Mafia's Greatest Hits S1E3: Joe Colombo: The Maverick Mobster

Overview

Joe Colombo was always flamboyant. He loved fame. He loved celebrities and he loved money. But he was the only mobster who actually went out looking for trouble with the authorities... Colombo was fed up with the way the FBI was harassing him. It was the 1970s and Colombo was much taken by what he had seen of "people power" – student protests, Gay Rights marches, and, of course, Martin Luther King. So he decided to set up his own organisation – the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Soon he was picketing FBI offices, holding rallies and building a nationwide civil rights movement. And it worked. The FBI found it couldn't lay a finger on him as he won a strong of civil liberties actions. Unfortunately for Colombo, his fellow mobsters didn't like the attention he was getting and he was shot in a sensational high-profile assassination attempt in front of thousands at one of his Italian-American Unity Day rallies in the heart of Manhattan. The shooting was captured by the world's media. Joe died eight years later, never recovering from a coma. All around him the family he once ran started to fall apart...