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In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins examines one of the most puzzling events in organized crime history—the 1971 shooting of Joe Colombo.
At the height of his influence, Colombo stood before a crowd of nearly 50,000 at Italian Unity Day in New York City when he was gunned down by Jerome A. Johnson, a man posing as a journalist with a camera. The brazen daylight attack shocked both the public and law enforcement, immediately raising questions about motive, planning, and whether larger forces were at work.
Drawing on insights from Chief by Albert A. Seedman, Jenkins breaks down the NYPD’s investigation. Despite intense scrutiny, detectives found no clear ties between Johnson and organized crime, a fact that complicated the case from the outset.
The episode explores:
The chaotic scene at Italian Unity Day and Colombo’s shooting
Johnson’s background, including his strange attempts to break into filmmaking
The investigative work of Detective John Weber and the efforts to link Johnson to militant or political groups
The difficulty in determining whether Johnson acted alone or as part of a larger conspiracy
Although authorities ultimately concluded Johnson was a lone gunman, lingering questions remain. Was he truly acting independently, or was he manipulated or used as a disposable asset?
Jenkins also examines the broader consequences of the shooting. Colombo’s incapacitation triggered instability within the Colombo crime family, leading to internal conflict and a significant shift in New York’s organized crime landscape.
This episode provides a detailed look at an unresolved mystery that continues to spark debate among historians, law enforcement, and mob insiders alike.
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Transcript
[0:00] Speeches, to cheer, to celebrate a holiday.
[0:12] What they found was death. The main speaker was fatally shot. This crowd, infuriated by the shooting of their leader just moments before this scene, raged into complete chaos.
[0:32] Fighting broke out everywhere.
[0:38] This man, totally unrelated to the assassination attempt, was caught up in a violent altercation with the police.
[0:49] Hey guys good to be back here in the studio of gangland where’s gary jenkins retired Kansas City missouri police intelligence unit detective and later sergeant i have a a mystery that i’m going to look at one of the longest hell mysteries in the mob maybe and has never been solved and i don’t think i can solve it today but i’m going to look real close at the people that did try to solve this mystery and that’s the murder or the wounding and he eventually dies so you could call it the murder of Joe Colombo. And I’m getting this from a book that a man named Albert A. Seedman, who was the New York City Police Chief of Detectives, wrote about his career. It’s called Chief. It’s a really pretty good book. And it goes into a lot of things besides this, but he really goes into depth about the investigation of the shooting of Joe Colombo. I can’t even call it shooting, but it ended up he died. He died of his wounds. I really think You can call it a murder. Albert Seidman, he has worked all the high-profile cases. He was really well-known to the press because he had a real media-savvy style. He was colorful, and he was tough and gruff, and I think chewed on a cigar maybe. Probably who they modeled Kojak after, that kind of a character. He made a lot of organizational changes to the NYPD detective unit. They were for the better, and he did write this memoir titled Chief.
[2:12] Now, as chief of detectives in 1971, it’s about a year and a half before he retired, Albert Seidman led the New York City Police Department’s inquiry into the assassination attempt of mob boss Joseph Columbo, Joseph A. Columbo, Sr.
[2:29] At Columbus Park on June 28, 1971, Joe Columbo was addressing a huge crowd and shots rang out and he went down and he was left paralyzed until his death in 1971. 78, I think, and actually brain dead too. And the shooter, as best anybody can tell, was a 24-year-old black man named Jerome A. Johnson. And he was immediately jumped on by a bunch of mob guys who were up front there. Now, they say Columbo’s bodyguards, but it was probably anybody who was up front there jumped on him. You’ve seen those pictures where he got him around the deck like that. When somebody, a gun goes off and shoots him and he dies from that shot. Now, he just happened to die because you didn’t like, I don’t think they did a coup de grace to the head. I think they just shot him and he went down. Who was Jerome Johnson? I think that’s the key here. That’s the only, that’s a place that you start in an investigation like that. Who was Jerome A. Johnson? That time he was a 24-year-old African-American man, been living in Harlem.
[3:33] Right off the top of the investigation, they had no known ties to organized crime in 1971. First thing you do is you go to the intelligence unit and say, hey, you know this guy?
