Why Lillo Is Lying Low

The would-be godfather is afraid of being killed

Night after night, just before bedtime for federal prisoners, two Mafia triggermen walked up to the modern twelve-story Metropolitan Correction Center near New York's city hall. With unidentified inside help, locked doors opened mysteriously for the gunmen, who took up positions in the hall outside one particular cell. Tossing restlessly on the hard pallet behind the bars was chunky Carmine ("Lillo") Galante, 68, who once aspired to become the Mafia's capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses). As lights dimmed in the cell block, the two armed men settled down for a nightlong vigil. Their assignment: to keep other mobsters from putting Lillo to sleep forever.

The extraordinary nocturnal sentry duty by Galante's bodyguards demonstrates both the Mafia's remarkable influence inside U.S. prisons and the fact that there is no rest for a mobster who strives to become godfather and fails. Sooner or later a rival will try to put him out of the running, permanently.

After the Mob's last overlord, Carlo Gambino, died of natural causes in 1976, New York's Galante strutted about the streets as though he were the anointed successor. Despite much press attention, the longtime bootlegger, drug king, racketeer and killer never reached the top. Law enforcement officials figure that Lillo now will be lucky just to keep on living and that his best chance of doing so rests upon protection from federal agents--the hated enemies who have kept him locked up for more than 20 years, one-third of his life.

The threats to Galante grew out of incessant rivalry among the five Mafia clans based in New York City, where the most powerful don is usually looked on by Mafiosi elsewhere in the U.S. as the capo with the most respect.

Galante began gunning for the top spot soon after becoming head of the Mafia family once run by Joseph ("Joe Bananas") Bonanno, who now lives in Tucson, Ariz. Galante was immediately challenged by Aniello Dellacroce (translation: Little Lamb of the Cross), who is one of the Mob's most feared executioners and longtime second in command to Carlo Gambino. The wily Dellacroce, 63, paid his respects to Gambino's memory by letting the late capo's brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, remain titular head of the family, while Dellacroce was elevated to the Mafia's ruling commission last summer. He emerged as the most powerful U.S. mobster.

As the feud between Galante and Dellacroce turned bloody, more than a score of their soldiers were slain. Then federal authorities revoked Galante's parole last spring from an earlier 15-year narcotics sentence on the unassailable grounds that he had been "associating with known criminals." At Dellacroce's urging, the Mafia commission in September not only decreed that Galante no longer headed the Bonanno family but let out a contract on his life.

When Galante got that fearful word, he was in the Metropolitan Correction Center. He soon learned that killers from two families were trying to get him: triggermen who worked for Dellacroce and others who belonged to the Colombo family, a clan that after a decade of internal struggle is trying to regain other mobsters' regard--and Dellacroce's thanks--by eliminating his rival. Knowing how easily he could be assassinated in prison, Galante arranged to have his bodyguards take up their nighttime baby-sitting beside his cell.

In what appears to have been a routine transfer, Galante was sent in late September to the medium-security federal prison at Danbury, Conn. Once again the armed men turned up at Lillo's bedside to tuck him in and stand guard. But also tracking Galante was a skilled Colombo family hit man, Carmine ("the Snake") Persico. Serving a 14-year sentence in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta for hijacking, the Snake somehow managed to get himself transferred to Danbury. But during the trip north, he was held briefly at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison and was visited there by another Colombo gangster. Federal authorities interpreted the meeting as a sign that something was afoot and detained Persico in Lewisburg.

Meanwhile, Dellacroce dispatched hit teams of his own toward Danbury. Federal officials learned about them from wiretaps that revealed talk among mobsters about the contract on Galante. Belatedly, Morris Kuznesof, chief federal probation officer in Manhattan, wrote Danbury Warden Raymond Nelson that he had received information "from a highly reliable source that an attempt to murder Mr. Galante will be made at your institution." Nelson slapped Galante into solitary confinement "for his own protection." But Lillo apparently prefers to rely on his own security arrangements, without the feds' help. Contending the plots to kill him were fictitious and that the Government was trying to harass the prisoner, his attorney, Roy Cohn,* has asked a federal judge to release Galante from "the hole."

In solitary, Lillo eats alone, exercises under guard in isolated areas and is kept away from other convicts. Even so, he has developed a bad case of the shakes. He is suspicious of his guards and does not even dare turn for comfort to the prison chaplain. One reason is omerta, the Mafia oath of silence. Another is the fact that Dellacroce, in one of his favorite disguises, likes to don a clerical collar and go about as "Father O'Neill" (a play on a common mispronunciation of his first name). Lillo has no yearning for the last rites, least of all as administered by the Little Lamb.

* Cohn, who became known nationally for his televised role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel in the 1953 Army-McCarthy hearings, now occasionally represents mobsters in court.

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