He was to die on that same date, while celebrating his birthday with family, forty-three years later.
1: Crazy Joe and the Mad Arab
Gallo first learned of the infamous, ancient book while serving a ten year sentence for extortion. Gallo was widely read – in prison he devoured the writings of Sartre, Machiavelli, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Camus – and so it was not unnatural for him to become intrigued by talk of this legendary tome.
In prison, Gallo had befriended numerous African-Americans, as it was his revolutionary and controversial idea to work together with African-Americans on the streets instead of opposing them as the mob had traditionally done. One of his most recent allies was a new inmate named Jerome Johnson, and on an overcast day out in the exercise yard an avid Gallo pressed Johnson to relate how he had himself acquired a copy of this unthinkably rare volume. Listening in was another prisoner, of Southeast Asian descent, named Joshi (a fervent atheist, doing time for violently assaulting two Jehovah’s Witnesses on his doorstep) – who was also familiar with the Necronomicon through his own reading, though he had never seen a copy himself.
“You mean to tell me you got this book stashed on the outside right now?” said Gallo, who bore a strong resemblance to the actor Robert Duvall (who would appear in the movie The Godfather in a number of years), though it would be actor Peter Boyle who portrayed Gallo after his death. “Thing must be worth a lot of money to the right people.”
“Yeah, man,” said Johnson. “But it’s not just what it’s worth, it’s what it can do...that’s what I want to tell you.”
“I can see you’re smooth, Jerome, but how’d a street hustler like you get a hold of a thing like that?”
“There was this guy named Gavin, collected all kinds of crazy damn books besides this one. I been inside his apartment, man, and you shoulda seen the spooky shit he collected. Shrunken heads, bones, animal parts; like a fuckin’ museum. But the man was into junk, and that’s how he came to be introduced to me. Every time I came to see him he’d had to sell off more of that creepy collection of his, till at the end the place was almost emptied out. Last time I seen him, all’s he had left was a couple of books, and he tried to trade me that there Necronomicon for his fix.”
“Obscene,” Joshi muttered. “Trading such a book for narcotics.”
“I told him I didn’t need no wormy old book for a doorstop, so then he told me how rare the thing was and all. I asked him what it was about, and he said it talked about these gods or monsters or something called the Old Ones, that came to our world gazillions of years ago, but they got defeated and locked up by these other cats called the Elder Gods. Gavin said maybe all this shit was what originally inspired people to believe in devils and angels, and –”
“No, no, no!” Joshi protested loudly. “That line of thinking is so horrendously wrongheaded! No wonder this fool became a drug addict! Angels? The Elder Gods are not good, they don’t care about humanity! We’re nothing more to them than we are to the Old Ones, and – ow!”
Gallo had clapped Joshi across the back of the head. “Quiet down! Man’s trying to tell us his story, okay?”
“Anyways,” Johnson continued, “I didn’t wanna hear about all that loony shit, so I was just about to leave when he got all desperate and told me he’d give me an example of what this book could do.”
“Yeah? So what was it he showed you?”
“Shit, Joey, you won’t believe me. You’ll say I was on the dope myself, but I wasn’t. At least, not just then.”
“So tell me, already.”
“He read something outta that book...a spell or...incantation or whatever. He was facing the corner of the living room – he said it had to be a corner. And he said he had to read the...the ascent chant?”
“Ascending?” prompted Joshi.
“Right, right. The ascending chant to open, the descending chant to close.”
“Madonne,” Gallo said impatiently. “To open or close what?”
“Joey, I swear it – I saw a door open up in the corner of the room.”
“A hidden door?”
“No, a doorway to another world! It just sort of slowly appeared, man, like it started out dim and then got brighter, until I could see through it. Door had a pointy top, like a window in a church. And man, on the other side was water! At least it looked like water, like I was looking through a glass window into the bottom of the ocean. But the bottom of an ocean on another planet, or some damn thing.”
“Jerome,” Gallo snorted, smirking as he wagged his head. “Man...”