[3:44] You ever seen him show up at a social club or anything like that? Any of your informants know this guy? And they came up with nothing. Now, what happened that day, Columbo was speaking. There was about 50,000 people there. It was an Italian Unity Day rally. Jerome Johnson had a press pass around his neck, and he had a big video camera, a professional-looking video camera, and all of a sudden, he’s getting close, and all of a sudden, he comes up with a gun. He shoots Columbo three times in the head and neck. As I think I said before, he survives, but he doesn’t really survive because he’s brain damaged and he’s paralyzed the rest of his life. They take him down.
[4:27] Witnesses will place a 20-something attractive African-American girl who also had an expensive-looking photographer camera, photographer outfit, and she had been with him, moving around the crowd with him like she was with him. First of all, here’s what you do. You’ve got to find out who Jerome Johnson is. So Albert Seidman takes charge of this investigation. Biggest investigation they got going. It’s a burner, a red ball, whatever you want to call it. And he assigns one of his detectives, a guy named John Weber, to look deep into Johnson’s life. Now, Weber, he selected Weber because he was already an expert on black Muslims. And at that time, there was the Black Guerrilla Army. There was several New York City patrolmen had been ambushed. And there was black militant groups had taken credit for it.
[5:17] Everybody’s thinking, okay, that’s what this is. And here’s a guy that would be the best guy to go into Johnson and try to connect him up to this. I was reading about Weber, kind of an interesting guy, Columbo-style detective, because they described him as he seemed to drift off from the point and be naive and maybe easily fooled. So let me ask you one more thing, but that was his trick to get folks to talk more. Another trick an old-time detective told me, he said, when you got a suspect, tell them all how it went down, but get a lot of the facts wrong. And sometimes they’ll say, oh, no, that’s not the way it happened. This is what happened. So you got those little tricks trying to get people to talk. And this was during a time when other detectives were investigating black militants for a connection to ambush murders of New York City beat patrolmen just walking down the street and somebody would step out behind them and shoot them down.
[6:11] Now, right off the surface, he had no criminal record of note. A couple of minor things when he was real young. One thing out in California. He had no known mafia associations that they could find. as I said before. They couldn’t connect him up right away to any political groups or any ideological groups. There didn’t seem to be any motive there. He didn’t seem to have any financial backing. And lots of times you go look and get a guy’s bank account right away or go try to find out where he was staying, see if there’s a bunch of cash or if his bank account had a big influx of cash recently. So those are some of the first things you do. And you start looking for this light-skinned, attracted black female woman who was carrying a camera and a press badge with him.
[6:53] Camera, tried to find that camera. The camera’s disappeared. You want to see what’s the deal with this camera? Where’d he get this? They also had the gun. When they first start the investigation, somebody’s recovered the gun. It was a World War II, German-made.
[7:09] Meant a .32 caliber. Actually, I said World War II. I think they started making them at World War I. It was a heavy gun to carry. It was a small, easily concealable gun, but it was really heavy, solid steel. It was made for guys that were riding in tanks, so it was going to be really substantial, and it was going to work well under adverse conditions. It wasn’t going to jam on you, and they weren’t very traceable because so many had been thrown on the market between the wars. He had to copy the press pass and an examination that it was fake and no doubt it was fake. He found an address book that had been in Johnson’s pocket. So, you know, you start going down through that and trying to identify those people and talk to them. There were seven checks in there from B&H Distributing and Enterprise Modern Service. And on the checks, it said 110 West 23rd Street, Manhattan, which was vacant office or actually burnout office is right next to something called Orgy, the Orgy Club and some kind of porn thing.
[8:09] He was able to talk to some of Johnson’s family right away. They lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and found out that he’d gone to school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which is basically a suburb of New York City. They found out that he’d gone out to California in the 1960s like a lot of young people did. And they found one police contact, only one, out there in L.A. Where he was stopped, kind of walking while black in a white neighborhood in an expensive Beverly Hills neighborhood. And he said, I was just visiting a girl up here, and she gave me this book of poetry, and he showed that. And I guess they must have written a field interview for him or something. Weber got hold of that. But they did find out in California, he’d moved in with a guy who he knew from New Brunswick who had gotten into the film industry a little bit. And he tried to use that as a connection to get on in the film industry. And this guy lived in the Sunset Strip area. So he moved into the street life along the Sunset Strip and the drugs and the hippie lifestyle along the Strip. He’ll come back to New Brunswick. He doesn’t really ever get in the movie industry or anything. He’ll use that as a stick later on. But he comes back to New Brunswick, and then he moves into a student and hippie community up around Rutgers University, which is there in New Brunswick.
