Jerry Orbach and the Murder of Joey Gallo - Part 2

Jerry Orbach and the Murder of Joey Gallo - Part 1

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A passage from the obituary of Marta Curro Orbach:

Former Broadway Actress. She starred in the musical The Threepeny Opera where she met actor Jerry Orbach and fell in love with him.

They married on June 21st 1958 and had 2 sons Tony and Chris Orbach to which Marta gave up her career to raise the kids.

She and Orbach divorced in 1975 after 17 years of marriage but still remained good friends until Jerry's death in 2004. ....

The Orbach Wedding in 1958

Some Getty images of Jerry and Marta Orbach

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Now I will summarize what Harvey Aronson's book says about Joey Gallo's friendship with Jerry and Marta Orbach.

Joey Gallo

In 1961, Gallo was convicted for extortion and so was imprisoned until March 1971. While in prison he read seriously and apparently decided to quit his previous criminal life. He thought he might earn a legal living by working as a consultant for books and movies about criminals and prisoners.

By coincidence, when Gallo was released, Jerry Orbach was involved in the filming of a movie that would be called The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and that would be released to the theaters in December 1971.

Here is the movie's trailer, where at 0:30 you can see Orbach playing the role of Salvatore 'Kid Sally' Palumbo, a character based on Gallo.

Aronson writes:

[quote]

Joey was also looking for a sideline, and the entertainment field seemed custom-made for a man of his talent and experience. After all, look how well the book and film The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight had done. And that was just a takeoff; Kid Sally Palumbo, the book's protagonist, represented an author's license. Joey represented the real thing. They had filmed part of the movie just a few blocks from President Street [where the Gallo gang was based], and the [Gallo] gang was able to tell Joey all about it.

Especially Armando the dwarf, whose personality had continued to blossom. On one occasion, Armando had gotten someone to drive him by the movie location in a Cadillac. Armando sat up very straight in the car, turned on his best beetle-browed stare, and as they passed the moviemakers, he hollered out the window, "Smile pretty for the camera, you mother-fuckers. Later Armando and the dwarf [Herve Villechaize] who acted in the movie were brought together for a sitdown at which they discussed family trees to see if they could be related.

Another time, Jimmy Breslin, who had written the book, came down to watch the movie being shot. While he was there, Breslin, who had covered the Gallo-Profaci war as a newspaperman, drove over to President Street to see if any of the gang members were still putting on their dark glasses and $200 suits and sunning themselves in beach chairs on the sidewalk. Instead, he found Armando relaxing on a straight-backed chair in the middle of the street while ten hoods stood around him. To get by, passing cars had to go up on the curb. Armando never even looked at them. Breslin remembers thinking it sort of silly that the moviemakers were three blocks away spending money on make-believe scenes when they could have had the real thing for free.

Although he would phone Jerry Orbach, the star of the film, it's interesting that Joey never tried to get in touch with Breslin. Book projects were among Joey's ideas, and he did contact another writer — reporter Nicholas Gage, the crime specialist of the New York Times. After he got out of jail, Joey Gallo called Gage three times. The first time he said that he was interested in writing a book and that they should get together. He said he knew Gage was of Greek extraction and that he had a lot of Greek friends.

"We'll have to go to some Greek clubs together," Joey said. "Drink ouzo, dance some Greek dances."

The second time was several months later, and Joey apologized for the long interval. He said marital problems were the cause. "Are you divorced?" he asked Gage, who said no, that he was happily married.

"l'm getting a divorce," Joey said. "lt's a very emotional thing."

The third time he called, Joey had already met the Orbachs, but he said he was still interested in writing a book with Gage.

"It wouldn't be about what you want to write about [Gallo's crimes]," he said. "It would be about prison."

Gage said he wasn't interested.

The second phone call to Gage had touched on another twist for Joey Gallo's roller coaster. Joey and Jeffie's remarriage lasted only months. By March, 1972, Jeffe and their daughter were in Los Angeles, where Jeffe was getting a divorce.