“Look, man, you want to hear this or not? If you don’t wanna believe me, Joey, we can end this right now.”
“No, go on,” Joshi all but pleaded, his eyes practically bulging from his head, “go on!”
Gallo got Joshi in a headlock and said through gritted teeth, “I told you to shut your trap, didn’t I?”
“Hey!” a guard patrolling the yard called over to the men. “Gallo, you got a problem over there?”
Gallo let the red-faced Joshi straighten up, his arm around his shoulders, and grinned back at the guard. “Just palling around, Hank!”
“Well treat your girlfriend a little better, will ya?”
The guard strutted off, and Gallo mumbled, “How ‘bout I’ll treat your wife a little better?” Slipping his arm from Joshi, he turned back to Johnson with a more serious expression than he had worn before, and said, “Tell me.”
“Well,” Johnson began again slowly, reluctantly, “after a few seconds I started to see things back there in the water, moving through it. Like shadows at first, but big.”
“Deep Ones?” Joshi blurted heedlessly.
“Huh?”
“Fish-like humanoids?”
“They looked kinda like bugs, or crabs. Huge crabs. But their heads...they were just like brains, with no face, but with like feelers or tentacles growing out of them!” Johnson wiggled the fingers of both hands above his own head. “And they had these huge wings, that you could sort of see through, that helped them move through the water.”
“Mi-go,” Joshi hissed to himself in awe. “The fungi from Yuggoth!”
Johnson ignored him. “Anyway, I almost fell over a table backing away from that doorway, Joey, believe me. I almost crapped myself. I started yelling at Gavin to close the damn door, close it now!”
“Sure it wasn’t just a movie, from a hidden projector or something?”
“No, man, listen to me!” Johnson was clearly agitated now, his face shiny with sweat and his own eyes beginning to protrude. “There was this buzzing sound coming from the doorway, coming through the water. It was getting louder and louder, and it hurt my ears. It hurt my fucking brain! It sounded like a giant bee or something – like a whole swarm of giant bees. And it was getting louder because one of those things was coming toward the doorway! Like it seen us, Joey, and wanted to come get us! Wanted to come through the doorway into that guy’s living room and get us! I was ready to panic by now, I ain’t ashamed to say it, and I even took out my gun and pointed it at Gavin and told him to read that fuckin’ descending chant right now or I’d kill him! But he knew I couldn’t do that. If I killed him, I didn’t think I could read that chant myself. So he just smiled at me, and walked over to the doorway, right up close to it so the light from the water like rippled across his face. By now that crab thing was walking across the bottom of the ocean or whatever, walking straight up like a man and waving those big wings and reaching out its claws to us. It was only a few yards away, it looked like. And what does that sick bastard Gavin do? He reaches out one hand and sticks it through the doorway! Sticks it into the water! I seen him flinch a little, like the water was freezing cold – and I realized I could even feel the cold from where I was standing. Then he pulled his arm out again, and his sleeve was soaked and dripping on the floor! There wasn’t no glass over the doorway, after all, so I don’t know how the water was held back like that. Held back even though he could reach right into it!”
“My God,” Joshi muttered, no doubt forgetting his atheism for the moment.
“But before that thing could reach the doorway – reach it and stick its arms through, too – Gavin looked down at the book and read the descending chant, and the doorway went dark again. Disappeared, like it was never there. All that was left was a little water dribbled on the floor.”
“And then what?” Gallo asked, in a thoughtful tone of voice.
“Then what? Well, I traded him my drugs for the fuckin’ book, of course!”
2: Released to the World
When Crazy Joe Gallo left prison in 1971 he looked physically diminished, though his ambitions were anything but. Gallo had already attempted to overthrow crime lord Joe Profaci before his ten year prison stint, but cancer had since done Gallo’s job for him and taken Profaci out. Another Joe, Magliocco, had stepped up to fill Profaci’s shoes, but after a heart attack did him in it was yet another Joe, Colombo, who took helm of what was now called the Colombo crime family. Whatever its name and whoever ran it, Gallo wanted to conquer it, and he enlisted the aid of his brothers Larry and Albert “Kid Blast” Gallo to do so. But not only them...
