The Cigar: Carmine Galante, Mafia Terror

From the godfathers of American Mafia history, the brutal and blood-stained biography of Carmine Galante, the ruthless Bonnano boss who rose from tenement street thug to masterminding the legendary global heroin trafficking network, the French Connection – always with a cigar in his mouth.

HIS WAR CRY: “I RULE EVERYTHING.”
FOR HALF A CENTURY HE ALMOST DID.

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Camillo Carmine Galante was raised in Manhattan’s Little Italy and by all accounts born bad. At age ten his home away from home was juvenile detention. By fifteen he was terrorizing the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, scoring high marks for the “errands” he was running for his La Cosa Nostra elders. When he turned twenty, Galante was already one of the mob’s top enforcers­–a sadistic thrill killer and clinically diagnosed psychopath with big dreams: whack his way into controlling organized crime the world over, vowing to kill Mafia chieftains Tommy Lucchese and Carlo Gambino and take control of their mob families.

Carmine “Lilo” Galante’s rise to Mafia star was infamous: hit man for the Luciano and Genovese crime families; named consigliere by Joseph Bonnano; he wiped out eight members of the Gambinos; on behalf of Mussolini he assassinated the publisher of an anti-Fascist newspaper. “The biggest dope peddler in the country” according to law enforcement, Galante helped orchestrate one of the largest heroin trafficking operations on record—a power move too dangerous for his rivals in the narcotics trade. The heads of the five New York families decided that the psychotic Galante had to be stopped. On July 12, 1979, finishing his lunch in a Brooklyn restaurant, Galante got what he’d dished out his whole life: a shotgun blast to the face, his trademark cigar still clenched in his teeth…