On June 28, 1971, Joe Colombo, namesake of the Colombo crime family, one of New York City’s five mafia families, was shot several times while he was addressing a crowd during the Italian Unity Day rally in New York’s Columbus Circle.
The shooter, who was identified as Jerome Johnson, a black man from Newark, New Jersey, was immediately shot and killed by Colombo’s bodyguards.
Colombo would survive the shooting. However, he was paralyzed and ostensibly brain-dead. He would languish until his death in May 1978.
Though a police investigation would conclude that Johnson acted alone and independently, many within the insular world of organized crime believed that Johnson had acted at the behest of one of Colombo’s disgruntled mafia soldiers.
