At the end of the day, when all was said and done, Joe was basically a bum. The only thing he ever did that was worth a tin of beans was to kill the wrong guy, and getting all remorseful about it, blow the lid off a group of criminals. Until then, they had been so secretive about their existence they made the order of Masons appear to be a bunch of blabbermouths.
He spoke about a secret criminal organization that had existed in America for over seventy years. In major metropolitan areas such as New York, its members had held society ransom as they went about their business of thieving, extorting, union manipulation and murder. Valachi’s view was not from the top but was more a worms eye view, as he was never involved in the corporate decisions that formed its policy. As a foot soldier in the ranks of organized crime, his job was to turn policy into practice.
At his defection, Joseph Michael Valachi was up to that point the most famous apostate in the criminal underworld. Although his revelations provided the public and law enforcement with a wealth of information, it did have its limitations. His minor standing in the pecking order of organized crime precluded him from the macro picture. In many ways, Valachis viewpoint was like asking a gas jockey at a Shell station about the strategy of the board of directors. A barely literate, low-ranking member of the Mafia whose first-hand experiences were frankly limited to less important events, Valachi was often obviously talking beyond his personal experience. Additionally, Valachi was not always the most discerning observer. In his mob world, the telling of false tales between mobsters, and the claims of credit not deserved for important incidents, are common. When another criminal bragged to Valachi that he did this or shot so-and-so, Valachi tended to believe it. As a result some of his information is false and some strains credulity.
Basically, Joe was a loner who went his own way whenever he could. Shrewd, cunning and cagey, he never really trusted anyone and this distrust often colored his thinking. He was a rebellious troublemaker with a single-minded determination to show his independence, a cocky and self-assured man who often made his views known. He didnt care what the consequences were.
However, his information helped to focus enforcement agents’ investigation of organized crime, and it allowed many of them to test out their hypotheses and assumptions against his disclosures.
Valachi was not the first to disclose the can of worms that most refer to as the Mafia.
The official recognition of the existence of the Mafia in America dates back to 1890 when one of the two grand juries in New Orleans that investigated the murder of police chief Peter Hennessey stated: The range of our research has developed the existence of the secret organization styled Mafia.
In 1903 the New York Herald published details of the Black Hand extortionists that were operating in Brooklyn under the control of Annuziato Cappiello, a member of the ndrangheta often referred to as the Calabrian Mafia.
As early as 1918, a “made” or inducted member of the Mafia had spoken publicly about the organization and its structure when a New York gangster called Tony Notaro gave evidence at the murder trial of another hoodlum called Pelligrino Morano. One year later, McCann published what was the first book on the Mafia in America: William J. Flynns The Barrel Mystery.
In the Justice Department files were the records of Nicolo Culicchia Gentile, also known as Zu Cola. A notorious Mafiosi from Siculiana, in Sicily, he had moved into the USA in 1907 when he was a young man of twenty-one, and over the next thirty years had created a niche for himself by traveling across America as a troubleshooter for the mob. He was there during the New York gang wars of 1930-31, and apparently had access to, and the confidence of many of the top players in the formation of the Americanization of the Mafia. It was rumored that he may have been a serving member of the Commission, the arbitration tribunal that was set up to mediate in mob disputes to try to keep things under control when the Ying and Yang of the American Mafia got out of kilter.
He fled America in 1939, under investigation for drug trafficking, and returned to live in Sicily. There, during the Eisenhower Administration, the Justice Department had sent a special investigative unit on organized crime to interview him. He had recounted his memoirs to this team, outlining in detail names and dates, but the information was filed away and never acted upon.
Then there was J. Richard Dixie Davis, the smooth, soft-talking attorney for Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. Sentenced to prison for a year on a charge of conspiracy to operate the numbers racket and then released, Davis wrote a series of articles in 1938 for Colliers magazine about the birth of the American Mafia. He also gave dates and named names, but no one listened.
In 1940 Abe Reles, a heavy hitter for a group of killers that became known as Murder Inc., turned informer to save his neck when under arrest. He boasted that he would make the Brooklyn District Attorney the biggest man in the country.
In addition to supplying information that helped solve scores of murders, Reles had asserted that in the early 1930s an alliance of underworld bosses resulted in the creation of a nation-wide crime syndicate. He named names and gave dates just like Gentile and Davis, and his testimony resulted in the successful prosecution of numerous organized crime figures in New York. Yet no law enforcement agency followed through, with the exception of the prosecution of Louis Lepke Buchalter, the only gang boss in American history who in 1944 paid the ultimate penalty for his crimes in the electric chair.