[9:24] At that point in time, then he tries to play the part of a film producer, and he gets some business cards for a fake company called Johnson Productions. Said he’d even hired, he’d found that he’d even hired a chauffeur limo to drive him around the college and the bars and the coffee shops and stuff and tried to use this as a scam to pick up girls. Hey, I’ll put you in the movies. You look like you’re a model. I just need to take some pictures of you and that. That scam’s been going along for a long time.
[9:54] Eventually, he wears out his welcome. People get tired of this shit and they don’t realize that he’s a fake. He move up into Manhattan where it’s more anonymous and he starts trying the same scan with girls. And I assume that’s when he probably moved down in the Chelsea Hotel in that area down there in 23rd Street. I think that is at Greenwich Village or down more downtown than uptown. He moved on to Philadelphia. They traced him to Philadelphia. Continues this, what they learned about him, he’s continuing trying to scam girls with this fake filmmaker thing. Nothing’s coming out of that. No connections. Nothing that bothers the investigation. and Weber will check out the two companies on the checks, B&H Distributing and Enterprise Modern Service. He said he was in a burnout building. It once been something called Club Orgy and Adult Worlds. It’s in the porn business, and he’ll find it has some connections in and around the porn business. He’ll find the names that are authorized on these two accounts, and they say, yeah, they’re still in the porn industry, but they don’t remember this guy at all.
[10:57] And they couldn’t connect them to him they couldn’t really connect him to any other mob guys where he could form a nexus there now they might have missed something there i don’t know you could go slide by something there he just kept grinding away so you keep grinding away the guy’s background and some of the look going back at the crime scene photos and of course by this they know that this camera that he had it was a bolex 816 big you crank it up like this and then and you start going, and it turns a 16 millimeter. It looked like something that a TV station would have. Can’t find it, and keep looking around, and they finally find that somebody had picked up that camera, and he said, when they talked to him later on, it was a couple, three weeks later, he said, I stood around with it, and nobody asked me about it. No cops came up to me and said, oh, is that the camera? He said, I didn’t want to yell out, hey, I’ve got his cameras. I was afraid after what I saw, they attacked him. I didn’t know why they’d be jumping all over me. So I just took it home. He first looked inside of it and he said there was no film. Aha, did he use that camera to hide the gun in? There wasn’t any metal detectors. Nobody was patting anybody down, but that was your first theory when there’s no film in it. He has a friend on the detective unit who brings it to Albert Seidman’s task force, and they already had the men a pistol, and no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get it in this empty film magazine so much for that theory.
[12:24] They noticed that the camera had markings from a camera store up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which they had traced him to going around these different colleges trying to hit on college girls. So a couple detectives fly up, and they learned that five days before the shooting, he had gone into this camera store and asked to rent this exact specific camera, a Bolex 816. The owner really was sure about that. He wanted a Bolex 816. He used a check on this B&H distributing to rent this, paid $23.80,
[13:03] and the camera store, things were a lot easier back then. No deposit was required. He didn’t ask him for any identification. The detectives are a little suspicious about that laxness in their procedures. Back in Manhattan, detectives did find a professional photographer who had known Johnson and knew something about him and had socialized with him a little bit and talked about photography because Johnson was going around acting like he was some kind of a filmmaker. And this guy had a recent burglary where he had an identical Bolex camera was stolen. But as they examined the Bolex that was recovered from the guy who found it at the scene, and this guy said, this was not my camera. I don’t know what the deal was. Johnson could have stolen. Johnson knew I had it. He could have stolen it.
[13:48] But he didn’t use it. He rented that one to use at the crime scene. This guy, in an unusual circumstance also, this guy that had the Bollocks camera stolen, said Johnson. Now, this guy that had the camera stolen did say that Johnson told him that he had been hired to film this Columbus Day rally by the Italian American Civil Rights League. That guy, he said he was a professional photographer and filmmaker and videographer. And he said, I was really surprised that they would hire somebody like this to film this really important event because there was like 50,000 people there. From this guy, the squad found other professional photographers that Johnson had approached to help him go film that day. And he had asked this first guy that had the Bullux camera stolen to help him film it. So it just seems like that’s a dead end. The squad found that Johnson approached other professional photographer to help him, and they were all women. Still couldn’t find this black woman who he must have promised some money if she’d come and help him film this.
