Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market

270 Pages·2009·1.621 MB·English

by  Jerome Tuccille

Gallo Be
Thy Name
THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW
ONE FAMILY ROSE TO DOMINATE
THE U.S. WINE MARKET
JEROME TUCCILLE
Copyright © 2009 Jerome Tuccille and Phoenix Books Inc.
All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the
publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except brief
quotations in critical reviews and articles.
The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59777-590-8
ISBN-10: 1-59777-590-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Available
Book Design by: Marti Lou Critchfield
Printed in the United States of America
Phoenix Books, Inc.
9465 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 840
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my famiglia: my wife, Marie; children, Jerry and
Christine; son-in-law, Jim Merry; daughter-in-law, Wendy
Katzenstein Tuccille; and grandsons, Jasper, Hugo, and Tony.
Table of Contents
Prologue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Book One—OUR FATHER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Book Two—THY WILL BE DONE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Book Three—THY KINGDOM COME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Book Four—DELIVER US FROM EVIL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Book Five—GALLO BE THY NAME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Chapter Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
vii
Prologue
Fresno, California, was a small and dusty town in 1933,
populated by down-at-the-heels farmers and idle men and
women with too much time on their hands and not enough
work to fill their days. It, like the rest of the country, was dry. But
after thirteen long, violent, and turbulent years, Prohibition
would soon be coming to an end. It had been a puritanical
and ignoble experiment in social engineering that was widely
ignored and almost universally considered to be a failure.
With the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment about
to become a reality, the fortunes of the Gallo family
supposedly took a turn for the worse. Having lived like
royalty for a decade, Joseph and Susie Gallo found themselves
deeply in debt, reduced to living in a modest house on a
scrubby, dust-covered ranch in this agricultural working-class
town in the Central Valley of California, midway between
Sacramento and Bakersfield. The house they moved to had
neither a telephone nor electricity.
For those thirteen years—1920 to 1933—Joseph Gallo
and his brother Mike had prospered in the illegal California
wine industry. Competition was sparse during Prohibition.
Grape-growers and winemakers with connections to the
lucrative mob-controlled markets in Chicago and New York
made a pretty good living, while those without ties fell by the
wayside or ended up in jail.
The morning of June 20, 1933, broke hot and sunny.
The heat could be brutal from late May through late
September in the parched valley, and this particular day was
no exception. According to Julio, the Gallos’ second son, he
and his wife, Aileen, had driven his truck to his parents’ home
to pick up the youngest brother, Joe Jr., and bring him back
with them to Modesto. Julio first unloaded some irrigation
equipment that his father had asked for. Then he strolled
viii JEROME TUCCILLE
behind the house to the barn, where he found his father pacing
back and forth, distraught, muttering to himself.
“Where’s Mother?” Julio asked.
Joe pointed toward the field alongside the barn, where
Julio saw his mother standing on top of a haystack, pitching
hay into a truck. Julio cursed and ran over to her.
“Here, Mother. I’ll do that,” he said, taking the
pitchfork from her. “You and Aileen go make lunch and get
Joe ready to leave.”
When he returned to the barn, Julio spoke harshly to
his father, the Gallo patriarch, berating him for treating his
mother so badly. Joe had raised his family with an iron fist,
abusing his wife both verbally and physically and brutalizing
his older sons, Ernest and Julio. But now Julio stood up to
him. Why was his mother pitching hay, he wanted to know.
Instead of joining the others inside the house for lunch,
Joe Sr. stayed out on the front porch, where he slumped in a
chair with his head buried in his hands. Julio, who had gone
into the house, now went outside and tried talking to his
father, but Joseph continued to babble incoherently. Julio, then
twenty-two, knew that his father had been borrowing heavily
from banks—and from his mobster brother, Mike—just to
keep his vineyards operating. But Julio claimed that he did not
know the full extent of his father’s debt, nor could he pry
details out of him in his current state of mind. Later, as Julio
and Aileen prepared to leave with Joe Jr., Susie walked over
to Julio, grabbed his shoulders, and whispered in his ear, “I
don’t care what happens to me. All I want is for you boys to
work together and get along.”
Julio had a sense of foreboding but said nothing. This
was not the first time Susie had tried to be a buffer between
her husband and her sons. And how many times had she
attempted to intervene when her oldest son, Ernest, took out
his resentment of his father on Joe Jr.? Julio figured it wouldn’t
be the last time his mother intervened. It was just the family
dynamic, he decided, and no amount of pleading with his
GALLO BE THY NAME ix
