Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys: Surviving Brooklyn's Colombo Mob

A Timeline of Events

A Product of His Environment

These are the stories of Carmine Imbriale.

Ya know, Carmine from 13th Avenue.

Carmine went by many names. Captain Crunch. Handsome Carmine. 79th Street Carmine. Federal Inmate Register Number 67563-044. Or just, ya know, that Neddy’s loan shark that used to park Caddies outside Pastels as a kid... 13th Avenue Carmine.

Carmine Imbriale was many things—a gambler, a brawler, a bookie, a bandit. For two decades, Carmine was an associate in one of the most violent crews in the Colombo Family. Carmine was an armed robber, a credit card fraudster, a shylock, a hijacker, and, in the midst of a bloody South Brooklyn gang war, a survivor. Following multiple assassination attempts, he became an informant and today is a former member of the United States Federal Witness Protection Program.

To understand Carmine Imbriale is to appreciate how he is a product of his environment, a gritty South Brooklyn that now exists only in faded police photographs, grainy wedding-day reels, and Eyewitness News’ van’s sidewalk stock footage from the latter half of the last century. Even his place of birth is gone. Bay Ridge Hospital on Ovington Avenue is now a nursing home.

Carmine came up on the downside of Brooklyn’s Golden Era. But in many ways, it still was a magical time for a scrappy street kid who could blast a Spaulding three sewers. That’s until they started selling dime bags from corner payphones and purple double-barrels out the back of Cropsey Park.

Families in South Brooklyn were larger in those days. The Imbriales were a sprawling Italian-Irish American clan bursting through that sheetrock-and-linoleum mid-century one-family at 1245 79th Street. At the Imbriale home, it seemed like that screen door was always slamming. And they had to keep extra folding chairs in the hall closet for all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors rotating through for dinner.

The fourth of five children born to Helen Imbriale, Carmine clocked into this world late on a Friday night, July 12, 1957, moments before his father’s birthday. Named Carmine, like his father and his father’s father before him, he joined two brothers and a sister, with another sister trailing behind by a few years.

This was the heart of Brooklyn’s Little Italy, Dyker Heights bordering Bensonhurst, nearby Bath Beach, and Bay Ridge. These last exits to Brooklyn lie along the Belt Parkway on the outer shores of Lower Hudson Bay, running off that dark stretch of water they call the Gravesend.

For generations, grim-faced Italian legions arrived here fleeing the poverty of places like Campania, Apulia, and Palermo. They brought with them their butchers, their bakers, their braciole di manzo makers. They lined their streets with smoky social clubs, and slung salamis in their salumerias, spiking the air with traces of stromboli, soffritto, sfogliatella, piping hot out of pastry shops, pork stores, pizzerias, and pasta emporiums, far as the eye could see.

This is the South Brooklyn of the Sunday sauce, just don’t call it gravy. They played stickball in the streets and sat on stoops until late in the evening. Stray cats shrieked in alleyways strung with laundry. Dead-eyed statues of Saint Anthony guarded concrete gardens beneath banners of the green, white, and red snapping in the wind alongside the red, white, and blue.

In the mornings, street sweepers kicked up dust as men in white delivered glass bottles down blocks hung with sneakers sagging power lines like rubber hives. High above broken asphalt chalk-scarred with skelly boards, a tar beach tapestry unfolded, of rooftops, ancient water towers, church steeples, rusted fire escapes. And always, always, off in the distance, the Verrazano brooded and the mighty, mighty B Train rumbled out to Coney.

This was the real Brooklyn. Young bucks in white tanks on street corners sweated it out on busted beach chairs and milk crates. Ginas and Dinas and Minas in Berta 66 cut-offs reclined on car hoods preening, braiding. Someone crooked a monkey wrench out Old Man Dinardi’s shed, cracked open the johnny pump to scream out the sun... until a patrol car from the 6-8 rolled ‘round to shut it down. And soon, the sun slipped and dusk tripped the street lights, reminding the mothers along 13th Avenue to put down their Pall Malls and holler their kids home for dinner.