[14:57] Well, Detective Weber had all these dead ends and dead ends. He’s looking back into black militant connections, and he started looking for the attractive black girl. Maybe she was a black militant, and maybe she was part of it.
[15:12] He just kept looking. They found a name, Marge Riley, in his address book and learned that she was a black woman and from New Brunswick and now lived in the area of the orgy club. But she didn’t still live there. When they started going down there, Chelsea Hotel, I think, but she started going down there, they started going down there to hunt for her. And then they found she had gotten a job and she had left New York City, was living in rural Georgia, working at a Head Start program. They flew two officers down who had seen her and remembered her well from the crime scene, and they got there and they said, yeah, that’s not the same woman. I had a bunch of other nutcase tips coming in, which they all do, and they all start out promising, and lots of times they’re implicating black people and black militants, but they quickly deteriorated once they examined them. Something called the Black Revolutionary Attack Team, or BRAT, was taking credit.
[16:07] They called the newspapers or something, but they couldn’t connect any dots there. Weber kept going back to the girls that Johnson had been around and been seen with, finally found one that had a trunk of Johnson’s possessions. It had a couple of fake swords. They’re like scimitars, those curved swords that Arabs have, a box of incense, a book on astrology, an Indian carving, a couple of photos of Johnson in a cowboy costume.
[16:35] Weber will later call this more of a box of a dreamer, a guy, somebody from outer space, a guy who just wants to act out on his fantasies in some fantasy world that he creates in his mind. And I’ve seen these guys on the streets or around in the libraries, and they hit on girls that are there. And they had this kind of, want to have this aura of this, like they’re spiritual and they’re this and they’re that. And they burn incense and poetry and that. And he was one of those guys. He had taken up with a white girl in a commune after hitting on it on the street and saying he could read her fortune. And they contacted her and she said he was wearing one of those fake swords when he first met me. He moved into that commune and then started sleeping with another girl. This guy sleeps around everywhere. One of the girls will tell the cops that in one sense, in a technical way, he was maybe the greatest lover she ever had.
[17:29] Claimed to be a male witch. This guy was a piece of work, wasn’t he? A hospital administrator who was named in his book, who he had his name and contact information book. He was a hospital administrator. And he said, how I met him, I picked him up while he was hitchhiking. And he said, while we were talking, he said, Johnson asked me to get some uppers or downers from the hospital. I said, hey, man, I’m an administration. I can’t get that. I couldn’t get that anyhow. That was a dead end. In the last days, just before he did the shooting, he had gone back up to Cambridge and rented the camera.
[18:02] And he tried to go to the commune where he’d stayed before, and they rejected him and came back to Manhattan, tried to recruit some massage parlor girls, told them he could be their pimp, and they laughed him out of the massage parlor. He had an answering service, and during this last week, he closed it down. It was, like said, he was a G&H exterminating service, and he went to the answering service. He used to have these, like, phone banks of people that, if you call, you get a number, and if somebody calls in on that number, then they go and they say, G&H exterminating. Can I take a message? No, nobody’s in. I can take a message. They closed that down. Now, they found a police informant who claimed that during the last week before the shooting that he saw Johnson at a used car lot in Brooklyn. He said Johnson was standing with some mafia-type guys, and he said as soon as the guy saw him, he had separated himself from the mob-looking guys and came to this informant. And he said he pulled out $20 and said, Hey, I borrowed this from you several months before. I’ll pay you back. And this guy’s name was in the phone book, but he didn’t know any more than that. And a couple of days before, he’s like frantically trying to get a date. He found a girl that he’d known from the past working at the Port Authority bus station as a traveler’s aid helper at the desk there. And he wanted to take her out on a date, and she refused. And he called some actress he knew and asked her out on a date, and she refused.
