as the campus occupations this Winter and Spring, a cohesive and strategic anti-war movement has yet to arise.

So where’s the silver lining, you ask? Well, the good news is that people can see the Zionist Entity for what it is now. People’s disgust at the barbarity of the Israeli military is now greater than their fear of being branded as “anti-semitic”.

Since 1945 or earlier, a powerful criminal organization has convinced most of the English-speaking world that it is racist to criticize Zionists, no matter how heinous their crimes.

For years, many journalists, academics, and artists have lived in fear of the Anti-Defamation League, the B’nai Brith, the Jewish Defense League and many other organizations dedicated to covering up Israeli war crimes. But most people are no longer buying the trope of “antisemitism” these groups employ.

I’m no longer afraid of being branded anti-semitic. Are you?

So there’s my silver lining: countless people have now overcome their fear of the Anti-Defamation League. That may be little comfort to the people of Gaza, but it’s a step in the right direction for the human race.

Here’s to hoping that, in the not-too-distant future, the Zionist Lobby will be seen as nothing more than a public relations front for a criminal organization.

You know, like the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

So, in the spirit of lightening the mood a little, I have chosen to publish a selection from Selwyn Rabb’s Five Families, which provides a fantastic history of the American Mafia.

May your children live in less interesting times,

Crow Qu’appelle

Unity Day

by Selwyn Rabb, excerpted from Five Families

Monday, June 28, 1971, was tailor-made for Joseph Anthony Colombo. Joe Colombo was in an ebullient mood, and the clear, relatively cool weather was ideal for his plan—a massive Italian-American Unity Rally in the center of New York City. The pleasant temperatures that afternoon would ensure a huge audience that would generate enthusiastic applause for what Colombo considered the high point of the festivities: his televised speech.

As Colombo prepared for his big day, RICO—the "get-tough-with-the-Mafia" law—had been on the books for almost a year but had been largely ignored by law enforcement agencies. For Colombo, RICO was equally unimportant, likely representing nothing more to him than a male nickname. Major mobsters and their attentive lawyers were unconcerned about a statute that had attracted sparse attention and was not being enforced. Like Joe Bonanno, the New York bosses and their lieutenants knew they operated inside an unstable volcano, and the greatest life-threatening dangers to themselves came from internal eruptions by envious, revengeful rivals, not from external assaults by the FBI or the police.

None of the bosses was cowering in his lair, fearful of RICO’s bite. On the contrary, in 1970, while RICO was being passed in Congress, Joe Colombo was organizing a national campaign—an unsubtle counterattack—to protect the Mafia. Unlike conventional mobsters who avoided the exposure of publicity, Colombo began courting the media, contending that he and countless other Italian-Americans were being falsely vilified because of their ethnic background. At forty-eight, Colombo was cresting on a wave of unparalleled career success and widespread public popularity. He was the godfather of one of New York’s five Mafia families and, simultaneously, the founder and leader of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization championed by public officials, corporate executives, and show business personalities.

It was an unheard-of triumph to simultaneously run a borgata and be acclaimed a civic leader and civil-rights pioneer. Joe Colombo had managed to accomplish it.

Shortly before noon, ten thousand people were streaming into Columbus Circle at the entrance to Central Park for the second annual Italian Unity Day rally. From eighty feet overhead, atop a distinctive column, the giant statue of Christopher Columbus gazed downward as bodyguards cleared a path for Colombo to reach the speaker's stage. Smiling and waving, Colombo ambled slowly past admirers wishing him well, striving to touch him or shake his hand, past the plastic red, white, and green buntings and streamers—the colors of the Italian flag.

In the din of the huge, noisy crowd and the band music pulsating from loudspeakers, witnesses heard three muffled pops that sounded like faint firecrackers. They were gunshots from an ancient .32 caliber pistol. The bullets ripped into Colombo’s head and neck. He plummeted to the ground. As blood gushed from his mouth and ears, Colombo lay motionless, irreversibly paralyzed, his dreams of underworld supremacy, national respectability, and political influence shattered.

Joe Colombo was no stranger to violence. Growing up in South Brooklyn, one of the Mafia’s spawning grounds, he knew from an early age the specter of gangster-imposed justice. When he was sixteen, his father, Tony, a made man, met an early and brutal death over some Mob misdeed. In a Sicilian-style revenge slaying, the bodies of his father and a girlfriend were found trussed and garroted in the backseat of a car.

Drafted into the Coast Guard in World War II, Colombo served three years before being discharged early, suffering from “psychoneurosis.” It was a malady that cronies attributed to his theatrical skills, as he never later exhibited the slightest sign of mental distress. Briefly working as a longshoreman on the gangster-saturated Brooklyn docks, he switched to running crap games and then found his calling as a proficient hitman for the Joe Profaci gang. Mob insiders credited Colombo with being in a squad that whacked at least fifteen victims to resolve Profaci’s most troublesome problems.

