Where's Manny?

The continuing gang war between New York City's embattled Mafia clans has deteriorated from messy to just plain murky. The showdown began openly enough when reputed Mafia Chieftain Joe Colombo was gunned down last year at an outdoor rally for his Italian-American Civil Rights League. Then in April "Crazy Joe" Gallo, Colombo's archenemy, was assassinated in the relative privacy of a Little Italy clam house. Last month the nephew of Carlo Gambino, boss of the nation's strongest Mafia family and a Colombo ally, was kidnaped. Or was he?

The Gambino caper proved so perplexing that a special federal grand jury was impaneled last week to sort out the details. As pieced together by Justice Department officials, the case sounds like a chapter out of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. It seems that the missing nephew, Emmanuel ("Manny Boy") Gambino, 29, was not one of Uncle Carlo's favorites. Assigned as a loan shark, Manny doled out the better part of $1,000,000 in Gambino family money to borrowers who were very tough in resisting his demands for repayment. Worse yet, a few months ago, Manny reportedly announced that he wanted to divorce his wife to marry a flashy blonde modeling student he had set up with an apartment and a new Cadillac. The Mafiosi were aghast. For one thing, divorce suits often expose embarrassing financial arrangements. For another, jilted wives have a way of blabbing their troubles. Don Carlo's decision was final: paramour yes, divorce no. On May 18 Manny vanished.

Steep. The next day a man telephoned Don Carlo's home and said that Manny had been kidnaped and was being held for a $350,000 ransom. Following instructions, Gambino sent his men racing off to a phone booth in New Jersey, but they somehow lost their way and arrived too late to receive another message. Four days later the deal was renegotiated; Don Carlo claimed that $350,000 was steep and wondered if the kidnapers would be satisfied with $60,000. After a day of haggling, the abductors agreed. The FBI, which had got wind of the goings-on, then interceded. Undaunted, Don Carlo boldly argued, with some logic, that the Government provide the ransom because he might be accused of gypping the Internal Revenue Service if he came up with such a large sum. The FBI refused, and on May 25, Don Carlo's men tossed the $60,000 into a gully along a New Jersey highway. Manny, however, never materialized.

A few days later the FBI traced an abandoned rented truck believed to have been used in the plot to Robert Sentner, a New Jersey souvenir manufacturer. Sentner is a high-rolling gambler who just happened to be in hock to Manny Gambino for $40,000. As the FBI focused its investigation on Sentner.

Manny's blood-stained car was found abandoned at Newark Airport, and it was assumed that he had been killed by his abductors. Conducting their own investigation, the Gambinos were also hot on Sentner's trail. After two men riding in a black Cadillac raked his home with shotgun blasts two weeks ago, the terrified Sentner went to the Government with a bizarre tale.

The kidnaping, he confessed, was a hoax engineered by Manny, who hoped to bilk Uncle Carlo out of the ransom so that he could run off with his blonde girl friend. Sentner said that he assisted Manny in return for having his $40,000 debt erased from the Gambino books. Sentner, who enlisted four friends for the job, claims that Manny was alive when he last saw him but that he has no idea of his whereabouts. Manny's girl friend, who has secluded herself in her apartment, says, "If Manny ran off, it certainly wasn't with me." "We've got to find out what happened to Manny," one Justice Department official explained last week, "before we charge anybody with committing a crime, whether it's murder or flimflamming the Gambinos out of $60,000."

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