An Unlikely New York Friendship
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They were quintessential New Yorkers who lived a bit on the edge and liked good food, good wine, and good times.
One was a reckless gangster who was raised in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn and schooled on the streets of Red Hook, where he shook down storeowners and kept a pet lion in the basement of an old tenement building that no longer exists.
The other was an actor and song-and-dance man who was born in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, played city-kid games on Findlay Avenue, and returned to New York to study acting in 1955, after living with his family in Waukegan, Ill., as a teenager.
The gangster was Joey Gallo, who was gunned down in a Little Italy restaurant in April 1972; the actor was Jerry Orbach, the street-smart, wisecracking character actor who died late Tuesday of cancer at the age of 69.
Their friendship has been described as unlikely.
It was anything but.
“They began hanging around together in the ’60s, after Joey got out of jail,” one veteran mob watcher says. “Joey could be a charming, likable guy and I guess they hit it off. They were together the night Joey was murdered.”
The friendship began a few years earlier, when Gallo, a murderous thug who claimed he took part in the 1957 slaying of Murder Inc. boss Albert Anastasia, got out of a New York State prison after doing nearly eight years for extortion and began fancying himself as a writer.
Gallo wanted to write a book about himself – not a good idea for mob guys – and the street-savvy Orbach used Joey as research for his role of hardboiled detective Gus Levy in the movie “Prince of the City.”
“Knowing Joey, as well as a couple detectives, made my background pretty complete,” Orbach once told the New York Times.
He and Joey appeared together at a few Manhattan cocktail parties, where the literary set gawked and gazed at the renegade mobster whose bumbling attempt in the early ’60s to take over what later became known as the Columbo crime family was made into a book and movie called “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Brooklyn boy Joey moved to Manhattan, where he tried to impress the celebrity crowd with a combination of street stories and random quotations from philosophers he read in jail, like Sartre and Nietzsche. He married his second wife, Sina Essary, on March 16, 1972, at Orbach’s West 22nd Street brownstone. The minister who presided had married Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki on television.
Then Joey screwed up. After refusing to take a $1,000 gift from family boss Joe Columbo, he supposedly recruited a young photographer named Jerome Johnson to murder Columbo at an Italian-American League rally in Columbus Circle in June 1971.
Columbo was shot in the head – he lingered in a vegetative state for years – and a mob bodyguard killed Johnson on the spot.
A gang war ensued. Two innocent businessmen lunching in a Midtown restaurant called the Neapolitan Noodle were murdered in a case of mistaken identity and, ultimately, a contract was put out on Gallo’s life.
Never a shrinking violet, Gallo, went out for a night on the town on April 6, 1972, to celebrate his 43rd birthday. Along for the ride were his new wife and her 10-year-old daughter, Orbach and his then-wife, and Gallo’s bodyguard, Peter “The Greek” Diapoulas, and his date.
They sipped champagne at the Copacabana, swapped stories and jokes, and parted company sometime after 2 a.m. The Orbachs went home; Gallo and entourage went to Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy in the early-morning hours of April 7 for shrimp, scungilli, and clams.
Four gunmen burst in, firing wildly. Gallo was hit in the chest, but he managed to stagger out into the street in pursuit of the gunmen and collapsed and died near his 1971 black Caddy.
“He made a mistake, Crazy Joe did,” a police spokesman was quoted as saying in the next day’s papers. “He should have gone to bed last night.”
Fortunately for millions of future “Law & Order” fans, Orbach, who starred as smart-aleck cop Lennie Briscoe for 12 years, went home to sleep that rainy night long ago.
Over the years, he bristled a bit when reporters brought up the friendship, saying they sensationalized and misrepresented it. But he never denied it and never regretted it.
After all, they were just two New York City kids who, while headed in different directions, passed in the night and found they had something in common.