Historians mark the year Carmine was born, 1957, as the beginning of the end of Brooklyn’s Golden Era that started way back in 1920, when the huddled masses of the Lower East Side slums fanned out across Brooklyn’s broad plains on the backs of brand-spanking-new BMT and IRT lines.

The promise of the 1950s post-war boom was already a welch when Carmine first picked up a stickball bat on Dyker’s P.S. 201 schoolyard. By the time he roofed his last Spaulding across the street, there were even fewer opportunities for the New Utrecht high school dropouts hanging out on 13th Avenue. At least not many legitimate ones.

That year, 1957, marked the peak for the Baby Boomers, born 1946 through 1964. Today, more Boomers live in Kings County zip codes than in anywhere in America.¹

That year, 1957, the average cost of a home was $12,220. Rent in Brooklyn on a two-bedroom ran you $90. Fill your tank for 24 cents a gallon in a car that cost you $1,500, affordable on the average annual salary of $4,550 (though the day-rate down along the South Brooklyn waterfront was lower, especially after the union kickbacks).²

They went to the movies to take in The Ten Commandments, 12 Angry Men, and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, while at home, watched as Perry Mason and Maverick debuted, American Bandstand first aired, and I Love Lucy cracked her last joke. They flung their Frisbees, slunk their Slinkys, and Hula-ed their Hoops. But Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys stuck to stickball, handball, football—really anything with a rubber ball to hit, slap, smack, or chuck.

That year, 1957, was also the year of The Great Tragedy, when the wailing of millions went up as the dastardly Walter O’Malley made good on his threat to move the Brooklyn Dodgers unless the city built him an elaborate new stadium. The mayor balked, and O’Malley walked, hijacking the beloved Dem Bums from Ebbets Field for Los Angeles.³

Rat bastard.

That year, 1957, was the year of the infamous summit of the American Mafia at the home of Joseph Joe the Barber Barbara, in Apalachin, New York. Mafia chieftains and their top lieutenants from as far as Italy and Cuba invaded that sleepy hamlet to crown Vito Genovese capo di tutti capi. Not so fast, said suspicious local police, spoiling the party, sending dozens of gangsters stumbling into the woods in their wingtips.⁴

That round up of 60 mobsters compelled FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to concede that, yes, in America, organized crime does exist. But Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys could’ve told you that.

You see, in the neighborhood where Carmine grew up, the Mafia was everywhere. Everyone in that era of South Brooklyn knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, in the Life.

You knew a guy who’d give you a break on something that just fell off a truck. Feeling lucky? You go to that other guy to play the numbers. Bank turned you down and need a loan fast? You’re in luck. That’s the other guy, the shy. And if you wanted to gamble, that guy had another guy for you, the one with the book. And all these guys were not hard to find. They were outside the club on your corner, in your local barber shops, down by the OTB a couple blocks over, or in the smoky backroom of the Fortunata bakery throwing the cards around.

Some of these guys, the ones that did well, lived in Dyker Heights, starting a block north of the Imbriale home. Growing up at the bottom of that hill on the border of Bensonhurst, Carmine saw that tale of two neighborhoods unfold.

Bensonhurst, working class, is block after block of one- and two-family homes and random red-brick apartment buildings, sliced by commercial strips like 13th Avenue. Lower-income Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant families settled here a hundred years prior. Dyker Heights took a bit longer to develop, a former Native American burial ground too sloped for farming, too wooded for building.

As young Carmine crossed over 12th Avenue, he saw where the wild ones went once they were done dealing in the clubs and cafés of 13th Avenue. These homes—larger, stucco-ed—were front-yarded with towering fountains and marbled lions, privacy hedged, paved in polished stone with gurgling waterfalls, dripping dandelions.

Behind those lace curtains were two types of people: those who made it, and those who’d been made.

