Mafia Rub-Out

Carmine Galante, also known as Lilo and Cigar (1910-1979), was the boss of the Bonanno mafia ‘family’. On July 12, 1979, Galante was eating lunch at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn while he was murdered along with his bodyguard, Leonard Coppola, and restaurant owner/cousin Giuseppe Turano. Cigar in mouth, the 69-year-old mobster was blasted in the face and chest at point-blank range with a shotgun. His assassination was thought to have been engineered by the head of other New York Costa Nostra families.

The picture of dead Galante with a cigar hanging from his mouth become an instant icon. Hearing a call to aid a patrolman on the police radio in his New York Daily News car, photographer Frank Castoral got to the restaurant before any other reporter. A policeman he knew told him what happened but would not let him into the restaurant. Castoral asked a family living in the building to climb to the roof, and took these pictures from his high vantage point.

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31 thoughts on “Mafia Rub-Out

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