Around this time, Joey told a police officer that he wanted to get into the entertainment world. He wanted to get together with a writer, he said, or become an adviser on films. Joey said he had a girlfriend who had theatrical contacts and that she would help him get into that field. He was apparently talking about Sina Essary, a bright, attractive dental assistant whom he had known briefly before he went to prison and whose daughter was a child actress.

In January 1972, shortly after the opening of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, Joey got in touch with Jerry and Marta Orbach. According to Marta Orbach, a police Officer of Joey's acquaintance had told him that he'd met the actor who was supposed to have played Joey in the movie and that "he was a nice guy, not like an actor."

Joey phoned the Orbachs, took them to dinner in Brooklyn and wowed them with his charm and knowledge. Marta Orbach found him "brilliant." It was at this first meeting that she nearly "fell into a plate of spaghetti" when he asked her whether she preferred Camus or Sartre.

Mrs. Orbach has been quoted as saying that she indicated a preference to Camus, whereupon Joey said he'd go with Sartre. He explained that he thought Camus was suicidal and that he preferred survivors.

"I challenged him on Camus being suicidal," Mrs. Orbach would be quoted as saying. "He referred to the auto accident in which Camus was killed and said that anybody who went in a car with somebody driving that fast was suicidal.

January [1972] was a good month for Joey. He met the Orbachs, and he was able to say good-bye — at least for a while — to an old adversary. [Gallo's main enemy] Carmine Persico's appeals ran out, and he was shipped to the federal prison in Atlanta ..... 

As the winter ended, Joey Gallo's acquaintanceship with Jerry and Marta Orbach grew into friendship. The friendship would last three months, and some of its aspects would be over-publicized. Joey knew his way around New York's night spots long before he met the Orbachs, and although they went out together, they were not constant companions on Manhattan's celebrity trail. The Orbachs and Joey attended three Broadway shows and two nightclubs together. They were also seen twice at Sardi's and twice at an East Side hangout called Elaine's. ....

More important to Joey, perhaps, were the Sunday brunches in the early evening at the Orbachs' home. It was there at informal gatherings where the guests chatted, played pool and helped themselves to spaghetti and salad that the Orbachs introduced him to some of their good friends. Or, as Marta Orbach told an interviewer, "to the people we loved best."

The Sunday evenings were described by Charlotte Curtis in an article in [the magazine] Harper's Bazaar. The article was entitled 'The Last Delicious Days of Joey Gallo or Mafia Chic." It started with Joey Gallo saying, "People like me are a plague on people like you," and Marta Orbach answering, "No, Joey. the reverse is true." In the article, Miss Curtis told how Joey spilled spaghetti sauce on publisher Thomas Guinzburg's shoes, cleared dinner plates and had a deep conversation with the modish D.D. Ryan, who said: '"He knew so much about life's values."

Mrs. Orbach said something that might be of special interest to Teddy Moss [the victim of Gallo's extortion in 1961]. She said Joey was very shy. "He needed people who were as bright as he was," Marta told Miss Curtis. "We never invited anyone who wouldn't understand this. Just our closest friends. Which meant that Joey got to meet people like publisher Guinzburg, writer Bruce Jay Friedman, playwright Neil Simon, producer Harold Prince, actress Joan Hackett and comedian David Steinberg.

Through the Orbachs, Joey also met writer Peter Stone and his wife. When the Stones' dog was stolen, Marta Orbach contacted Joey, who tried to be helpful. He seemed suspicious that a dog-napping ring might be involved and went out Of his way to help Mrs. Stone interview people who had answered an ad she put in the paper seeking the dog's return.

Most of his new acquaintances seemed impressed with Joey. .... 

"Breslin's book had portrayed Joey as a clown," Jerry Orbach would tell Time magazine. "Then when I met Joey, I was absolutely amazed to find out that maybe he had been a wild kind of nut before he went to prison, but something had happened to him inside. He'd done nothing but read there, and it was startling to talk with him."

