Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, the first mafioso to turn government witness and testify against other mobsters, was a brutal and widely feared hitman in the Boston mob of the 1950s and 60s, and ultimately met his end on the streets of San Francisco. A new book about him, titled Animal: The Bloody Rise and Fall of the Mob's Most Feared Assassin by Casey Sherman, is getting made into a major motion picture.
Barboza got his nickname after biting off another man's cheek in a fit of rage, and eventually, in 1967, after a falling out with the Patriarca crime family, Barboza was convinced to become an FBI informant in order to protect his family. He was relocated under the witness protection program to Santa Rosa in 1969, where he was enrolled in culinary school. As Sherman tells CBS, he got quickly bored and "thought that San Francisco had a void of leadership when it came to organized crime. [So,] he [thought he] would see if he could take over the rackets in San Francisco." He's rumored to have killed ten men while in California, and was imprisoned in 1971 after pleading guilty to a second-degree murder charge.
The court trial, though, brought to light his whereabouts. Not long after being paroled in 1975, while living in an apartment in the Sunset district, he was gunned down five months later, in February 1976.
There's no word on who's attached to the film, but according to CBS, the book has been optioned.