The Gallo brothers’ war against Joe Profaci in the early 1960s proved to be a stepping stone for Colombo’s advancement. He remained loyal to Profaci against the insurgent Gallos and, after the old boss's death, seemingly supported Joe Magliocco in his aborted quest for leadership of the borgata. Stellar service as a killer for the Profaci-Magliocco faction earned Colombo a promotion to run a crew as a capo. But in the power struggle between New York’s family bosses, he switched sides. Rather than obeying Magliocco, he engineered a double-cross, warning Carlo Gambino of the assassination plot hatched by Joe Bonanno with Magliocco’s assistance to murder Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. Gambino outmaneuvered Bonanno to triumph as the reigning personality on the Mob’s Commission. Impressed by Colombo’s chicanery, Gambino, the aging leader of the largest New York family, adopted him as a protégé. Don Carlo’s unqualified endorsement in 1964 eliminated any opposition to Colombo’s ascending the throne as boss of the old Profaci gang. The borgata of two hundred soldiers and more than one thousand associates was swiftly renamed in Mob circles. It became the Colombo family.

Colombo’s installation as a family godfather with a vote on the Commission at the comparatively young age of forty-one rankled Mafia old-timers. An FBI wiretap in the office of Sam "The Plumber" DeCavalcante, the boss of a small New Jersey family named after him, heard him grousing to an unidentified caller about Colombo’s undistinguished qualifications and Gambino’s judgment. “He was nothing but a bust-out man,” Sam the Plumber said of Colombo, referring to him disparagingly in Mob slang as a small-time operator of card and dice games. “Yeah, he was always hanging on Carlo’s shoulder,” replied the unhappy voice on the other end of the telephone line. Older bosses might envy Colombo’s rapid ascension, but he knew how to fulfill the role of an established family Caesar. Upgrading his appearance, he outfitted his stocky frame in conservative suits, muted ties, and custom-tailored shirts, trying to pose as a prosperous businessman. As another emblem of middle-class respectability, he took up golf instead of shooting pool with the boys. Colombo’s real income poured in from illicit million-dollar gambling, loan-sharking, hijacking, and shakedown rackets, but to appear legitimate, he became a “salesman” for a Brooklyn real estate company owned by an associate in his crime family. Overnight, the new venture capitalist was a partner in a funeral parlor and a florist shop. Those were popular “front” occupations for mobsters, and both of them were run by hirelings. The fictitious income from the salesman’s job and investments that could be justified to the IRS allowed Colombo to adopt a lifestyle befitting his Mob title. He moved his wife and their five children into a spacious split-level house in the Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s middle-class version of Little Italy. For a more elegant and bucolic retreat, he acquired a five-acre estate near the Hudson River, one hundred miles from the city.

A second-generation American, Colombo was far more articulate in English than Don Carlo Gambino and other immigrant bosses whose speech was heavily accented and grammatically mangled. And, Colombo had no fear of going mano a mano with law-enforcement officials and speaking his mind.

In 1964, after a soldier in Colombo’s family was gunned down, Albert Seedman, then a New York detective inspector, asked Colombo to appear voluntarily at a Brooklyn station house. To Seedman’s surprise, the new Mob boss showed up alone, without a lawyer, and unabashedly tore into Seedman. “If I was a Jewish businessman, you’d never dream of calling me down here on a murder,” Seedman recalled Colombo railing at him. “But because my name is Italian, that’s different. I’m a goombah mobster, not good people like you.”

Before departing, and without providing any information about the homicide, Colombo fired another verbal barrage at Seedman: “You lean back at that big desk, and you're thinking, ‘This guy is sitting here, feeding me a line. He’s nothing but a two-bit greaser trying to look respectable.’ Well, you're wrong. I am an American citizen, first class. I don’t have a badge that makes me an official good guy like you, but I work just as honestly for a living. I am a salesman in real estate. I have a family to support.”

Six years later, Colombo pulled off an even more daring surprise. His son, Joseph Jr., was indicted in April 1970 on a rare federal complaint: a $300,000 conspiracy to melt down nickel coins and sell them as silver ingots. Instead of the customary Mob tactic of retaining high-priced lawyers to win a courtroom acquittal, Colombo responded by staging demonstrations and picket lines outside the FBI’s Manhattan offices. The picket lines were manned mainly by Colombo borgata members, wannabes, and their relatives, handing out leaflets assailing the bureau for being anti-Italian and for persecuting Italian-Americans on fictitious charges.

