On the night of November 4, 1959, Francesco Abbatemarco walked toward the front door of Cardiallos, a tavern in south Brooklyn owned by his cousin. He was 60 years old and had spent most of his adult life drinking in places like it. As he pulled open the door, two men in top coats and fedoras were already raising their guns.
The glass shattered. He was hit at least once, and he did what almost anyone would do. He turned and ran back inside toward the bar, toward people he knew.
The men followed him in, put six more shots into him, and walked out.
Everybody in Brooklyn called him Frankie Shots. He was a captain in one of the five New York crime families. He was killed over a bill.
Not an insult, not an informer’s file, not a woman, not a territory. He owed his boss $50,000 in what the organization called back taxes, and he had not paid it.
Men were killed over money all the time. What makes his death worth remembering is what happened afterward. The men who shot him were promised something for doing it and were cheated.
That broken promise set off a war inside the New York Mafia that ran on and off for 12 years.
Frank Abbatemarco was born on July 4, 1899. He came up in Brooklyn and made his living in the numbers. He had been a grown man during Prohibition.
He watched the whole thing be built: the families, the commission, the rules, by people he knew personally. He lived long enough to see younger men decide none of it applied to them.
The numbers racket has almost vanished from the way these stories are told now, but it was the biggest part of that world. It was an illegal lottery that ran in every working-class neighborhood in urban America. A person put down a nickel, a dime, or a quarter on a three-digit number.
The winning figure was taken from something public that could not be fixed, like a total from the racetrack or a published financial number, so everybody could check it in the paper the next day.
Runners collected the bets. Someone kept the book. The person who ran it in a neighborhood took in small amounts of money from thousands of ordinary people every day and paid out considerably less.
It was not glamorous and it did not make headlines. It was enormously reliable. It did not depend on smuggling anything or trusting anybody outside the neighborhood.
It was built entirely on trust, which is the strange part. A man handed over a coin and a piece of paper to a runner he saw every day, with no receipt worth anything and no court he could ever complain to. The whole business rested on the fact that if you won, you were paid, and everybody on the street knew it.
An operator who did not pay out was finished in a week.
That is why the men who ran it were often not frightening at all. They were fixtures. They were in the same barbershop and the same church, and people had been giving them money every day for 20 years.
Frankie Shots ran a very large numbers operation in Brooklyn. By 1959, he had been doing it for decades. He was a made member, a captain with men under him, and he was, in the plainest sense, a successful businessman in an illegal business.
The man he answered to was Giuseppe Profaci. Joe Profaci had run that family since the early 1930s. He was one of the longest-serving bosses in the country.
In public, he was an importer of olive oil and tomato paste on a genuinely large scale, and he made a great show of respectability and connections to the church.
That public position had taken a serious knock two years before. In 1957, the leadership of American organized crime met at a house in Apalachin, upstate New York, and the state police noticed the number of expensive cars. Dozens of men were stopped and identified, and the story was on every front page in the country.
Joe Profaci was one of them.
After Apalachin, it was no longer possible for any of these men to claim they were simply businessmen. The pressure on all of them increased sharply, which is one reason a boss might suddenly become very interested in collecting what he was owed.
And he taxed his men hard. This is the thing that made Profaci different, and the thing that eventually destroyed him. Every man under him paid a regular tribute upward, a fixed sum every month, whatever the man was earning and whatever his circumstances.
Other bosses took a share of what came in. Profaci took a levy, and he took it whether you had a good year or a bad one.
Men resented it deeply. The money went up, and very little ever came back down. Profaci’s own relatives got the best of everything.
His brother-in-law was his underboss. If you were not related to him, you paid in and you waited.
By the autumn of 1959, Frankie Shots had fallen behind. The accumulated figure was $50,000. In 1959, that was a substantial house outright in a good part of New York.
It was more than a police captain earned in a decade. It was not a debt that a man simply wrote a check for.
It is worth asking whether Frankie Shots could have paid it at all, even if he had wanted to. A numbers bank holds money in motion. It is constantly paying out and taking in, and the float is the business.
Pulling $50,000 out of it in one piece may simply not have been possible without shutting the whole thing down.
Joe Profaci wanted it, and he made it clear through the whole of that autumn. Frankie Shots did not pay.
Now here is where this stops being an ordinary dispute about money. He was encouraged not to pay. There was a group of younger men in that family from the Red Hook end of Brooklyn, led by three brothers named Gallo.
Red Hook then was docks and warehouses and public housing, cut off from the rest of Brooklyn. The Gallo crew were exactly what that produces: young, tight, and not impressed by anybody.
The best known of them was Joseph Gallo, whom the newspapers called Crazy Joe. He was small and sharp and genuinely dangerous. He was also unlike anybody else in that world.