There had been at least three bureaucratic attempts to investigate and attempt to understand what the problem was, starting in 1915 when the Chicago Crime Commission tried to define just what organized crime was. This was followed in 1929 by the Wickershaw Commission, which studied the impact of prohibition on criminal activity. In 1950 the Kefauver Committee was formed to investigate organized crime in interstate gambling, and its members found that certain crimes bore the earmark of the Mafia. They exposed a pervasive network of organized criminals operating in alliance with local political figures, but never actually established proof that the Mafia existed.
Then Joseph Valachi came along at just the right time in history and the wrong time for the mob.
In 1950-51, there had been the Kefauver Committee Hearings on Organized Crime. Also in 1950, the Mayor of New Yorks Joint Committee on Port Industry exposed the New York waterfront for the cesspool of lawlessness it had been for decades. Throughout the 1950s, there was also a series of high-profile gangland killings or assassination attempts. In November of 1957, the state police caught the mob well and truly with its pants down at a convention they were holding near Apalachin, in upstate New York. They arrested dozens of men, including many of the family Dons (bosses) from New York and other parts of the United States.
Valachis revelations were certainly the biggest single blow against organized crime following the debacle at Apalachin. The really significant danger to the mob was the pattern of connection that Valachis testimony furnished. He made it possible for organized crime investigators to at last realize the dimensions of syndicated crime and to stop seeing it as a series of unconnected incidents. Until Valachi’s confessions, the FBI had steadfastly refused to acknowledge the existence of the Mafia. Although police departments and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics operatives had long realized that many underworld figures where often seen together, they had not comprehended that these were formal relationships ranked through a system governed by rules and regulations.
Valachi and his testimony changed all that.
Although just a foot soldier, Valachi had served the mob loyally for over thirty years. Even though he was in prison and facing a long sentence for drug trafficking, there was no reason to suppose his fidelity to his crime family would change. That was, until they found what was left of Al Agueci in a field in Monroe County.
Mafia? Whats the Mafia? There is not a Mafia. Joe Colombo. Head of the Colombo Crime Family. 1964-1971.
To most Americans interested in their history, Rochester, New York, is the site of the famous Underground Railway movement that in the decade prior to the Civil War helped more than 70,000 fugitive slaves to freedom into Canada. To those interested in the development of organized crime, this city on Lake Ontario across the waters from Toronto is famous for a murder that occurred there. That started a chain of events that led to the most famous disclosure about the criminal syndicate, which was referred to until then as the Mafia.
On November 23, 1961, a body was found in a cornfield near Rochester. It was eventually identified as that of Alberto G. Agueci, 38, who was also known as the Baker of 21 Armitage Drive in Scarsborough, Canada. His death had not been easy.
While still alive, over thirty pounds of flesh had been cut from his body, his jaw broken, and half his teeth kicked or knocked out. A blowtorch had been applied to his face, blinding him, and he had been tied to a tree with barbed wire before his genitals had been hacked off and stuffed into his mouth. According to the coroners report, his fatal torture had been spread over a number of days and his body was so badly mutilated it was identifiable only from his fingerprints.
Stefano Magaddino
He died the way he did because he had the temerity to threaten Stefano Magaddino, the boss of the Buffalo family of the Mafia.
Along with his brother Vito, Agueci had been arrested on July 20th, 1961, on a narcotics conspiracy charge and imprisoned in New York. Magaddino had allowed the brothers to operate their drug business in his domain for a cut in their profits. In return, he had promised them protection and help if they were ever arrested. However he reneged on his side of the deal and Aguecis wife had to sell their Toronto home to raise the $15,000 bail to free her husband. When he was released, Agueci drove up to Lewiston, New York, where Magaddino lived at 5118 Danna Drive, and apparently threatened him.
A police wiretapwhich was unfortunately inadmissible in court-picked up a conversation between two of Magaddinos lieutenants discussing how they would eliminate Agueci. His atrocious death was surely aimed at sending a strong warning to the underworld: Kill one but teach one hundred.
Vito Agueci swore to avenge his brothers death, but was convicted on his narcotics charge and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Here he met up with Valachi, who was serving time on a drug trafficking charge. At this time, there were about ninety organized crime figures in Atlanta. The absolute ruler of this group was Vito Genovese, who had been sent there in 1959 to serve a fifteen-year sentence, also for peddling drugs. He was the head of the largest Mafia group in America, which coincidentally was the one to which Valachi belonged.
Valachi was serving time for two drug offenses, one of which was his involvement in the same crime as Vito Aguecis. Thus crime apparently had been instigated by a senior member of the Genovese crime family, a man called Anthony Strollo, also know as Tony Bender. He was deeply involved in a complex heroin-smuggling scam that had badly backfired.
