Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad "Joey", Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia. Joey was the epitome of gangster chic, an anti-hero and counterculture rebel/philosopher whose readings of cigarette-burned copies of Camus and Sartre in Village cafés inspired him to "go to the mattresses" holing up with his gang in a Red Hook tenement with shotguns and grenades in an all-out street war.
Modeling themselves after B-movie gangsters in film noir classics, Joey made it into Women's Wear Daily and he and his brothers were regularly featured on the covers of the tabs dressed nattily in cheap black suits, skinny black ties and dark hipster Ray-Bans, a look so "gangster chic" that agnès b. dressed Harvey Keitel accordingly for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Like a character out of Godard film, Joey always carried his press clipping around in his pocket.
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Joey Gallo before the McClellan Committee, embodying “gangster chic,” as much the ’60s revolutionary attitude as the clothes, just around the time Leonard Bernstein hosted the Black Panthers for which Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic.” (AP Images)
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What they said about Crazy Joe:
"I never considered him a gangster. I always considered him some kind of hero...An underdog fighting against the elements."-- Bob Dylan
"He almost became one of the Beautiful People." -- Gay Talese
"I wish I'd had the chance to talk to Joe Gallo before he died." -- Susan Sontag
"Laugh at Joe...you're liable to get your brains blown out." -- Pete Hamill
The problem here is that the Gallos were violent criminals. As reported and reviewed people may believe being a gangster is fine if you are hip. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The book is enjoyably written - a quick read - but please don't think the Gallos are hipsters. They were violent criminals.