In few other places (maybe Long Island, or out in Jersey) did so many cardiologists live alongside caporegimes. Here, medical surgeons shared driveways with Mafia soldiers, as contractors gave gardening advice to contract killers. After all, just like doctors on call preferred to live near Victory Memorial over on 7th Avenue, the wiseguys wanted to be short drives to their sit-downs.

In those days, Halloween was a big deal for the tough Italian boys of 13th Avenue. As night came down, the old Sicilian black-shawls returning from their All Hallows Eve masses at St. Bernadette’s, the trick-or-treaters retreating home to savor their sweets, Carmine and his boys set out on their missions.

Across South Brooklyn, rival factions fanned out, block after block, armed for aerial combat with eggs and modified cans of Barbasol, bent on bombing the shit out of each other... or beating the shit out of each other.

Halloween night, 1969, Carmine at 12, rambling through Dyker Heights with his boys, spotted a glowing jack-o-lantern smiling wickedly down from a second-floor balcony wrapped in wrought iron. He told his boys to hold up a sec, then shimmied up that drain pipe, not knowing, not caring whose home it was.

Moments later, mid-shimmy halfway up that pipe, Carmine froze as an older Italian-American gentleman clad in a dark silk robe stepped out onto that balcony. He lit a long cigar, snorted at Carmine like he knew he was there, amused, not alarmed. He then twisted that fat Cuban in the flame as he dead-eyed Carmine.

We looked at each other, like, forever, and he got a real good look at me, Carmine says. He didn’t seem to give a shit this kid was climbing up his house. He’s all relaxed, lighting that big, fat cigar. Then he laughs, says out the corner of his mouth, ‘Okay, tough guy, let’s see how fast you can get down that pipe.’

Carmine was stuck.

I didn’t think it through and couldn’t really climb down the drainpipe, especially carrying a pumpkin, Carmine remembers. Lucky for me, he just let me out of the house and told me to never come back. But he was laughing, like making a joke out of it.

Fortunate for Carmine, that sophisticated-looking older gentleman clad in dark silk found humor in the situation. Guy like that could make a body disappear out in a hole in Staten Island, pretty easy in fact.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I remembered that old man, and I’d see him on 13th Avenue, Carmine recalls. He’d see me, shake a finger at me, laugh, sort of like he had his eye on me.

A friend of Carmine’s witnessed one such exchange, and paused. "How do you know him? he asked. Carmine laughed as he shared the Halloween story. You don’t know who that is? his friend asked. That’s Joe Colombo. You know, the boss of the Colombos."

The Colombo Family? Sure, Carmine shrugged. Who hadn’t heard of the Colombos? They were all over 13th Avenue, like semolina seeds on a Sunday loaf.

At the time, Carmine could not know what that name meant for his future.

Wiseguys were always eyeing talent up on the Avenue, and there were many sizing up that kid Carmine. Youth street gangs like the 13th Avenue Boys long served as farm teams for the Five Families of the New York Mafia. A generation before Carmine was crushing Joe Colombo’s pumpkins, they had more colorful nicknames, like the South Brooklyn Devils, the Degraw Street Boys, the Sackett Street Boys, the Gowanus Boys, the Kane St. Midgets, the Savages, the Senators, the Little Gents, and the Young Savages.⁵

Future Colombo Boss Carmine The Snake Persico started out as a leader of the Garfield Boys in Downtown Brooklyn. After he killed a rival in a gang fight in Prospect Park, then beat the charges, he came to the attention of a Profaci solider, and was a made member of that Family (forerunners of the Colombos) by the age of 25.⁶

The morning of October 25, 1957, on the orders of Carlo Gambino and Vito Genovese, a hit team murdered mob boss Albert Anastasia while he was getting a shave in the barber shop in the lobby of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. Persico was one of the gunmen on the hit team led by Joseph Crazy Joe Gallo.⁷

Profaci, Gallo, Colombo. These were the antiheroes held up by Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys, at a time when America’s teens idolized astronauts and cowboys.

