On the afternoon of Thursday July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante was noshing and hanging out with associates at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His trusty cigar in hand, at around 3 pm that afternoon, Galante was shot at point blank range by three masked gunmen who found him in the garden section of the restaurant. According to a Washington Post article that ran a few days after the slaying, “Galante and the others were drinking wine and eating fruit and salad” when Galante, his 44-year-old associate Leonardo Coppola, and the 47-year-old owner of the restaurant, Giusseppe Turano, were gunned down with automatic pistols.
Somehow, the two other men who flanked Galante at the time of the shooting, Caesar Bonventre and Baldo Amato, were completely unharmed in the melee. Authorities had reason to believe this implicated the two in an ordered hit on Galante.
