Giosue Gallucci

Gio­sue Gal­lucci was based at 318 E109th, where his brother Gen­naro had been killed in 1909. The build­ing was a three storey brick house, the lower floor had a bak­ery shop at the front with liv­ing apart­ments above. Gal­lucci had emi­grated from Naples in 1899. He had var­i­ous busi­nesses such as bak­eries, ice and wood shops, cob­bler shops and olive oil inter­ests, and also owned huge amounts of real estate. Gal­lucci was described in police records as “The Mayor of Lit­tle Italy”. He ran the Ital­ian Lot­tery in Harlem with strict con­trol over other gam­bling in the area, nobody ran pol­icy games with­out pay­ing Gal­lucci trib­ute first. He used his image and wealth to become polit­i­cally pow­er­ful, and was noted to be “very active” dur­ing polit­i­cal campaigns.

In July 1913, Assis­tant DA Mur­phy and Deputy Police Com­mis­sioner Dougherty began to attack the Ital­ian ring of pol­icy shop pro­pri­etors. Over 40 arrests were made around Mul­berry Bend and upper Harlem. Among those cap­tured was Gio­sue Gal­lucci, the police described him as “The leader of the Ital­ian crim­i­nals in Harlem” and that “his con­sent was con­sent was nec­es­sary before any­thing out of the way could be done in Harlem’s Lit­tle Italy”. The real rea­son of the arrests was spec­u­lated to be to try and smash Galucci’s vice ring. Gal­lucci was well known for his deal­ings with pros­ti­tu­tion and was nick­named in the press as “King of the White Slavers”.

On May 17^th 1915, shortly before 10pm, Gio­sue Gal­lucci, 51, and his son Luca left the fam­ily bak­ery on 318 E109th and walked to the cof­fee shop Gal­lucci had just pur­chased for his son. Four men entered the shop and fired at the Gallucci’s. Gio­sue was hit in the neck and stom­ach, his son Luca was shot in the stom­ach. Fif­teen men were in the cof­fee shop, mostly friends of Gal­lucci, some returned fire but the shoot­ers escaped. More than seven shots were fired in total. When the police arrived they arrested every­one in the cof­fee shop, and found Luca who had man­aged to stag­ger back across to the fam­ily home. Luca died the fol­low­ing evening in hospital.

Luca’s funeral was given three days later, 800 car­riages left the “Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel”, 22 car­riages were for flow­ers alone. The pre­ces­sion went along E115th head­ing for the cemetary, car­ry­ing the $500 cof­fin. That evening Gio­sue Gal­lucci died in hos­pi­tal. He had still been on $10,000 bail for car­ry­ing a con­cealed weapon from a case that dated back to 1913 and had not yet reached court.

Gallucci’s sta­tus and wealth was always hugely exag­ger­ated in the press. Titles such as “King”, “Leader” and “Mil­lion­aire” were always com­mon when his name hit the headlines.

The killing of Gal­lucci was for­mu­lated by the Morello fam­ily and Brook­lyn Neopoli­tan gangs, partly in revenge for the killing of Buonomo, a nephew of a Coney Island boss, Pel­li­grino Morano. The sup­posed killers were Joe “Chuck” Naz­zarro, Andrea Ricci and Tony Romano. The huge gam­bling and pros­ti­tu­tion empire left behind by Gal­lucci now passed to the Morellos.