He read seriously. He quoted what he read. Later in life he kept company with writers and actors who found him fascinating.
He had no reverence whatsoever for the old order, and he did not bother hiding it.
The Gallos hated the tribute system. They were doing the work and handing the money up to an old man who gave it to his in-laws. When Joe Profaci went after Frankie Shots for $50,000, Joe Gallo told Abbatemarco to stand his ground.
Refuse. Do not pay. Make him come and get it.
Which Frankie Shots, at 60 years old, after 30 years in that organization, decided to do.
Joe Profaci’s answer was the most efficient thing any boss in this series ever did. He did not send men from outside. He gave the contract to the Gallo brothers.
Think about the arithmetic of that. The men who had told Abbatemarco to defy him were now ordered by him to kill Abbatemarco for defying him. If they refused, they were in open rebellion, and he could deal with them for that.
If they did it, they had murdered the man they had been encouraging, and they had proved their obedience by destroying their own argument.
There is no good move on that board, and they took the contract. It has always been reported that they took it for a price, and the price was not cash. It was the business.
Frankie Shots ran a very profitable numbers operation, and when he was gone, that operation would need somebody to run it. That was the understanding. Kill him, and his rackets are yours.
So on the night of November 4, 1959, two men in top coats and fedoras stood inside the door of a tavern owned by Abbatemarco’s cousin and waited for him to pull it open. He never had a chance, and he was not meant to have one. He was 60.
He was unarmed. He was walking into a bar he had been going to for years.
There is a detail worth pausing on. The tavern belonged to his cousin. Whoever set this up chose a place where he would be relaxed, where he had family behind the bar, and where he would come through a door at a predictable hour without looking at anything.
That is not the work of enemies who had to find him. It is the work of people who already knew his habits.
The murder of a captain is a serious matter in that world, and normally, it settles something. This one did not, because of what Joe Profaci did next. He did not give the Gallos the rackets.
The numbers operation that Frankie Shots had built went where everything else in that family went: to Profaci’s own people, his relatives, and his loyalists.
The Gallo brothers had killed a man on his order with a promise attached, and they got nothing.
That is the moment the first Colombo war begins. Not the killing. The bill for it.
What followed was one of the longest and strangest conflicts in the history of American organized crime. It ran on and off for about 12 years. It included a moment in 1961 when the Gallo crew kidnapped several of Profaci’s senior men, including his underboss, and held them.
That had almost no precedent at all.
Consider how extraordinary that is. A crew of soldiers took the second-in-command of their own family off the street and kept him as a bargaining position against their own boss. They eventually released them on a promise of a settlement.
The settlement was not honored either.
That is now three separate promises broken in the same story, and every one of them made the next round of killing more certain.
Joe Profaci himself did not live to see the end of it. He died in June 1962 of cancer in a hospital bed, an old man in his own country. Of everybody in this story, he is the only one who went that way.
Joe Gallo went to prison for extortion in the middle of the war, which is the only reason he survived the first half of it. He came out in 1971 into a New York that had moved on. He was killed in April 1972, shot in a clam house in Little Italy in the early hours of the morning while he was out celebrating his own birthday with his family.
The family that Profaci had run eventually took the name of a later boss, Joseph Colombo, and it has carried that name ever since. Colombo himself was shot and permanently disabled at a public rally in 1971 in front of cameras. The Gallos were widely blamed for that, too.
Everybody in this, apart from the old man with the olive oil business, died badly.
So what is Frank Abbatemarco? He is not a figure anybody has heard of. If you know anything about this war, you probably know it as the Gallo-Profaci War or the First Colombo War, and you probably know Crazy Joe Gallo because he was interesting and quotable and got a song written about him.
Abbatemarco is the thing that started it, which is not the same as being remembered. Wars get named after the people who fight them, not the people they begin over. Nobody calls it the Abbatemarco War.
He is a doorway and a date in somebody else’s chapter. He was, in the end, used twice. He was used by younger men who wanted a fight with the boss and needed somebody else to have it first.
They told him to refuse. He was 60 years old. He had been in that organization his whole adult life, and he listened to men half his age who had nothing to lose and let them talk him into a position he could not climb down from.
Then he was used by the boss, who saw an opportunity to make his most troublesome crew do the one thing that would silence them and took it.
He was not killed because he was dangerous or disloyal or greedy. He was killed because his death was useful to two different sets of people at the same time, for two completely opposite reasons.
The $50,000 was never paid. It could not be. There was nobody left to pay it and nobody left with a claim on it.
Within two years, the men who had killed him for it were at war with the man who had ordered it, over a debt of their own that nobody would honor either.
Everything in that business runs on promises between people who have already demonstrated that their promises are worth nothing. Frankie Shots was 60 years old, and he tested that in a doorway in Brooklyn. The answer came through the glass, and the men who delivered it were not paid either.