The almost daily protests orchestrated by Colombo coincided with widespread national unrest over the Vietnam War and a rising clamor by African-Americans, Hispanics, and feminist groups for civil rights and equality. With New York as the vortex of national and international media, the novelty of a reputed Mafia boss giving extensive television, radio, and print interviews catapulted Colombo into a media celebrity. He began appearing frequently on news and talk shows, expounding his views that “the Mafia was a myth” manufactured by law enforcement and the press, and that Italian-Americans—like black Americans and other minorities—were victims of FBI and police bias and brutality.

The viewpoint, glibly expressed by Colombo and echoed to some degree by earnest, prominent Italian-Americans, struck a chord in the Italian community. Distrust of authority and government agencies, fanned by opposition to the Vietnam War, was on the rise, and the public was acutely aware of the government's abysmal record of violations of, and indifference to, the civil rights of many groups.

Colombo’s son was acquitted in the silver conspiracy case, benefiting from a standard development in Mob-related trials. The key witness against twenty-six-year-old Joe Jr., a former wannabe named Richard Salomone, had an abrupt change of heart in the witness chair, recanting earlier incriminating statements by suddenly stating that young Colombo knew nothing of the scheme.

After the court victory, Colombo senior revved up his personal crusade. In less than a year, he formed and became the head of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, with a claimed dues-paying membership of 45,000 and 52 chapters nationwide. Harangues by Colombo and his followers against the FBI, law enforcement in general, and the press convinced thousands of decent Italian-Americans that their community was being unfairly stigmatized as the Mafia. “The president is knocking us down; the attorney general hates our guts,” was Colombo’s provocative sound bite on late-night TV talk shows. Interviewed in a thoughtful article in Harper’s Magazine, Colombo, posing as an abused defender of his community, asked, “Is it possible in New York that only Italians have committed crimes?”

Arrested thirteen times, Colombo had a police record for minor gambling misdemeanors. Having escaped major felony convictions, he could reasonably contend that he was being smeared, without proof, by the authorities as an organized-crime gangster. “I wasn’t born free of sin,” he thundered, “but I sure couldn’t be all the things that people have said—I got torture chambers in my cellar, I’m a murderer, I’m the head of every shylock ring, of every bookmaking ring, I press buttons, and I have enterprises in London. At the airport, I get seven, eight million dollars a year revenue out of there. Who are they kiddin’ and how far will they go to kid the public?”

Colombo’s pitch that his mistreatment typified frequent abuses suffered by law-abiding Italian-Americans was an instant success. Almost overnight, the league—in effect Colombo—became an electoral weapon, recognized and respected by politicians.

At the first Unity Day Rally in June 1970, the theme was “restoring dignity, pride, and recognition to every Italian-American.” An estimated fifty thousand people cheered Colombo and other speakers in Columbus Circle as they pounded home that message. Mindful of the league’s rapid growth, elected officials quickly responded to its potential voting power. New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller and scores of lesser politicians rushed to accept honorary league membership. At the rally, four congressmen and a New York City deputy mayor stood on the speaker’s platform alongside Colombo to support the league’s goals of preventing discrimination against and slander of Italian-Americans. The league’s lobbying efforts intimidated Governor Rockefeller and Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell into officially banning the use of the word “Mafia” by all law-enforcement agencies under their jurisdiction.

Hollywood also felt the sting of Colombo’s wrath. Before Paramount could begin filming the first of its The Godfather movies, Colombo fired off a threatening press release. Characterizing Mario Puzo’s novel, on which the film was based, as a “spurious and slanderous” account of Italian-Americans, he warned the producers against using the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” and depicting Italians as immoral criminals. For additional pressure, Colombo persuaded a dozen elected officials to caution the studio to portray Italians more positively than they had been characterized in the novel. Aware that the Mob’s union goons could sabotage location shooting schedules, Paramount mollified Colombo; for “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra,” it substituted “family” and “syndicate” in the script. And perhaps seeking authenticity and Joe Colombo’s goodwill, the producers hired several of the Mob boss's gofers as extras. The actor James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone, son of the godfather portrayed by Marlon Brando, spent a good deal of time cavorting with one of Colombo’s capos, Carmine “the Snake” Persico, a feared killer. Caan’s movie performance drew rave reviews.

Financially, Colombo’s unique league seemed to be on the road to success. Frank Sinatra, who had a penchant for socializing with mafiosi, sang as the star headliner at an event in Madison Square Garden that raised $500,000 for the organization. A benefit dinner in Long Island netted $100,000. However, Colombo’s astonishing achievement with the league began to draw unfavorable attention among his Mafia brethren. For some mafiosi, dissatisfaction was inspired by both jealousy and greed. They suspected that a good portion of the funds and dues collected by the league was being diverted into Colombo’s private treasury, and they were offended by not being cut in on a new racket.

