ABOUT THE AUTHORS
F RANK D IMATTEO s book President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia is listed by culturetrip.com as the number one Mafia book that you need to read. Frank is also the author of the Kensington True Crime books Lord High Executioner and Carmine the Snake , as well as the publisher of Mob Candy magazine. He was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, in 1956. His father, Ricky Dimatteo, was a key member of Joey Gallos crew.
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M ICHAEL B ENSON was Franks coauthor for Lord High Executioner and Carmine the Snake and an editor of President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia . He is one of todays most popular true-crime writers. His books include Escape from Dannemora , Haunting Homicides , Nightmare in Rochester , The Devil at Genesee Junction , Betrayal in Blood , Murder in Connecticut , Killer Twins , The Burn Farm , Mommy Deadliest , Watch Mommy Die , A Killers Touch , and Evil Season . He was a regular commentator on the Investigation Discovery true-crime series Evil Twins and Evil Kin and has made guest appearances on 20/20 , Killer Couples , Evil Stepmothers , Deadly Sins , Southern Fried Homicide , On the Case with Paula Zahn , Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo , Someone You Thought You Knew , Killer Affair , and Murder in the Family .
EPILOGUE
J OEY GALLO DIED ON THE CUSP OF A NEW AGE of respectability for organized crime. Two weeks before Joey ate scungilli and hot lead at Umbertos, the movie The Godfather , one of the best movies ever, was first shown to preview audiences, giving the Italian mob in the United States a permanent lacquer of high art. (My mom says The Godfather is a great movie but has no relation to reality. I cant imagine any American kissing another Americans ring no matter how Italian they are, she says.)
Point is, the movie changed the way the world thought of the mob, even the old Sicilian Mafia, but Joey Gallo and the new modern era never got to coexist. One can only imagine what type of super-duper star Joey Gallo would have been had he continued attending beautiful-people parties in Manhattan in the wake of the movie. Describing the phenomenon, someone coined a phrase that stuck around for a while: gangster chic.
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On President Street, no one went to Umbertos after Joey got hit there. It was taboo. Matty the Horse mightve taken care of the guys who whacked Joey, but that didnt mean he was our friend. That became especially true after my godfather, Bobby Darrow, killed a bartender at another one of the Horses bars.
That happened on March 11, 1973. Bobby Darrow went to the Broadway Pub, a joint near Times Square across the street from the Peppermint Lounge, an area that at that timebefore Disney bought the whole thing and cleaned it upwas outside the law.
The bartender was a guy named Sam Wuyak. He mustve known Bobby was a President Street guy, so it was pretty stupid when he started to flap his lip about being a Joe Yak man.
It was the wrong thing to say to a psycho killer like Bobby. My godfather waited until the next time the bartender had to take a leak, followed him into the mens room, and shot him twice, killing him on the spot.
Two days later, cops came right into Roy Roys club on President Street and arrested Bobby. A cocktail waitress named Beverly Costello IDd Bobby at the quickie trial, and Bobby was sent to Dannemora for the rest of his life.
Joeys widow, Sina, sat in the gallery during the trial, in a front pew, dabbing at tears with a dainty hankie.
The papers, when reporting the killing, did note that both Umbertos Clam House and the Broadway Pub were owned (on paper anyway) by brothers of Matty the Horse, but otherwise didnt bother to connect the dots.
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The President Street Boys began to fall apart the instant Joey Gallo was killed. President Street itself began to deteriorate soon thereafter. I always thought the city destroyed the block on purpose.
The official story is that a new sewer was dug along Columbia Street to help alleviate the pollution in the Gowanus Canal, parts of which were only technically liquid. The result was a vermin and insect infestation that made our block feel like something out of the legendary nineteenth-century Five Points ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While some of the guys were turning into rats, actual rats took their place. Guys from the city came around and determined that the ground under the tenements of President Street was starting to give away, condemned the whole block, and tore everything down. Today, you go there, its all new buildings, apartment houses, and its hard to imagine the way it was.
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Alphonse Sonny Red Indelicato rose up the ranks to become a Bonanno captain, but proved fatally ambitious. In May 1981, an FBI source told reporters, Were most comfortable saying that Sonny Red has been whacked. The hit took place at the 20/20 Club in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. His body was taken to Lindenhurst, New Jersey, and buried in a vacant lot, a mob graveyard known as the Hole. The source said that the FBI believed Indelicatos murder took place on May 5, but offered no other details.
Alphonses son Anthony Whack-Whack Indelicato was in on the famous Bushwick, Brooklyn, hit on Carmine Galante in 1979 and was convicted for that murder seven years later.
Matty the Horse lived a charmed life after the disappearance of Carmine DiBiase and Philip Gambino. The Horse lived the good life, summers in his Old Westbury, Long Island, mansion, winters at the vacation place in Florida.
On Long Island, the Ianniello estate was said to have a safe and inside that was a small fortune in cash. Emergency bribe money. The Horses life was charmed, that is, until he was sixty-five years old, February 1985. Matty was in Fort Lauderdale when the law came knocking. A smarmy Italian prosecutor, a fed, named Rudolph Giulianiyouve heard of himwent after Matty like a guard dog gnawing at his calf.
The papers called Giuliani hard charging, but you could tell if a hood got the jump on him hed start in with the goombah bullshit. Now, its true Giuliani seemed hardwired for crisis when he managed the disaster as mayor of New York after 9/11, but he later dropped out of a presidential race because he couldnt get his own family to back him and was last seen polishing turds for Trump. In 1985, he was a U.S. attorney who wanted to have a war with the mob so voters wouldnt think he was mob, and once he got Matty the Horse in his sites, he was relentless.
The Horse and eleven other guys were named in a sixty-seven-count federal grand jury indictment, charged with skimming a whole array of joints, including Umbertos Clam House.
He and a partner, a guy named Benny Cohen, were charged with bullying their way into contracts to haul away Con Eds waste. A certain amount of physical persuasion was involved in getting the old guys out so they could move in.