Gallo’s fellow inmate from prison, the scholarly Joshi, had been released several years earlier. No doubt the last people he had expected to show up at his apartment door one night in 1971 were Joe Gallo and Jerome Johnson. “Well,” Gallo told the stricken-looking Joshi, “it’s better than opening the door to a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, ain’t it?”
Inside Joshi’s kitchen, Gallo told Joshi he had nothing to fear from them. In fact, Gallo had a proposition. “How’d you like to become the unlikeliest hitman in the whole of New York, my friend?”
“What are you talking about?” the man stammered.
“This,” said Johnson, thumping a valise down on the kitchen table and unlatching it. Joshi leaned over it timidly to peek inside, wincing as if he expected to see a bomb within, though no doubt hoping it was a mound of cash.
It was even better than a mound of cash. It was the Necronomicon.
Joshi looked up at Gallo with his eyes sparkling weirdly, as if the mere sight of the book had imparted that light to them. “Who do you want me to kill first?” he whispered.
3: Wiseguys from Yuggoth
“And they call me crazy,” Gallo said, reading a newspaper article about Joseph Colombo’s Italian-American Civil Rights League. While Gallo had still been in prison, crime boss Colombo had created the organization to battle the negative stereotyping of Italian-Americans. In 1970, Colombo had organized an Italian-American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle. Now, according to the newspaper article, Colombo had planned a second Unity Day rally to again be held in Columbus Circle, on June 28th.
“I’m telling ya, Gambino is not happy about Colombo drawing attention to himself like this,” said Kid Blast, gesturing in the air with his cigarette. The men were sequestered in their headquarters on Brooklyn’s President Street.
“But Frank Sinatra was happy enough to do a benefit for the League at Madison Square Garden, last November,” said Larry Gallo. “Can you imagine? The stupid fuck.”
“Larry,” Crazy Joe said, pointing at his older brother, his pale blue eyes meaningful. “Don’t knock Sinatra.”
“Gambino will back us up on anything we do to Colombo,” Jerome Johnson said, again referring to Carlo Gambino, the powerful mafia don who had once been allied with Colombo – but no more. Johnson was seated at a table, trying to twirl spaghetti around his fork as deftly as his white comrades did. Slurping an unruly strand into his mouth, then speaking around it as he chewed, he urged, “Let’s stop fuckin’ around and do it, boys. Stop wasting Joshi and the book on these little fish and go for the big man, huh?”
But Gallo had been a little reluctant to go after his more important, high-profile enemies with their newfound weapon, because of its unpredictability and the possible attention it might bring back to him (and this from a man who normally reveled in attention). There had been a number of experimental hits, as Johnson had said, on lesser figures in Colombo’s ranks. Some of these had gone okay. In one man’s bedroom, a doorway had been opened up. His hysterical widow – still in psychiatric care – claimed her befuddled husband had approached the portal...and long, multiply-jointed arms like those of the king of all Alaska king crabs had suddenly reached out of the murk beyond the threshold and pulled her husband through, out of sight. She had heard brief, distorted and gurgling cries, and then the doorway had darkened and vanished, leaving only some icy water spattered on the carpet. No body. The victim was sleeping with the fishes of another dimension.
Yet then there had been the hit where another technique had been used. The grimoire described the use of a lens in combination with certain potent chants. By this means, the spell-caster was said to be able to peer through the lens into other realms – or focus, magnify and project his mental energies. Joshi had suggested that any sort of lens might serve this purpose, from one’s own spectacles to a camera. On the night in question he had used his reading glasses, and consulted some notes in his lap, copied from the book back in his apartment. He had been sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car at the time, Jerome Johnson behind the wheel, and Johnson had watched him read and reread the notes, memorizing them, then lift his gaze and direct it toward the tenement building they were parked across the street from. Specifically, at the bedroom window of an apartment in which one of Colombo’s men resided.
