In 1959, Joey got his infamous nickname. He claimed it came after he showed Kennedy up on national television by looking so good in his suit, an event recounted in RFK’s 1960 bestseller, The Enemy Within.

“I read that bullshit,” spat Joey, taking a New York Post reporter between the lines. “And just for openers I didn’t have a black shirt on. I was wearing a one-buck work shirt I picked up at an Army-Navy store on Sixth Avenue.

“I walk into Kennedy’s office and he’s got his sleeves up and his tie down and he says, ‘So you’re Joe Gallo the jukebox king?’ The first thing he told me was if I helped him get Hoffa, I’d never want for nothing. When I told him the hell with that and that I was going to take the Fifth, he said, ‘You’re not so tough—I’d like to fight you myself.’ And when he came around from behind his desk and started to peel off his coat, I told him, ‘I don’t fight,’ and I reached in my pocket and pulled out a mezuzah that Sid Slater had given me and shoved it in his face.”

No way was Joey going to play rat on account of big league politics.

“Plenty of people have said to me, ‘You know, Joey, if you’d gone another way, you might have made something of yourself. If you’d put your brains and your energy into something legitimate, you could have gotten to be President.’ And you know what I always say to them? ‘Bullshit. I couldn’t be that crooked.’”

Weeks after Joey came home from Washington, the cops picked him up on the charge of vagrancy with no visible means of support.

“They say I been picked up fifteen, seventeen times,” complained Joey. “That’s junk. I been picked up maybe a hundred and fifty times and they never make a record. I get picked up for vagrancy and for consorting with known criminals—my father and my brother, in my own house.”

The judge sent the Blond back to the Kings County psych ward, hoping to keep him off the streets for a while. The shrink administered the Rorschach test.

“It looks like somebody spilled ink on it and folded it over,” said Joey.

The shrink probed the Blond’s creative impulse, telling him to draw a house, asking, “Would you like to live in a house like this?” Next, a tree. “Is this tree alive? How old is it?” Joey put aside his artwork and laid it straight. “If I could answer questions like that, I would be crazy.”

“I spoke to this psychiatrist,” Joey told the Post, “and I said to him, ‘You’re appointed by the police commissioner, aren’t you?’ And he said he was. And I said, ‘Look, I been accused of a lot of vicious crimes. It happens I know a lot of people who met violent ends and that’s my crime. And now they’re trying to railroad me and you tell me I’ve got a persecution complex. And I told him I have a large family and a lot of friends and if I was him, I wouldn’t let myself be used as a tool of the commissioner and the DA and be the one to drop the axe on me.”

Joey brought up his older brother, Larry.

“He never lifted a hand to nobody in his whole life. He’s a mechanic, and the government says he’s Public Enemy Number One or Two. I forgot which because I’m the other one.”