Departure of the Saturnia (CORBIS)
Federal narcotic agents had seized a shipment of ten kilos of heroin, which was smuggled into America in the luggage of an immigrant family called Palermi. They boarded the Italian liner Saturnia when it docked in New York and arrested some of the minor functionaries in the process. Then they tracked the trail back to Vincent Mauro, Frankie Caruso, Sal Maneri, and Valachi, a member of Genoveses group who was working with the Agueci brothers. The trail had stretched back into Italy and the mythical figure of Salvatore Lucania, better known as Lucky Luciano, who was the exiled former boss of the criminal empire now headed by Vito Genovese.
Valachi had been involved on more than just a business level with the Agueci brothers. The late Alfonso had sheltered Valachi when he had fled to Canada in 1959 to avoid prosecution on an earlier drug charge. Vito Agueci asked Joe to make an introduction for him to Genovese, but the crafty Mafia boss avoided him and asked Valachi to walk Agueci around the penitentiary yard so that other members of the mob could easily identify him.
However, Valachi noticed that Agueci was soon in deep discussions with some of these imprisoned senior mob figures, including Mike Coppola of the Genovese family; Johnny DioGuardi, a top man in the Lucchese crime group; and Joseph (Joe Beck) DiPalermo, one of the consummate narcotics traffickers in the Mafia.
Valachi came to believe that Agueci, concerned because of his involvement with his late brother and the threats he had made against Magaddino ( a close friend of Genovese) to revenge his brothers death, had decided to placate Genovese by offering him information that Valachi had turned stool pigeon and was working for the Bureau of Narcotics.
Slowly, Joe became isolated from the rest of the mobsters in the prison and became aware of their reluctance to talk or socialize with him. One evening while walking in the prison yard, Vito Agueci started yelling at him in front of other mob prisoners, calling him a filthy dog and an informer. By June of 1962, Valachi had survived three attempts on his life. One evening in the cell he shared with Genovese and six other men, after a long rambling discussion, Genovese suddenly kissed Valachi on the cheek. One of Joes cellmates, a young hood called Ralph Wagner, remarked that Joe had just received the kiss of death.
On June 16th, Valachi took the desperate step of committing himself into solitary confinement. While there, he made frantic attempts to contact several people, including the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Narcotics. However, it was to no avail.
Released from solitary, Valachi finally reached the breaking point. On the morning of June 22nd, weak from starvation and having eaten nothing for days for fear of being poisoned, his mind and body were cracking under the pressure. He finally broke.
Three men started toward him as though to threaten him. Backing up against a wall, Valachi grabbed a piece of iron pipe lying near construction work in the yard and attacked a man whom he thought was DiPalermo. He had come to hate Joe Beck in particular. One day he had offered Valachi a steak sandwich which he was sure was poisoned, and DiPalermo was a close friend and ally of Genovese. Valachi beat the man about the head so severely that he died forty-eight hours later of multiple fractures.
Overpowered by the guards and taken to the wardens office, Valachi was mortified to find out that the man he had attacked was not DiPalermo but another prisoner who bore an uncanny physical resemblance. This man, John Joseph Saupp, had no connection with organized crime and in fact was in Atlanta for mail robbery and forgery.
According to an agent of the FBI, who spent more time with Valachi than any other law enforcement officer, this was a turning point. Valachi, he said, had no real remorse for anything he had ever done in his life, except this. Nothing crushed him more than the fact that he got the wrong man…getting a guy who was going to get him was the one satisfaction he would settle for. If he had been successful, he probably never would have talked.
On June 13th, Valachi advised the authorities that he wanted to cooperate with the federal government. On July 17th, he pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree and received a life sentence. That same day he was flown out of Atlanta and settled in the Westchester County Jail, a few miles from New York city. There, he was installed in an isolated ward in the prison hospital under the alias of Joseph DeMarco, with Frank Selvagi of the FBN as his case agent. By September 8th, he was out of the control of the Bureau of Narcotics and was being managed by the FBI, through a crack special agent from their New York office named James P. Flynn.
On that day, the agent demanded from Valachi substantiation about the criminal organization he had worked for. I want to talk about it by name, rank and serial number, he said to Joe. Whats the name? Is it Mafia?”
No, Valachi said, Its not Mafia. Thats the expression the outside uses.
Is it of Italian origin? asked Flynn.
Cosa Nostra, replied Valachi. “We call it Our Thing.
Later, when appearing before the McClellan Committee investigating organized crime, Joe answered a question from Senator Edmund Muskie. When asked if Cosa Nostra was the same as the Mafia, Joe replied, Senator, as long as I belong, they never express it as Mafia.
For the next year, Joseph Valachi talked about his thirty years in the mob. He had a photographic memory and was able to remember things in even the most minute detail. He recalled for example, that in 1913 when he was nine years old, he had committed his first criminal act: stealing a crate of soap. He could even remember the brand name, Fairy Soap.
Valachis testimony to law enforcement and subsequently to the McClellan Committee, was primarily intelligence, although in April, 1968, he helped to convict an up-and-coming star in the mob called Carmine Persico, who had been indicted on a $50,000 hijacking case.
According to William Hundley, the man in charge of the Justice Departments attack on organized crime, What Valachi did is beyond measure. Before he came along, we had no concrete evidence that anything like this existed…But Valachi named names. He revealed what the structure was and how it operates. In a word, he showed us the face of the enemy.
And what an enemy it was.
Joseph Michael Valachi was born on September 22, 1904, in East Harlem, a ghetto on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Marie and Dominick, had emigrated from Naples to settle in New York. Valachis family was as poor and wretched as any could have been. He was one of seventeen children, only six of which survived. His kid brother, Johnny, was found dead in the streets, apparently the victim of a hit-and-run accident, although rumor had it that the police had beaten him to death. His oldest brother, Anthony, was committed to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Danemora. Two of his three sisters and his grandmother were also destined to become patients in mental hospitals.
Joseph Valachi (CORBIS)
He grew up in a world of poverty and despair, living in a succession of miserable cold-water flats-hovels in fact-and often he shared his bedroom with the wood and coal his family scavenged for heating fuel. His schooling was erratic, to say the least, and when he was eleven, he threw a rock at his teacher. For this, he was sent to the New York Catholic Protectory, a reform school for wayward children. By the time he was fifteen he had left school behind and was working with his father at the New York City garbage dump on 107th Street, near the East River.
Three years later, Joe was out of the work force and had joined up with a gang of teenage toughs and burglars know as the Minute Men, because of the speed at which they operated. Over a four-year period, this gang carried out hundreds of thefts. Joe was lucky to avoid the law, but that changed in August 1923. After breaking into a store one night and stealing bolts of cloth, he was chased by the police and shot in the arm. Though he escaped and the wound turned out to be superficial, the car registration had been traced, and he was arrested, tried and convicted. On October 26th, 1923, he was sent to Ossining Prison, in upper New York state. For a criminal from New York, to be sent up the river meant just that, to go to the most famous prison in America. The local Indians had known it as stone upon stone, but to the hoods of the underworld it was more familiar as Sing Sing. In its early days, the dark, forbidding pile had for some reason been known as Mount Pleasant. Joe was there for nine months.
After his release, he rejoined the neighborhood thieving, but this time he started up a small gang of his own. While breaking into a Bronx warehouse that was used to store fur coats, he and his gang were surprised by a passing police patrolman who managed to get a shot off at them. Valachi was hit again, this time in the head, but after surgery by an underground doctor, he miraculously recovered.
Then Valachi joined up with four other young hoodlums, and they robbed a loft in Upper Manhattan that was crammed with bolts of silk. Valachis Packard stalled, and the gang had to escape in another car driven by a young hood called Joseph (Pip the Blind) Gagliano. However, the police traced the abandoned car to Valachi and arrested him. In April 1925, he was sent to Sing Sing again, this time for three years.
Not long after he was admitted, he was attacked and knifed in the back by a man called Pete LaTampa. It was a wound that almost killed him, requiring thirty-eight stitches. His would-be assassin would make the headlines in the years to come because of his involvement in a murder that would help to change the course of organized crime in New York. That killing would also involve a man who would eventually become Valachi’s nemesis.
During this third spell in prison, Joe completed his seventh grade education, learning to read and write. He also made friends with an old-timer called Alessandro Vollero, one of the more prominent of the Italian gangsters operating in Brooklyn since the turn of the century. He was serving a life sentence for the murder in 1918 of Vincenzo Terranova, the younger brother of The Artichoke King, a prominent figure in the Italian mobs of New York.
Vollero coached the young Valachi in the complexities of the underworld, explaining in detail the differences between the two main factions that dominated the criminal landscape: those men who originated from Naples and those who came to America from Sicily.
Joe came out of his second term at Sing Sing on June 15th, 1928. His first major job was to sort out the problem that had resulted in the murder attempt on his life by LaTempa. A few months before he went to prison, Joe had been involved in a fracas with a group of Italian mobsters who operated under the control of Ciro Terranova. They claimed he had been the wheelman in a car that had shot up their neighborhood. Valachi had strongly denied this, but Terranova had ordered LaTempa to hit Joe in revenge.
Through the mediation of a man whom Joe had met in Sing Sing, Dominick The Gap Petrilli, the dispute was apparently resolved, although Joe never forgave Terranova for the attack. Valachi then returned to the one thing he knew best-burglary. Putting together another small gang, he and his companions were soon grossing about $1500 each week for two or three nights work.
One day, The Gap introduced Joe to a man called Girolama Santucci, better known in the underworld as Bobby Doyle. After checking Joe out, Santucci arranged for an introduction between Joe and a man called Tom Gagliano. This would be one of the most important meetings in Valachis life. It would take him from a life of petty thieving and two-bit burglaries into the world of organized crime.
BY Thomas L. Jones
Oh, What a Lovely War
Gaetano (Tom) Gagliano was a big, tall man who was going bald. His legitimate facade was in the construction business. Behind this front, he was a trusted lieutenant in a gang of mobsters controlled by a man called Gaetano Reina, 40, who was a successful businessman in his own right. Reina controlled most of the ice distribution in New York City a vastly lucrative business in the days before electric refrigeration.
Since the turn of the century, the underworld in New York had undergone many changes. The strong Irish and Jewish mobs had been largely displaced (although some Jewish gangsters would remain powerful forces in the New York crime scene), and their position occupied by Italians who were mainly from Naples and Sicily. The Morello brothers, hailing from Coreleone in Sicily, had been a potent influence in the criminal world from the end of the nineteenth century into the new millennium. They, in turn, had been replaced by Ciro Terranova, who was assisted by his deadly brother-in-law, Ignazio Saietta, a ruthless Mafiosi, also know as Lupo or The Wolf. By the end of the 1920s, they had been superseded by another mobster, a short, squat, piggish-looking thug called Giuseppe Masseria. He had been born in Palermo in 1886 and emigrated to New York in 1903 when he was sixteen. By 1929, Joe the Boss, as he was also known, was looking to become the dominant figure in the Italian criminal underworld of the biggest city in America.
Masseria had built his power base in Lower Manhattan, but was challenged by a newcomer to the New York area, a man called Salvatore Maranzano, who had landed in the city in 1925. A cultured, erudite Sicilian, he was apparently a close friend and confident of Vito Cascio Ferro, supposedly the boss of bosses in the Sicilian Mafia. Maranzano soon established business interests in import-exporting and real estate, and quickly developed as a major force in the illegal booze business. He became a member of a Brooklyn-based crime group that became known as the Castellammarese Mafia family, which at this time was headed by Cola Schiro.
As the 1920s drew to a close, it was obvious that trouble was brewing as strongly as all of the illegal booze being generated to quench the thirst of the American public that had been officially denied access to it because of the Prohibition act of 1919.
At the time Valachi met up with Tom Gagliano, there were five separate groups of Italian mobsters operating across New York, made up of men from Sicily and Naples. He joined the one operated by Reina, who was murdered on February 26, 1930. It is generally agreed by crime historians that this killing heralded the start of what came to be known as the Castellammarese War. It would last until September 1931. When it was over, both Masseria and Maranzano were dead, along with an untold number of casualtiesmaybe between fifty and one hundred men. It is hard to be specific since some gang members used the war as an excuse to settle private disputes.
Valachis first contract, or hit, happened in November 1930. Along with Santucci, another man called Nick Capuzzi, and an imported gunman from Chicago known only as Buster, he was sent on his first important assignment for the group he had joined, which was now allied to the Castellammarese men.
Their target was a top ally of Masseria called Steven Ferrigino. Valachi rented an apartment in a complex at 760 Pelham Parkway, in the Bronx. The rooms overlooked a courtyard leading to the entrance of Ferriginos residence. The four men spent weeks scoping out their intended victim. Late in the afternoon of November 5th, Ferrigino and another member of Masserias group, Alfred Mineo, were shot dead by three of the four gunmen, who blasted them with shotguns as they walked into the courtyard.
Later in the month, Valachi made his button and became an officially inducted member of the criminal group he knew from then on as Cosa Nostra. Along with Nicky Padora and Salvatore Shillitani, two members of his old burglary ring that he had recommended to Gagliano, he was driven from the city about ninety miles north into upstate New York. Taken to a large, white, colonial-style house, he was ushered into a long room where forty men were gathered around a banquet table. At its head was Maranzano, now the boss of the Castellammarese men.
Joe was introduced to Maranzano as Joe Cago, which thereafter became his nickname in the mob. As a kid, Joe had been an ace scooter builder and this had earned him the sobriquet Joe Cargo. During his criminal career, this nickname was corrupted to Cago. Later on, those in the mob who came to despise Valachi for his treachery were quick to point out that Cago is also Italian slang for excrement.
Valachi and the tall, distinguished looking Maranzano shook hands. Joe, meet Don Salvatore Maranzano. He is going to be the boss of all of us through the whole trouble we are having. This was the first time Joe had ever seen him.
Gee, he recalled, he looked just like a banker. Youd never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.
Everyone around the table joined hands and Maranzano said, This represents that you live by the gun and the knife, pointing to a revolver and a dagger on the table. Valachi then held a piece of paper in his hands, which Maranzano lit with a match, and he was made to repeat after the boss, This is the way I will burn if I betray the secrets of this Cosa Nostra…The Cosa Nostra comes before everythingour blood family, our religion, our country…to betray the secret of Cosa Nostra means death without a trial.
The ceremony that Valachi participated in was almost identical to the one described by Palermo Chief of Police Giuseppe Alongi forty-four years earlier in 1886, when he described the initiation rituals of La Mafia from what informers had told him over the years.
Joseph Bonanno (CORBIS)
Joe was then assigned a gombah, or godfather, to be his mentor and immediate boss. From a random selection around the table, the designated man was said to be Joseph Bonanno, also known as Joe Bananas. Over the next thirty-five years, Bonnano was alleged to be a powerful figure among the Cosa Nostra, heading his own group before being deposed in a bloody power struggle that sent him into exile in Arizona. At the age of 95, Bonanno still lives there to this day.
After the meeting was over, Valachi returned to New York and moved into an apartment in the Bronx. He was designated as one of the shooters who were to be on call twenty-four hours a day. They waited to respond to messages from the spotters, who were tracking down members of Masserias mob. His first forays were noticeable for their ineffectiveness: The targets he and his partners chased after all managed to escape, and although guns were fired, few if any bullets found their targets. That is, until February 3rd, 1931.
On that day, Valachi, another man named Buster from Chicago, and two other gunmen were staking out an office at 467 Crescent Avenue, in the Fordham area of the Bronx. They were trying to pin down Joseph Catania, a Masseria lieutenant, and a nephew of Ciro Terranova, the man Valachi hated. Catania had hijacked some of Maranzanos trucks carrying illegal liquor, and the Castellammarese boss was determined to have him eliminated.
At about 11:30 a.m., Catania and his wife entered the office. A few minutes later, he kissed her goodbye and left. As he walked down the street, Buster was waiting for him. He fired six times. I dont think I missed him once, he said later to Joe. You could see dust coming off his coat when the bullets hit. Valachi had gone off to organize the getaway car, which was parked around the block, and he and the three gunmen sped away.
According to Valachi, in the weeks following the killing of Catania, the winds of war blew in favor of the Maranzano men. There were many defections to him from the side of Masseria, and in addition, those who stayed with Joe the Boss found they were facing an economic crisis. The war was stifling their rackets and hitting them where it hurt mostin their pockets.
Sometime in March or early April, two of Masserias top aides, Charlie Luciano and Vito Genovese, met up with Maranzano and some of his key men in a meeting held in the Bronx Zoo. In return for their promise to eliminate Masseria, Maranzano agreed to end the war.
At about 3:30 p.m. on April 15th, Giuseppe Masseria was shot dead in a restaurant on Brooklyns Coney Island-a killing masterminded by Luciano. A few weeks later, Maranzano hosted a meeting attended by hundreds of mobsters in a big hall on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. There have only been two recorded references to this assembly: one by Valachi and the other by Charlie Luciano in his biography, which was published twelve years after Joe began his testimony. The recollections of the two men more or less follow similar lines: their description of the hall, the way it was decorated and the speech that Maranzano made to the gathering. Speaking in Italian, Maranzano gave a brief background of the war and why it had started, and then he outlined the way things would be in the future.
First of all, Maranzano would be the top boss, calling himself Capo di Tuti Capi. He would share in the wealth of all the families, a term he used to replace the pejorative gang or mob. He then announced who would be the boss of each family:
Luciano would head the group that had been under Masseria; Gagliano would take over the former Reina interests; and Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci and Vincent Mangano would head the other families based on gangs they had controlled in the past. Each family boss would be supported by an under-boss, and beneath them would be the backbone of the families-the soldiers. These men would be grouped into crews or regimes, each controlled by a lieutenant or caporegime. Everything would be businesslike and there would be strict lines of communication between soldiers and bosses. There would also be rigidly enforced rules. The organization, this Cosa Nostra, would come first above everything, no matter what. Anyone who broke the code of omerta, the vow of silence, would die. No one was to ever strike another member, regardless of provocation. No man could covet anothers wife. These were the rules of survival and they served them well for years to come.
Genovese, Luciano and Joe Profaci 1958 (CORBIS)
After the gathering had dispersed, Joe decided on the spur of a moment to shift his allegiance. He wanted to work under Maranzano as part of his palace guard. He renounced his ties to the Gagliano family and went to be a chauffeur and bodyguard for the man with aspirations to be the most powerful criminal in America.
On the evening of September 9th, he was called over to the Brooklyn home of Maranzano and told that there was to be more conflict ahead. The boss had decided that Luciano and Genovese, along with a group of men allied to them, had to be removed. That way he could consolidate his position as head of all the families and exercise control over the Italian lottery, the unions, bookmaking and bootlegging businesses that formed the backbone of the underworlds money-making machine.
Maranzano told Joe that he had called a meeting in his office on Park Avenue for the next day with Genovese and Luciano. Unknown to Valachi, his boss had paid a fee of $25,000 to a hot-headed Irishman called Vincent Mad Dog Coll to be at the building to gun down the two men. Unknown to Maranzano, the intended targets had already pre-empted his strike. At 2:50 p.m. that day, four of their killers strolled into the office building and shot and stabbed Maranzano to death.
Blissfully unaware of the drama taking place in midtown Manhattan, Joe had spent the day with his friend, The Gap, in Brooklyn, entertaining two young ladies. He learned of the killing when he picked up a newspaper in the early hours of September 11th. He was, to say the least, wetting his pants. Petrilli had probably saved Joes life by making sure he was out of the office that afternoon. Valachi immediately went into hiding, especially afraid when he learned that three of the men whom he had recruited into Maranzanos palace guard had almost been gunned down while walking along Lexington Avenue.
The Castellammarese War might be over, but for Joseph Valachi the peace had yet to be made.
His first place of refuge was with Nicky Podaro, one of the men who had been initiated with him into the Cosa Nostra. He then contacted the son of the late Gaetano Reina, who agreed to hide him in the attic of the family home. Valachi soon afterwards contacted Tommy Lucchese, who had become the right hand of Gagliano, and a few days later Joe met the two men. They talked the matter over and suggested that Joe reconsider his move away from their family.
Feeling safer, Joe left Reinas attic and moved in with his mother and sisters. (His father had died of alcohol poisoning years before.) Matters grew more complicated, however, when Buster turned up and suggested that they should band together with the other gang members under suspicion because of their closeness to the late Maranzano. Then they could fight back. Joe suggested that Buster take a low profile until they could sort things out. However, a week later, Buster was murdered somewhere on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It turned out that his murder was nothing to do with the war but involved a personal dispute over a gambling debt.
Valachi then linked up with Santucci and his old friend, The Gap. They both pressured him to join up with Vito Genovese and the family being run by Charlie Luciano. Poor Joe was in a quandary, to say the least. He had been an inducted member of the mob for less than two years, had gone through the most cataclysmic gang war in history, and was now facing the prospect of changing partners for the third time. After much agonizing, Joe decided to take The Gap’s advice and join up with Vito Genovese’s family, which was controlled by Luciano. His power within the mob was so great that if he approved of Joe, it was highly unlikely anyone would ever question Joes loyalty to the cause, despite the fact that he had been close to Maranzano.
At a meeting held in a downtown hotel on West 23rd Street, Joe and three of his associates met up with Genovese, who took them down to Greenwich Village and introduced them to Anthony Strollo, also known as Tony Bender. A close friend of Vitos (they had been reciprocal best man at each others weddings), he became the caporegime to whom Joe would answer. Genovese assured the men that he and Luciano would settle things and they should fear no repercussions from any other family.
Salvatore Charlie Luciano would become the most powerful chief that Cosa Nostra would know, holding court over his kingdom from a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he resided as Mr. Charles Ross. No significant racket in the citygambling, numbers, union extortion, loan sharking or narcoticsoperated without his involvement.
Although in theory he abolished the position of Capo di Tuti Capi and headed up only his own family, his influence was far-reaching among the criminal underworld, Italian-American, Jewish and Irish.
Luciano created an addition to the crime family structurea position known as counselor or consigliere. Initially, this position was created to shield individual soldiers from personal vendettas arising out of the war. It subsequently evolved into a move to pre-empt the problems that would arise as the various Cosa Nostra groups struggled to develop their interests in an environment that Joe Bonanno came to call: The Volcano.
As the underworld settled down and began a period of relative peace, Joe began operating his first business, developed through his family membership. Along with Girolamo Santucci, he started up a slot machine business that was soon grossing $2500 a week. Joe also started to date the daughter of the late Tom Reina. When he was hiding out in the attic in the family home, they had become more than just friends. After a complicated and troublesome courtship that required Vito Genovese’s intervention to sort out her familys misgivings, Joe married the twenty-two-year-old Mildred Reina on September 18th, 1932.
Having started his first business venture, and his first and only marriage, it was not long before Joe’s new crime family called upon him to handle his first contract to kill.
In the Cosa Nostra, it was mandatory that when called upon, a soldier carries out any job handed down from his boss. Killing for the mob was no different in their eyes than collecting a debt or enforcing a family policy on gambling or loan sharking. A soldier killed as part of his job; he was never paid to do it.
