CRIME: AFTER THE DON: A DONNYBROOK?

The Boss of All Bosses was dead, three ruthless racketeers were plotting to replace him, and platoons of hard-eyed "greenies" were waiting for orders to shoot.

The sod had hardly been tamped down on the grave of Mafia King Carlo Gambino last week when a motel near New York's J.F.K. Airport was the scene of an extraordinary meeting. Packed into the basement room 100 strong were the capos (captains), consiglieres (counselors), under bosses and bosses of the five New York Mafia clans that Gambino had ruled directly. Attending, too, were some honored guests from afar; for it was the patient Don Carlo who had maintained order among the 26 families of the national Mafia combine. His word was taken as final judgment on their affairs and squabbles. The problem: how to divide his unprecedented power.

The meeting was quiet, and the conferees moved with diplomatic caution. Well they might; for according to federal officials, there are only three serious contenders for what Don Carlo left behind, and all have frightening reputations. The unholy trio:

> Carmine Galente, 66, nicknamed "Lillo" and "the Cigar." Since getting out of Lewisburg federal penitentiary in 1974, after serving a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking, Galente has controlled the remnants of the Joseph Bonanno family in New York. Says one Mafia source: "Lillo would shoot you in church during high Mass." Galente, it is said, had no respect for Gambino because the latter "never broke an egg in his life." Unverified Mob talk last week went so far as to suggest that Galente ordered his spies within the Gambino family to persuade the capo di tutti capi to take a swine-flu shot, knowing that a frail individual with a heart ailment and hardening of the arteries might succumb. According to federal sources, Gambino did get his flu shot shortly before his death.

Galente is believed to have assisted another New York mobster, Anthony ("Tony Ducks") Corallo to regain control of one New York family by helping Corallo arrange the murder last month of its chief, Andimo Pappadio. Now, according to a Mafia insider, Galente will stop at nothing to take power: "If everybody don't get in line, there's gonna be a lot of heads rolling. Lillo's gonna wipe up the streets with a few people that didn't bow down to him when he come out of the joint [prison] or didn't bow down to him when he was in the joint, even worse."