Late Mobster's Son Bobby Spillane Falls To His Death In NYC

In NYC Robert “Bobby” Spillane, the 46-year-old actor and playwright son of late Westies gang leader Mickey Spillane, fell to his death this morning from his sixth-floor apartment ”in what his uncle said was a tragic accident” as reported by the New York Post: 

Spillane’s uncle, James McManus, says Spillane was leaning against a screen when it gave way and he fell through the open window.  He says one of Spillane’s arms was in a sling.  * * *  The youngest of three children, Bobby was born in 1964 to Mickey Spillane, the real-life “Gentleman Gangster” who ran the “Westies” Irish gang for nearly two decades. Bobby grew up in the family’s huge Hell’s Kitchen apartments and his play “All Dolled Up” — about the mob using cross-dressing gangsters to muscle in on Greenwich Village gay bars in the 1960s — opened in 2006 in the neighborhood’s Acorn Theatre.

Spillane reportedly based “All Dolled Up” on a real life cross-dressing mobster, and athough it’s unclear who was the inspiration for the play perhaps it was Genovese soldier David Petillo.  Petillo was born in NYC in 1908, and according to FBI documents ”in his early teens was reputed to be a ‘fairy,’ but . . . when he was 18 or 19 years old he went to Chicago where he was ‘straightened out’ by Al Capone and was soon a member of the Capone mob there.”  Although Petillo may have “straightened out,” he nevertheless had an alleged fetish for dressing in drag when he killed his numerous victims over the decades.  When Petillo returned to New York he hooked up with Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, and on February 1, 1936 was arrested on white slavery charges “with 100 prostitutes and madams and was described as an individual who had organized 200 houses of prosititution under Luciano with 3,000 girls grossing $12 million a year.”  The girls were happy to testify against Petillo, and he served 20 years at Sing Sing until he was paroled in 1956.  At this point Petillo allegedly trafficked heroin for Vito Genovese through his Greenwich Village gay bars, and in the late-1960s allegedly had a hidden interest in an afterhours club at 11 East 16th Street according to FBI documents. Throughout the 1970s Petillo was involved with cocaine trafficking and ”active in operation of sex-related businesses in New York City”  FBI documents allege.  On February 4, 1980, he allegedly murdered Edward Vassallo a/k/a Charles Talbot, and fled the country.  Petillo died in Spain on December 28, 1983. For more on the historical role of the Mafia in gay bars:  Stonewall Riots: A Gay Protest Against Mafia Bars