In the annals of organized crime, Carmine Persico’s celebrity was somewhere in the middle rank. He wasn’t a household name like Al Capone or John Gotti, and he wasn’t quite as important or powerful as Meyer Lansky or Lucky Luciano. But he had a good nickname — the Snake — which he reportedly disliked and fought his way to the top of one of the famous Five Families of the New York Mafia. And he stayed there: For some years between the late 1980s and the turn of this century, he ran the Columbo family while incarcerated in successive federal prisons.
When he died last week, at 85, he was one of the last of his kind.
Of course, as his obituaries noted, the Snake had a vicious reputation; but which mob boss does not? He is said to have earned his nickname because of his knack for successfully switching sides in the various Mafia wars of his time and betraying allies. But Persico was also something of a gangster-prodigy, first coming to public notice at age 17, when he was charged with beating a fellow gang member to death and beating the rap.
Persico was the product not of urban poverty but Brooklyn’s striving middle class. His father, with a touch of irony, was a court stenographer. With his diminutive stature, bug eyes, and unruly hair he bore a resemblance to the actor Sal Mineo. A shrewd, fearless soldier in arms, he became a “made member” of the Mafia at 21, an unusually early age.
As crime bosses go, Persico was smart enough to avoid attention, when possible, and disguise his loan-sharking and sports-betting operations, hijackings, burglaries, labor shakedowns, and occasional killings behind an outward appearance of respectability. He was always dressed in a suit, tie, and starched white shirt, lived discreetly up north along the Hudson River, a comfortable distance from dangerous rivals and flamboyant colleagues, and his domestic arrangements were reportedly impeccable.
Still, Persico’s pride of place in the annals of crime is due largely to his involvement in two of the more gothic gangland killings in modern Mafia history. The first, the 1957 execution of Albert Anastasia while seated in a hotel barber shop, swathed in hot towels and lathered in shaving cream, not only ended the career of the founder of Murder Inc. but enhanced the Snake’s reputation as a useful co-conspirator. It was Anastasia’s No. 2, Carlo Gambino, who wanted his boss dead, and it was Persico’s bright idea to shoot Anastasia in midtown Manhattan on a busy weekday morning. No one was ever charged with the murder.
His other well-publicized homicide was equally instructive. Persico’s onetime partner in crime, Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, had become something of a man-about-Manhattan after his release from prison in 1971. A frequent dining companion of actor Jerry Orbach and other show-business figures, as well as journalists and assorted society types, Gallo’s version of Mafia chic was the sort of risky indiscretion abhorred by the Snake. Gallo was believed to have been involved in the shooting and wounding of Joseph Columbo, head of the Columbo family, and with Columbo disabled and Gallo a plausible rival for the succession, Persico moved decisively.
The 1972 killing of Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy, in full view of his wife and 10-year-old daughter, remains a celebrated spectacle of mob business practices and, of course, promoted Persico to first in line when Columbo died a few years later.
In the end, of course, even Persico’s cunning and luck couldn’t last and he, along with other bosses, was successfully tried and convicted in 1986 by New York’s crusading U.S. attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. At trial Persico conducted his own defense, and with some skill, prompting the judge to remark at his sentencing that “Mr. Persico, you are a tragedy. You are one of the most intelligent people I have ever seen in my life.”
Indeed, the Snake was the rare gangster just smart enough to have died in bed, but still in custody after 33 long years.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