By the 1970s, they no longer greased their hair in South Brooklyn or wore jackets with colorful gang names. Yet they were just as violent. They banded together by block or by avenue. The 18th Avenue Boys. The Avenue U Boys. The Bath Avenue Boys. And, of course, the 13th Avenue Boys.

The 13th Avenue Boys were not to be fucked with, armed, dangerous, stashing weapons nearby, because you never knew who’d be driving by, or when one of your boys would come running up after being jumped.

My brother Carmine was crazy as could be, which could be frightening, Maryellen Imbriale recalls. He never shied from a fight, and so many times he should’ve. He got beaten up so bad, so many times, fighting people he never should’ve been fighting, guys ten times his size, ten years older than him. But he never backed down.

Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys’ fiercest rivalry was with the Bath Avenue Boys. The two groups brawled at every opportunity, from church fairs and carnivals to bowling alleys and beaches. Yet nowhere was that violence more explosive than at The Feast.

The Italians brought these ancient festivals over with them to honor the saints who watched over their villages. Back when Carmine was kicking in teeth, South Brooklyn hosted feasts all summer, like the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, the Feast of Santa Rosalia on 18th Avenue, the Feast of Santa Fortunata on 17th Avenue (actually two feasts), the Feast of St. Bernadette, the Harway Avenue Feast, and many others.

It was a territory thing, Carmine recalls. We fought everyone. Sometimes we got together with another avenue. Sometimes, just us against whoever came down. But it was always something with someone, every night a fight. We battled 14th Avenue, 15th Avenue, 17th Avenue. Sometimes you’d get the Park Slope Boys coming in looking for trouble, and we gave it to them. But mostly, we fought Bath Avenue. We hated those assholes and they hated us. But they were some tough kids, like us. And let me tell you, there sure were a hell of a lot of them.

Carmine’s sister recalls one memorable fight at St. Bernadette’s Bazaar, when a gang from Red Hook crashed the scene. I was inside, and all of my friends came running up telling me my brother was in a huge fight, Maryellen says. So, I run outside, and there’s Carmine, all bloody, but now he’s getting ready to continue on to the next stage of the fight.

Maryellen attempted to intervene. I could get him under control sometimes, but not that night, Maryellen says. I was afraid for him and I tried. But he took off with all his friends. They went down to Red Hook to settle the score. Later that night, he was arrested in Red Hook and went to jail.

Those feasts drew thousands, funneled into narrow streets barricaded on both sides by long, white vendor trailers, as bright green, white, and red lights hung overhead. As Lucy’s sausage sizzled, Italian bands blared, and bingo wheels click-click-clicked, rival gangs charged, egged on by big-haired bangled beauties.

The Saint Bernadette Bazaar was like gladiator school, Carmine says. Other gangs came in, looking for trouble, and we just beat the shit out of each other, night after night. The girls loved it. But I’d never get into a fight over a girl.

Technically, sure, Carmine almost never beefed over girls. But it did happen one night at the St. Bernadette Bazaar.

This jerkoff, Larry, from the neighborhood, comes over to me, and I’m dating this girl, Linda, and Larry wants Linda, so Larry wants to fight me for Linda, and Linda wants me to fight Larry for Linda. Carmine laughs. I ask Linda if she wants to be with me or be with Larry.

Linda didn’t give Carmine the answer he wanted.

So, I said, ‘I’ll knock the shit outta this asshole, but I’m not fighting over you,’ Carmine says. So sure. Fuck Larry. Fuck Linda. But no way was I letting it look like Larry backed me down. Fuck that.

Carmine fought Larry on principle. And that night, Carmine beat Larry unconscious, in front of Linda, at the Saint Bernadette Bazaar.

Then Carmine flat left Linda.

As Carmine grew, the violence grew, and 1970s South Brooklyn grew... darker, meaner. Drug dealers commandeered corners and parks. Sex workers strutted down Surf Avenue or stalked the shadows under the Gowanus, before the Industry City renaissance, when it was more abandoned warehouses and drug spots.