father or Ernest would change anything. Julio revved up his
truck and headed north to Modesto.
The youngest Gallo son, Joseph Jr., remembered that
day differently when he recalled it later in life. According to
him, his mother had not been pitching hay on the ranch.
When Julio and Aileen drove up in their truck, Joe Jr. was in
the house with both his parents. The three walked outside
together to greet them. Julio tossed thirteen-year-old Joe the
keys to the truck and told him to drive the two women around
the ranch for a while. It was clear to young Joe that his older
brother wanted to speak to their father alone.
When Joe Jr. returned with his mother and sister-in-
law more than a half hour later, he saw Julio and his father
arguing under a tree in front of the house. Then Julio told
his younger brother to go inside and get his bag because they
were leaving immediately. Julio and Aileen did not stay for
lunch, as Julio had claimed, and according to Joe his father
did not seem upset before Julio arrived. When little Joe left
the house with his suitcase, however, his father was sitting on
the porch in silence, looking troubled. Like his older brother,
Joe Jr. also recalled his mother walking over to Julio, clutching
him by the shoulders, and whispering, “I don’t care what
happens to me. All I want is for you boys to work together
and get along.”
But Joe Jr. added that his father suddenly got up,
walked over to where he was standing next to Julio’s truck,
and said to him in Italian, “Be good and mind your brothers.”
Then his father turned away and walked back inside his house
by himself.
Around noon the following day, June 21, Joe Sr.’s
right-hand man, Max Kane, and a field hand named Frank
Madrigal arrived at his house for lunch after finishing their
morning chores. Surprisingly, neither Joe nor Susie was inside
the house. Normally, the smell of Susie’s cooking would have
wafted through the air as she prepared the midday meal. Max
and Frank looked forward to lunch every day, ravenous after
x JEROME TUCCILLE
a long morning spent working hard around the ranch or
running errands in town.
They pulled their horse and wagon around the house
toward the barn in back. Max felt a sinking sensation in the
pit of his stomach even before he had a chance to see what
had happened. The first thing that caught his eye was a bright
blue cloth on the ground, which at first he thought was a
windblown rag. Max jumped off the wagon, handing Frank
the reins. The rag was lumped up on the ground beside the
pigpen, but as Max drew closer he could see that the blue
cloth was actually the edge of Susie’s dress. Susie lay facedown
in the mud with a bloody wound on the back of her head.
Max saw Susie’s straw hat a few feet away, a bullet hole
visible in its broad, blood-soaked brim. Max howled, yelling
for Joe. Joe was nowhere to be seen, so in a panic, Max
jumped into Joe’s truck and sped to the gas station down the
road, where he called the local sheriff from the pay phone.
Fifteen minutes later, two deputies pulled up at the
ranch. First they checked out Susie’s body and then walked
down to the house to see if they could find Joe. There he was,
sprawled out on the floor beneath a small mirror in the dining
alcove of the house. Beside his outstretched right arm, they
could see a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Near Joe’s
feet lay his black fedora, soaked with blood. The blood had
come from the bullet hole that Joe had drilled above his ear
into the right side of his head.
Ernest claimed that he was the first to get the news of
his parents’ deaths when a reporter from the local newspaper
called to tell him. Another newspaper, the Fresno Bee, ran a
front-page story that evening with the headline:
GALLO BE THY NAME xi
FRESNO FARMER AND WIFE VICTIMS
OF MURDER AND SUICIDE
The subhead beneath it stated:
Joseph Gallo Believed To Have Taken Own Life
After Slaying Wife As She Fed Pigs;
No Motive Found For Act Found By Officers
When Ernest called Julio to tell him what had
happened, Julio felt a wave of otherworldliness wash over his
body. He had seen this coming. He had sensedit there in his
parents’ house the day before. Why hadn’t he taken a moment
to get out of his truck and try once again to get through to his
father? He knewit had been inevitable. Receiving the news
from his brother Ernest was akin to déjà vu.
But the news of their parents’ grisly deaths, as Ernest
and Julio described them, did not hold up to scrutiny.
Too many contradictions surfaced during the ensuing
investigation, fueling speculation that the murders were
related to Joe’s mob connections and that perhaps his sons
were involved. Ernest in particular had sufficient motive to
want his father dead. Were Joe and Susie victims of contract
killings by the mob? Did Ernest and Julio have a hand in their
parents’ deaths? Was the pistol found at the crime scene the
same one Ernest had bought in Chicago four years earlier?
To understand the business Ernest and Julio inherited
from their parents and the tensions in the Gallo household,
we have to go back in time, when Prohibition was the law of
the land, when beer, wine, and bootleg liquor nonetheless
flowed like rivers through the mob-controlled speakeasies of
great American cities, when many of the grapes and wines that
made their way east from California originated in the
vineyards owned and operated by Joe and Mike Gallo.
And if one name was synonymous with Prohibition,
it was that of a tough thug from Brooklyn named Al Capone.