In October 1963, five armed men followed Harlem crime figure Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson down 7th Avenue with orders to kill him. The contract reportedly carried a $20,000 price tag and the weight of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, a powerful figure in the Genovese crime family who wanted Johnson eliminated. The hit was planned with professional precision. The five men, described as experienced operatives with clean records, shadowed Johnson on the night of October 14th as he walked alone through Harlem.
They waited for an empty block, intending to make the killing quick and disappear before anyone could identify them. But as the men closed in, the neighborhood seemed to shift around them. Lights came on in windows above. Shadows moved on rooftops.
A black Cadillac with its headlights off rolled onto the street and stopped, engine idling, without anyone getting out. Whistles began sounding from unseen positions, a coordinated signal that the five men understood immediately. When the first shot was fired, it struck a brick wall inches from Johnson’s head. He did not move.
Instead, he reportedly turned and addressed the men directly, telling them they had a choice: they could finish what they came to do, or they could walk away. Within 30 seconds, the street was empty. The five men retreated without firing another shot. The Cadillac pulled up beside Johnson, a voice from inside asked if he was okay, and the car drove away.
Johnson continued his walk as if nothing had happened. According to accounts, none of the five men were ever seen in New York again. NYPD Detective Thomas Erlick spent two weeks investigating the reports of gunfire on 7th Avenue. He found one spent shell casing and nothing else.
No witnesses came forward. His final report concluded there was insufficient evidence to confirm identities, motives, or the ultimate disposition of the suspected parties. The FBI’s organized crime files from 1963 contain hundreds of pages on Johnson, Gigante, and the struggle for control of Harlem’s underworld, but mention the five men nowhere. They had simply disappeared.
Gigante reportedly made no further attempts on Johnson’s life. The boundary between Italian-controlled territory and Harlem hardened overnight. His men stopped operating north of 110th Street without permission, and the expected gang war never materialized. The policy racket, a lucrative illegal lottery generating millions in untaxed revenue, stayed firmly in Johnson’s hands.
The fate of the five men became a subject of enduring speculation. Some said they were paid off and given new lives in other cities. Others claimed they were killed quietly. A few insisted they began working for Johnson.
No one knew for certain. Accounts of what happened to individual members of the crew have circulated for decades. One man reportedly received $5,000 in cash and an address in Philadelphia, boarding a Greyhound bus before sunrise and never returning. Another was given work on the Newark docks with an unsigned reference letter.
A third was told his mother’s surgery in Baltimore had been paid for and a job was waiting for him there. The remaining two reportedly resettled in Chicago and Atlanta. Years later, a retired mobster from the Genovese family was interviewed about the failed hit. Asked what happened to the five men, he said the journalist was asking the wrong question.
The right question, he said, was what Johnson offered them that was worth more than $20,000 and a clean exit. He added that nobody knew the answer, not even Gigante. Bumpy Johnson died in 1968 at age 62. Thousands lined the streets of Harlem for his funeral.
Gigante died in 2005, never having set foot in Harlem again. The five men who came to kill Johnson lived out their lives in distant cities under different names, their families unaware of what they had almost done on a cold October night. The incident on 7th Avenue was never officially recorded in any police report or newspaper story. But its consequences were permanent.
Johnson had demonstrated a form of power that did not rely on killing his enemies but on giving them a reason to walk away, a strategy that left the established order with no answer.