There had been a short, sharp crack like a miniature clap of thunder, and Johnson later described to Gallo seeing two blue streaks shoot from Joshi’s spectacles, through the closed car window, and through the glass of that third floor window. (Later they realized these extra sheets of glass had tripled the intended effect.) The next thing they knew, the darkened room behind that third floor window lit up with intense blue light, the glass exploded outward, and the exterior of the entire tenement building was crawling with a web of crackling blue electricity. This net of unearthly power danced and flickered for nearly a full minute, and Johnson got the car moving out of there. The next morning, they all learned from the newspaper that their target had indeed perished – as had his wife and three other of the building’s tenants who hadn’t escaped the fire that raged through and ultimately gutted it. “Nice work, Superman,” Gallo had told Joshi, swatting him with the rolled up newspaper.
As a result of this experiment in particular, at times Gallo had had second thoughts about continuing to use the book as a weapon; once he likened it to picking off ants with atom bombs. But then, he figured it probably had more to do with Joshi’s abilities in interpreting and executing the book’s spells and invocations. Maybe the man just needed to continue to hone his craft, his sniper’s eye and trigger finger.
“Nobody heard from Joshi yet?” he asked the others now. They’d called the occult scholar’s apartment a half dozen times that day.
“Nope, Joey,” said one of his soldiers.
“Okay, Jerome, go over to the bookworm’s place and see if he’s there. If not, wait there for him – and give him a slap for not being around, when he does show up.”
“Got ya, Joe.” Jerome wiped his mouth with a napkin as he pushed himself up from the table.
Talk turned again to Colombo, but it was only a half an hour after he’d left the gang’s headquarters that Jerome Johnson called and asked to speak with Crazy Joe. “Yeah?” Gallo said into the phone.
“I’m at the bookworm’s place,” Johnson said, careful not to mention names in case the phone was being wiretapped. “I think you should get over here, man.”
“What’s so important?”
“I really think you oughta see this for yourself.”
“All right, all right, I’m on my way.”
Within another half an hour, Gallo stood beside Johnson in the living room of Joshi’s apartment, staring at the body of his former unlikely assassin. Joshi sat in a cozy armchair, a book still open in his lap. His arms were draped comf
ortably on the chair’s armrests – but there were no hands at the ends of them. Nor was there any longer a head atop Joshi’s torso. And yet, there was no blood; not a speck of it. Joshi’s neck, and the stumps of his wrists, ended in odd twists as if the missing parts had been screwed off.
“Did you look around for the head and hands?” Gallo asked Johnson without taking his eyes off the corpse.
“Yeah, man. Nothing.”
Gallo leaned over the body and closed the cover of the book in its lap. “This isn’t the Necronomicon.”
“No, it isn’t,” Johnson agreed. “We can’t find that, either.”
Gallo straightened up fast, his eyes going wild and twitchy. He had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic back in 1950. “What do you mean?”
“Whoever did this took the book, too.”
“Fuck! Who else but Joshi or you or me would know what this thing could do? Know enough to take it? And who would already know this magic shit good enough to do this?” He waved his hand at the abbreviated cadaver.
Johnson leveled his gaze with Gallo ominously. “Gavin, Joey. He must have heard we’re at war with Colombo, and gone to him. Man needs his fixes, you know.”
“Madonne,” Gallo murmured, looking to the headless corpse again.
4: Camera Obscura
Joseph Colombo was all smiles as he moved toward the stage and its podium, so as to address the sizable crowd gathered for the second annual Italian-American Unity Day rally, in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. (Named after that positive Italian role model, Christopher Columbus.) And why shouldn’t he smile? The man was having it both ways. He was the don of one of New York’s five mafia families, and also the man who had convinced the Justice Department to stop using the word “mafia.” Because of Colombo, the word “mafia” would not be uttered in the film The Godfather, either. Mustn’t have the world getting the wrong idea about his people.
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