Crime spiked across all major categories. Security bars appeared on the windows of homes that, not too long ago, left doors unlocked. Roll-down gates now lined commercial avenues. Everyone knew someone who’d been mugged. And the theaters replaced comedies and westerns with vigilante movies like Death Wish and Taxi Driver.

Between 1969 and 1974, the city lost a half a million manufacturing jobs, the types that keep young, restless men off street corners. Unemployment grew to 10%. Rapes and burglaries jumped threefold. Assaults and auto thefts doubled.

In the fall of 1973, this was just the type of environment where a 16-year-old boy stumbling home along 12th Avenue late at night could get stabbed.

It was after midnight that September evening. The air was cool. Brooklyn cool, you know, with that crisp, early autumn edge. Carmine was on his way home after a night drinking in the P.S. 201 schoolyard with his boys and some local girls. The only sounds were the occasional sedan whooshing by, the faint plunk of the traffic light turning on the corner up ahead.

I didn’t know what hit me, didn’t see them coming, Carmine says, waylaid by two assailants springing from the shadows from behind a parked van. They came at him from behind as he passed. He felt a sharp pain exploding halfway down the left side of his back, half a second before he hit the concrete; a pain, he says, that felt like getting hit with a lead pipe.

Carmine rolled to his side, saw his attackers flee on foot. He felt the cold concrete on the side of his face. A warmness spread across his back, to his legs. He was bleeding out from a stab wound. He dragged himself upright, struggled the block and a half to his home, stirring his entire family into a panic.

Made a big scene, but turned out not to be too bad, missed my organs; but at the time, sure felt like I was dying, and there was a ton of blood, Carmine remembers. I actually still have the icepick. Believe that? They left it in me when they ran off.

Carmine didn’t know who jumped him. He only saw their backs. But he knew it wasn’t random. They didn’t even rob him of the fat knot of cash he picked up shaking down a pot dealer earlier.

Knew it was two guys ‘cause I saw them running away, and I heard one of them say, ‘Good, you got him,’ Carmine recalls. Yeah, they got me... in the back.

Days before, Carmine and his friends jumped some guys from another block to settle a beef he doesn’t remember. I’d put my money on them, Carmine says. But really, could’ve been half dozen other guys. We had beef with everyone. Every day, different bullshit. Couldn’t keep track of all the beef we had.

Doctor told Carmine that had the stab wound been an inch to the left, they’d have been laying him out at Torregrossa’s two blocks over from where he got stabbed.

Carmine was back out on 13th Avenue the next night, peeling back the bandage, showing off the nasty wound bruising up half his back, like it was fresh ink from Mikey Tattoo.

In the years ahead, this toughness served Carmine well in the South Brooklyn underworld. Drugs hit the scene in a big way. The fights became more frequent, more involved weapons. Carmine’s reputation as a 13th Avenue brawler grew.

Over the years, Carmine racked up more than two dozen arrests, from petty offenses up to a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) indictment. Before he even dropped out of New Utrecht High School, one judge reviewing his rap sheet scoffed, Nice to see you again, Carmine. I notice you’ve gone on to bigger and better things.

It’s a career that spans mostly enterprise crimes (burglary, illegal gambling, extortion, counterfeiting, and credit card fraud) and violent transgressions (aggravated assault, armed robbery). But considering his chronic violence and explosive temper, it’s remarkable he was never indicted, convicted, or even accused of murder—not even manslaughter.

His first serious scrape with the law came in the summer of 1972. That night, a 15-year-old Carmine sat cuffed in the back of an NYPD blue-and-white, notching his first collar, for assault and kidnapping.

It started out as a simple Coney Island shakedown.

That sticky summer night, Carmine and two friends jumped on the Belt Parkway, rumbling eastbound toward the cigarette butt-strewn sands of CI.

Today, Coney Island is enjoying a renaissance. Millions of investment dollars pour in, with hotels, amusements, and attractions built or envisioned. A 5,000-seat amphitheater opened