Like any father, you want to be able to do something for your son.”Īs AJ explained it to me: “It happened at dinner. “It was a clean shot … they came right at AJ, and he had a very severe knee injury, couldn’t play hockey anymore. “He was a defenseman and hit a kid,” Galante said.
A senior at New Fairfield High, AJ had been an alternate captain of his school’s hockey team, which played at the Danbury Ice Arena with Jimmy often in attendance. (“I wanted to bring something back to the community,” Galante told me when I spoke with him in February.) Some say he did it for the same reason he owned a race-car squad: He loved to compete.Įveryone, however, agrees that he did it at least in part for his son, AJ, who was 17. Some say he did it as a civic benefactor, to give a depressed city something to rally around. In 2004, this meant buying a minor-league-hockey franchise and installing it at the local youth rink, the Danbury Ice Arena. Now and then, he liked to make an elaborate gesture, something attention-getting. For instance, Galante and a few trusted associates burned a competitor’s truck in 1992-after first binding the driver-to send a message to stay out of the Connecticut market, and in 2006, damaged the tires of a competitor’s truck after that carter refused to back down on a $50/month account.īut Jimmy Galante was smart, and the G-men could never quite nail him.
Attorney’s office, his business disputes occasionally ended in violence:įor nearly two decades, Galante’s enterprise promoted a climate of fear through violence, threats of violence, economic sanctions and threats of economic sanctions. And, according to court papers filed by the U.S. However, he’d been to prison for tax evasion.
Galante was a philanthropist a pediatric suite in the emergency department of Danbury Hospital was named for his family. Though he lived with his wife and two children in suburban New Fairfield, he was beloved in nearby Danbury, where he had his office. In the mid-to-late 1970s, he started his own company, Automated Waste Disposal, and by 2004, he’d built it into a trash-collection empire of companies valued at about $100 million. He was born in the Bronx but grew up in bucolic South Salem, New York did a stint in the Air Force and then took a job driving a garbage truck. Yet in some ways Galante’s biography seemed unlike that of a traditional hood. The New York Times described him as “a Danbury trash hauler suspected of mob ties” who had a story “right out of ‘The Sopranos.’ ”įrom December 2019: Scorsese’s elegy for the American gangster View Moreĭepending on whom you ask, Jimmy Galante was either one of its mobsters or a legit businessman whose waste-removal company had become associated with the Mafia. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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