Our Friend Joey Gallo

In his final months of life, Mobster Joey Gallo developed an unusual friendship with Actor Jerry Orbach and his wife, Writer Maria Curro. Orbach had played a role patterned in part after Gallo's life in the movie version of Jimmy Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Out of the blue, the Orbachs got a call from Gallo, who wanted to meet his screen counterpart. The three saw each other almost daily after that. The Orbachs told TIME correspondent James Willwerth how they felt about Gallo. It is a picture that his rivals--and victims--would scarcely have believed.

JOEY had an intense sense of destiny," says Marta. "If he was truly marked for dying, this old-fashioned way--in style--would have been a point of honor to him. He was afraid he would choke on a piece of steak or slip in the bathroom. In a terrible way, Joey's death would have appealed to his sense of drama. He constantly told us that we might be with him when he was killed. And once he asked us if we would stay with him on a night when he knew it might happen. We would have, of course.

"We hadn't seen him very much in the past few weeks. I knew something was wrong, that he was doing something he was ashamed to tell us. He had been very sweet to me, holding my hand, saying tender things. It was a sign of something unusual. But he was terribly happy and relaxed the last night. At the Copacabana, I never saw him laugh so hard. My guard was down, just as his guard was down. And that's when they get you, when your guard is down."

"Joey compressed time with us because he knew in the back of his head that he might not have much time, that he could go at any minute," says Jerry Orbach. "Consequently, a minute spent talking to Joey was like an hour spent with someone else. There was no 'how's the weather?' or small talk. He was somebody who had to catch a train and get it all in now."

Adds Marta: "I know there was another side to Joey. But I can't comprehend it. He told us he was going straight. 'You don't understand, Momma,' he would say. 'I gotta get off.' It's a junkie term meaning you have to get the right kind of dope, the 'high' you need to make your life right."

Jerry remembers: "Breslin's book had portrayed Joey as a clown. Then when I met Joey, I was absolutely amazed to find out that maybe he had been a wild kind of nut before he went to prison, but something had happened to him inside. He'd done nothing but read there, and it was startling to talk with him." Marta adds: "When he asked me whether I preferred Camus or Sartre, I almost fell into a plate of spaghetti.

"There's a corner of Italian background in me," Marta continues, "that was ready to be activated. The first day I laid eyes on Joey, it was like being with my father. Joey sensed it, and my family sensed it. After that we were with him almost every day. And if we didn't see him, he'd call up and ask where the hell we were. He called my boy Christopher 'Dynamite.' He called me 'Momma,' or sometimes 'the Big Job.' The people we introduced him to were the best people we know. It was very difficult for him to say thank you. He might hug you or smile. But he wouldn't say much. When we had his wedding at our house, we got the minister who married Tiny Tim--no judge would touch the marriage with a ten-foot pole. Joey said in the car afterward, 'Nobody ever gave me a day like that. I'll always be grateful.'

"He had an idea for a play, a comedy about prison life, like M*A*S*H was about war. We worked on it, and I began observing him, and the book came out of it. Joey absolutely wouldn't talk about his past. I hope that is understood. The book is only about the relationship between my family and his.

"Joey was a terribly sexy person. He always made you feel he would run away with you--if there weren't 1,000 other factors to consider. He talked about prisons a lot, too. He thought that the Attica uprising was inevitable, and that Rockefeller handled it right. 'The hacks [guards] had to get their thing off, too,' he said. They would have shot someone sooner or later.' "

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