stay with us >>> his name was carmine galante, but his mob nickname was the cigar. he was apparently almost never seen without a cigar clamped between his teeth, so that was kind of his mafia handle, carmine "the cigar" galante. and in the 1970s, galante rose through the ranks, kind of killed his way through the ranks, to become at one point the de facto chief of the bonano crime family. galante was implicated in multiple murders and in drug trafficking on an enormous scale, and one of his drug-related trials, they had a hard time keeping a jury on the case after individual jurors kept getting phone calls threatening their lives. the jury foreman, somehow, ended up falling down a long flight of stairs and breaking his back. on top of all the other crimes in which he was implicated and for which he was convicted, perhaps the best window into carmine galante's approach to his upward mobility in the mob is the fact that upon being released from federal prison after a 12-year stint that ended in the early '70s, one of carmine galante's first acts when he got out of pris