Don Carlo Gambino had a different concern: the league’s success and Colombo’s incessant denunciations and picket lines were antagonizing the FBI and police departments. Shortly before the second rally, Colombo directed more venom at the FBI, accusing the bureau of deliberately encouraging the use of the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” to excuse its investigative failures. “When they don’t solve something, it’s because there’s this secret organization they still haven’t penetrated,” he mocked. “You can’t solve it, so you blame somebody. You make up labels.”

Colombo’s persistent attacks were becoming imprudent, attracting the kind of attention that could backfire, Gambino confided to others. He feared the end result would incite investigators to target all the families. Gambino, who had supported his protégé at the first Unity Day Rally in 1970, even sending out word for all longshoremen in New York’s waterfront to take the day off and attend, changed his tune as the second rally approached. This time, Gambino issued a directive to keep the cargo moving and not to take time off on the docks. Moreover, Paul Vario, a Lucchese capo and Gambino ally, abruptly resigned as the league’s membership director, signaling that the Luccheses had withdrawn their support. A final sign of Gambino’s displeasure came when his soldiers removed the 1971 Unity Day notices and placards from stores in Bensonhurst and other South Brooklyn neighborhoods. It was a clear rebuke—Colombo’s ego was becoming too large, and his boldness was endangering the other families. Without Gambino’s blessing, attendance at the second annual rally was expected to fall to 10,000 from the previous year’s 50,000.

There was never any doubt about who shot Joe Colombo. Despite a ring of mob bodyguards and phalanxes of uniformed and plainclothes officers, a lone gunman slithered through the protective shield in Columbus Circle. As Colombo fell, bodyguards and policemen pounced on the shooter, covering him like a besieged quarterback sacked in a football pileup. When the bodies were peeled off, the gunman—24-year-old black man Jerome A. Johnson—lay dead, fatally shot three times, presumably by one of Colombo’s soldiers who had failed to protect his boss. Embarrassed police brass assigned a special detective unit to figure out who Johnson was and who was behind the assassination attempt.

From the outset, detectives leaned toward the theory that Johnson had been a “patsy,” used by a Cosa Nostra enemy of Colombo to carry out a suicide contract. Four hours after the assassination attempt, a caller to the Associated Press, identifying himself as a spokesman for the “Black Revolutionary Attack Team” (BRAT), claimed Colombo had been shot in retaliation for violent acts committed by the white power structure against African Americans. Detectives quickly determined the group was fictitious. They doubted any authentic underground black organization would find political purpose in assassinating a Mafia leader. No connection could be found between Johnson and any radical black political activists. In fact, Johnson mostly associated with whites, and detectives were unable to find a single close black friend of his. The fake claim by BRAT, detectives speculated, might have been a red herring intended to lead them down a false trail.

Investigators pieced together a portrait of Jerome Johnson as a petty conman, check forger, burglar, and lothario who drifted around college campuses trying to seduce women students. Somehow, Johnson, without experience as a news photographer, had managed to obtain press credentials to cover the Columbus Circle rally from the league’s chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With an expensive $1,200 Bolex camera slung over his shoulder and a statuesque black woman assistant by his side, who also displayed a press card, Johnson threaded his way toward Colombo. As they approached, detectives believed, the woman passed a pistol to Johnson—an untraceable .32 caliber Menta automatic manufactured in Germany during World War I. At the opportune moment, the woman maneuvered alongside Colombo, shouting, “Hello, Joe.” Halting, Colombo turned to look through his horn-rimmed spectacles at the woman. Smiling, he responded with a “Hi ya.” This was Johnson’s opportunity. At almost point-blank range, he fired three shots before being tackled by bodyguards and police. During the melee, Johnson’s killer fired three .38 caliber slugs into his back; the weapon, also untraceable, was found near his body.

Johnson’s female accomplice darted away in the pandemonium that engulfed the crowd. Despite months-long, intensive searches and following scores of tips, detectives failed to identify or locate the mystery woman. Sifting through clues and intelligence reports, Albert Seedman, now chief of detectives, catalogued Johnson as a fall guy “whose head was somewhere in outer space.”

Johnson’s lackluster criminal record led the city’s sharpest detectives to conjecture that he had been inveigled, probably by the prospect of a large sum of money and false promises of an escape route, to gun down Colombo. He seemed too gullible and motiveless to have conceived and carried out the assignment without sophisticated outside guidance.

Seedman’s investigators reasoned that conspirators who knew how to acquire press credentials and pinpoint when Colombo would be most vulnerable must have choreographed the job for Johnson. Seedman and his detectives concluded that the plotters were most likely highly motivated mafiosi. Though lacking clear proof, Seedman firmly believed that circumstantial and logical evidence pointed in only one direction: the mastermind behind Johnson’s kamikaze attack was Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo.