On the evening of November 24, 1991, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, 52-year-old Henry Smurra, a male known as 'Hank the Bank,' was fatally shot. At approximately 6:45 pm, Smurra was sitting in the driver's seat of his 1989 Lincoln Town Car outside a Dunkin' Donuts when the deadly assault occurred. The shooting was not a random act of violence but rather a calculated move in a larger, bloody conflict for control of the Colombo crime family.
Authorities believed Smurra's murder
was a retaliatory strike for a recent attempt on the life of Gregory Scarpa Sr., a reputed Colombo capo. The incident was a key event in what was described as Brooklyn's most significant mob family war in three decades. Smurra, identified as a soldier in the Colombo crime family, became one of the casualties in a violent power struggle between the factions loyal to the imprisoned boss Carmine 'The Snake' Persico and the acting boss Victor 'Little Vic' Orena.
The order to kill Smurra was reportedly given by William 'Billy Fingers' Cutolo, a Colombo hitman and later underboss who was a strong ally of Orena. Five days after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Scarpa, Cutolo allegedly led a hit team that carried out the murder of Smurra, a loyalist to the Persico faction. The brazen killing was part of a series of violent episodes that rocked Brooklyn during this internal mob war, which saw numerous members and associates of the Colombo family targeted. In the aftermath, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes launched a grand jury investigation, issuing subpoenas to many reputed Colombo mobsters in an effort to quell the escalating violence.