[19:28] She said, I got a pretty important job interview tomorrow, just making some excuse. And she said, what are you going to do tomorrow? Or what are you going to do? and he said, I’m going to shoot Columbo. At the time, he had this Bolex camera with him, so she just assumed it was going to film him. Uh, sometime over the next 15 hours, he will pick up this black girl with a camera. Uh, and they said she had a powder horn on her belt. And I don’t know what that means, a powder horn. Maybe you guys can enlighten me there. If you watch that, uh, documentary about the American revolution that’s on right now on your public TV, and it’s pretty good too. It’s long, but it’s good. They had powder horns in there, but I don’t know what it meant. She had a powder horn on her belt. After all the leads, everything they ran down, all the nutcase leads, and I didn’t go into a lot of the nutcase leads that Albert Seidman talked about. There’s a ton of them.
[20:20] NYPD will just close the case and say Jerome Johnson was a lone gunman. Lee Harvey Oswald, huh? Seidman will never really believe that he was a lone gunman, and you had his men desperately, and the FBI did too, try to connect Johnson with Joey Gallo because of the Gallo War with the Columbos, And Gallo had worked with black gangsters while he was in the penitentiary. And most Italians never did any business with blacks, except for very few in the narcotics business. But he just can’t, he just can’t do it. Now, Gallo will be killed shortly after that. Then Percy will be able to take over. But they never could get any kind of a smoking gun statement, even a good solid rumor that would check out or any other sign that he was anything other than a lone gunman. Now, was he a lone gunman or was he just a disposable asset? A lot of people want to believe he was a disposable asset that they killed right away, just like Harvey Oswald.
[21:16] And Chief of Detectives Albert Seidman, he will never accept that conclusion personally himself. But as an agency, they had to come out with these lone gunmen. But at the time, some red flags at the time that Columbo might have been in trouble. He was under a lot of pressure from other mob bosses because he’s drawn all this attention. To the mob because of his Italian-American Civil Rights League and these rallies and all that, and let alone a little bit of jealousy because he’s getting a lot of money. A lot of people are donating a lot of money to him for that, who benefited from Colombo’s removal. Immediately after, I think, the Persicos went on to lead the Colombo family, and there’s a big power shift within his crime family, and it was a clean ending. When he’s killed immediately, there’s no confessions, nobody to bring into it. There’s no trail to follow, it seemed like. They never could find one.
[22:08] So, was he a patsy, a cutout, or was he a lone gunman, like they wanted to say? Jerome Johnson’s death will freeze this case permanently. It’ll never go any further. As far as I know, there’s never been anything more that came out about this that was worth repeating to anybody. There’s no shooter to question. There’s witnesses, but they didn’t really know who was who there. They did. They weren’t talking. No hard evidence of any kind. or good, informative information that tied any mafia people to this hit or to Jerome Johnson. So what we know for sure, Joe Colombo was effectively removed as a leader of the Colombo family, and the Colombo family did go into an internal war. He’s just a ghost in mob history, but he’s a guy who altered the balance of power, and then he vanished from the scene. He’s just one more expendable guy in the mob lore, I guess, a trigger pull,
[23:04] maybe by unseen hands, and he was never meant to walk away. The official conclusion was he was a lone gunman. Seidman disappeared.
[23:12] I don’t even know what else to say. He even brought in Carlo Gambino and Joy Gallo for questioning. Of course, they’re not going to talk to you anyhow, but he really pulled out all the stops trying to link other mob guys up to being the strings, pulling the strings behind Jerome Johnson and just never did do it.
[23:32] He retired shortly after this, and he’ll leave a legacy as one of the most colorful and maybe best New York City detectives and chief of detectives that they ever had. So get the book, Chief. You can get a copy for a small amount of money on Amazon. It’s used, of course, and it’s long out of print as far as a brand new one. I read it a long time ago, found it in the library, and it’s a really good book. It tells you a lot more, a whole lot more about cases in New York City because there was a lot going on in New York City in the 60s and 70s, if you remember. So thanks a lot, guys. It’s always a pleasure to be here and do one of these stories. I will have things on my website. You can go to my website, Gangland Wire, that you can buy my books, my movies. I’ve even got to put this story and increase the stories in my Big Apple Mafia stories from the Five Families book. I did these couple of books about Chicago and New York from just from the stories I’ve done on my podcast and then wrote them down in easily readable form and got a couple of books out there, not too expensive. Got my book about the skimming from Las Vegas and got my three documentaries, which are on YouTube to YouTube. They’re on Amazon to rent. Got links to them in my show notes here. So thanks a lot, guys.