Brooklyn's Gallo mobsters become heroes

On this date in 1962...
Gallo gangsters became neighborhood heroes.

Noticing a fire in a nearby apartment building on Jan. 31, 1962, Lawrence and Albert Gallo (brother Joey Gallo was in prison at the time), Anthony Abbatemarco, Leonard Dello, Alfonso Serantino, John Commarato and Frank Illiano rushed into the building and rescued six children from a third-floor apartment. They also succeeded in extinguishing the blaze before firefighters arrived.

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"We'll probably get locked up for
putting out a fire without a license."

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Gallo gangsters, Anthony Abbatemarco, Albert Gallo and Frank Illiano
(left to right) with the children they saved from a fire.

Abbatemarco, Iliano and Albert Gallo were photographed with the children for local newspaper reports. It was a rare moment of positive publicity for the Gallo faction, then engaged in a desperate war against the leadership of the Profaci Crime Family and hampered by intense police scrutiny.

When interviewed, Albert Gallo joked, "We'll probably get locked up for putting out a fire without a license." (Joseph Kiernan and Henry Lee of the New York Daily News reported the quote differently: "With our crummy run of luck, we'll probably be pinched for fighting the fire without a union card.")

Abbatemarco, Gallo and Illiano (left to right) pose with the family.

At twelve-thirty in the afternoon, the seven men were returning to their headquarters at 51 President Street after a visit to a nearby luncheonette at 77 President Street, when they saw clouds of smoke emerging from a third-floor window at number 73. They ran upstairs and found Sista Biaz's six children, aged ten months to six years, inside. Biaz had gone out to a local grocery. Two of the gang led the children out of the apartment, while the rest tended to the fire. Burning furniture was tossed out windows to the street and the fire in the apartment was extinguished before the fire department arrived.

Biography of Anthony Abbatemarco.