Marta Orbach told Time that Joey activated her Italian background, that being with him was like being with her father. She said he called her "Momma" or sometimes "the Big Job". She said it was hard for Joey to say thank you. "He might hug you or smile," she said. "But he wouldn't say much. When we had his wedding at our house .... Joey said in the car afterward, "Nobody ever gave me a day like that. I'll always be grateful."

The wedding was the marriage of Joey and Sina in mid-March. "It was some wedding," The New York Times reported. The Times account ... continued as follows:

Joseph Gallo, known before he spent years in prison for conspiracy as Crazy Joe Gallo, leader of an underworld faction in Brooklyn, married Sina Essary, a dental assistant. The wedding was performed by the Reverend William Glenesk, a minister best known for having united Tiny Tim and "Miss Vicki" in matrimony in a national televised ceremony. Allan Jones, the tenor, sang 'The Lord's Prayer," and looking on approvingly were Jerry Orbach, the actor, and his wife, Marta Curro, who is helping Gallo write his memoirs. The wedding took place in Orbach's home.

A photograph from the wedding of
Joey Gallo and Sina Essary (in the middle).
Marta Orbach is on the left, and comedian
David Steinberg is on the right.
(The photo is not from Aronson's book)

Even outside his new social precincts, Joey played the responsible citizen. He had made friends with a chaplain in prison, and he spoke to Catholic youth groups. ....

Apparently, Joey's wife and sister and his new friends felt he was going straight. "I'll never go back there," Joey told Broadway columnist Earl Wilson in reference to the rackets. "I think there is nothing out there for me but death." Marta Orbach was quoted as saying she knew Joey was straight because she checked him out with a detective friend who said he was all right.

Joey pushed the reformation theme. The day before his birthday, he told a law officer that he was bored with President Street and the rackets. He said life in the underworld had lost its kick, that Albert was doing well and that the gang would now be able to succeed without him.

No, sir, said Joey, he was through with all that; he was going to concentrate on the entertainment world.

But it was also reported that during the week before his birthday, Joey was in Little Italy boasting that he was taking what he wanted. Neither federal nor city police officials in charge of investigating organized crime believed for an instant that Joey Gallo was giving up the rackets. Other people close to the mob scene felt the same way.

"His men were always moving in," says a crime reporter.

"That thing of his reforming," says a parole official, "that was the greatest myth of all." ....

Federal and New York law enforcement authorities had been keeping tabs on Joey Gallo from the moment he got out of jail, which, they figure, is when he returned to the rackets. ... With [Joseph] Colombo taking the initiative and New England Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca acting as a mediator, peace had been arranged with the Gallos [and the Colombo Mafia family]. But Colombo didn't entirely fulfill his promise to "spread the bread around" and .... Joe Gallo's position was that the armistice wasn't binding on him because he had been in jail when it was negotiated. ...

Police learned that soon after his release, Gallo demanded $100;000 from Colombo as the price for keeping in line. Colombo refused, and the Gallo gang moved in on Colombo policy and loan-sharking operations in Brooklyn. According to information obtained by federal authorities, the two gang leaders held a sitdown and Colombo made a money offer that Joey felt was insultingly low. Joey slapped Colombo and walked out.

Shortly afterward, say federal sources, Colombo put out a contract on Gallo. The contract was subsequently withdrawn, but it was renewed after June 28, 1971, when Joe Colombo was [shot and paralyzed in a plot that some Mafia members believed was organized by Joey Gallo].

[end quote]

If the Colombo gang believed that the shooting was organized by Gallo, then that belief could have motivated the murder of Gallo on April 7, 1972.

Having read Aronson's book, I now feel sure that Frank Sheeran had nothing to do with the murder of Gallo, except that he later bragged falsely to his own biographer that he himself had murdered Gallo. Aronson provides plenty of details indicating that Gallo was murdered by Carmine DiBiase.

Furthermore, having read also an article titled Soul Assassin: The Brief Life and Death of Jerome Johnson by Michael Gonzales, I now think it's quite likely that Gallo had nothing to do with the shooting of Colombo. Is so, then perhaps Gallo really was trying to live a legal life, as the Orbachs believed.