was. Early life Joe Gallo was born in the Red Hook, Brooklyn, area of New York City. His parents were Umberto and Mary Gallo. A bootlegger during Prohibition, Umberto invested his earnings into a loan-sharking racket and did little to discourage his three sons from participating in local criminal activity. Although he would remain deeply entwined with South Brooklyn in the popular imagination throughout his criminal career and often frequented the area as a youth because of familial ties, Gallo was actually raised in the borough's Kensington section (then customarily characterized as a subsection of Flatbush), where his family owned and operated Jackie's Charcolette, a greasy spoon at 108 Beverley Road which capitalized on foot traffic from the nearby Church Avenue business district and IND subway station. As late as 1964, a United States Senate dossier on organized crime identified the family home at 639 East 4th Street as Gallo's permanent residence. (By 1972, the Gallo family had relocated across the street to a larger abode at 652 East 4th Street, which was operated as a rooming house.) He completed his primary education at P.S. 179 in Kensington before dropping out of the Brooklyn High School of Automotive Trades in Williamsburg at the age of sixteen. Shortly thereafter, Gallo sustained head trauma in an automobile accident, resulting in the manifestation of a "nervous tic"; by this juncture, he and lifelong associates Peter "Pete the Greek" Diapoulas and Frank Illiano had begun to contemplate various criminal schemes while frequenting Church Avenue's Ace Pool Room and a candy store on 36th Street and Fourteenth Avenue in the nearby Borough Park section. In 1949, after viewing the film Kiss of Death, Gallo began mimicking Richard Widmark's gangster character "Tommy Udo" and reciting movie dialogue. After a 1950 arrest, he was temporarily confined to Kings County Hospital Center, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Albert Seedman, the head of New York City Police Department's Detective Bureau, called Gallo "that little guy with steel balls". Gallo's brothers, Larry and Albert "Kid Blast" Gallo, were also his criminal associates. Gallo's first wife whom he married around 1960, divorced in the mid-1960s, and then remarried in July 1971 was Las Vegas showgirl Jeffie Lee Boyd. Later in 1971, Jeffie divorced Gallo again. The couple had one daughter, Joie. In March 1972, three weeks before his death, Gallo married 29-year-old actress Sina Essary. He became the stepfather of