Joe did not know the victim, and even if he had, it would have made no difference. Tony Bender handed down the hit, identifying the victim as Michael Reggione, known as Little Apples. He hung out at a coffee shop in Harlem. Some years previously his brothers, Louis, Mike and Jimmy, had been involved in some dispute with Genovese and Luciano. They had died as a result. The fear was that, ten years later at the ripe old age of twenty-two, he was now ready to avenge their deaths. The details did not concern Joe. As far as he was concerned it was simply a job.
He recruited two friends whom he had originally brought into Maranzanos palace guard, Peter (Petey Muggins) Mione and John (Johnny D) DeBellis, to help him arrange the execution. Joe then began to hang out at the coffee shop, and he struck up an acquaintance with Little Apples. He also scouted around and found the ideal place for the killing. It was an old, unoccupied tenement building at 340 East 110th Street .
On the evening of November 25th, 1932, he conned his victim into accompanying him on the pretext that they were going to a card game. As they walked into the entrance of the building, Joe turned away. His friends, waiting in the shadowy lobby, shot Reggione three times in the head, leaving him dead in the hallway. After the killing, Valachi said he went straight home to his wife. After all, he said, I was just married a couple of months and I didnt want Mildred to think I was already starting to fool around.
Following the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker on corruption charges, the new reform candidate, Fiorello LaGuardia vowed to rid New York of corruption and the slot machines. Joes business soon dried up and in desperation, he and Santucci turned to the numbers racket, starting up a policy game in East Harlem. Things went well and by 1936, Joe was drawing a tax-free income of $1250 a week. Although he had, in common with all policy banks, been paying off the local police precinct as protection, on January 13th., he was arrested. Yet when his case came up for trial, someone had put the fix in and he received only a suspended sentence.
Throughout the rest of the 1930s, Joe operated his numbers business with modest success, also branching out into loan sharking, which was a highly lucrative form of money lending that generated enormous profits for the mob. Eventually, through this area of his operations, he became involved in legitimate business. When one of his debtors could not meet his payment schedule, Joe accepted a half share in his business, an upper Manhattan restaurant called the Paradise. He also found himself a partner in a garment manufacturing company called Prospect Dress. He and Mildred had a child, a boy they called Donald, and like most mobsters, Joe cultivated a mistress, a twenty-two-year-old woman called Laura. He set her up in her own apartment and kept her dressed in the latest fashions, courtesy of his interest in the clothing business.
Towards the end of 1940, Joe bought his first race horse and began a love affair with horses that would last him the rest of his life. It was perhaps the only interest he ever had that he did for the pure pleasure of it. By this time, things had changed dramatically in the hierarchy of his crime family, and in the underworld in general. There had been major convulsions, especially surrounding a man who one day would try flying and one who would die frying.
Charles (Lucky) Luciano, 1936 (CORBIS)
Charlie Luciano, boss of the largest crime family in America, was arrested in 1936 and charged with 61 counts of compulsory prostitution. According to Michael Stern, the crime reporter who subsequently interviewed him ten years later, Lucky, who had broken just about every law on the books, was finally brought to a well-merited justice for a crime of which he was least guilty. Sentenced to prison for up to 50 years, he was released in 1946 and deported to Italy, where he eventually died in 1962 of a heart attack. The man who had done more than any other to Americanize the Mafia was out of the mainstream forever, although he would continue to use his influence from off-shore, particularly in connection with narcotic trafficking into America.
Vito Genovese, 1937 (CORBIS)
In 1937, Vito Genovese left New York. He had been involved in the messy murder of a low-level street hood named Ferdinand Boccia and he feared justice. Although he was running the family as Charlie languished in Dannemora Prison in upstate New York, he decided to visit his hometown of Naples and lay low for awhile. That “while” would stretch almost ten years. At this point, the family came under the control of Frank Costello, who would manage its affairs for the next twenty years. Costello was an unknown quantity to Joe, but more importantly he was not interested in the problems Joe was experiencing with his immediate superior, capo Tony Bender.
In 1939, Louis Buchalter was arrested. The most feared Jewish gangster in New York and a close ally and partner of many senior underworld figures, he was subsequently tried for murder. He was electrocuted on March 4th, 1944, the only gang boss in American history to pay the ultimate price for his sins. His execution sent shock waves through the criminal world.
Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, a crony of Buchalter, and one of the more renowned serial killers of the Jewish underworld, belonged to a group of psychopaths that became known as Murder Incorporated. They supposedly handled murder contracts for the entire American underworld, although Valachi denied this in his testimony. He stated that Cosa Nostra always relied on its own members or associates to carry out their judicial killings. Although his testimony resulted in convictions in at least six previously unsolved gangland killings, Reles’ career as an informer came to an abrupt end. On November 12th, 1941, he flew out of a sixth floor window at a Coney Island hotel while in protective custody, under the guard of a posse of New York policemen.
As all of this was going on, Joe was trying to operate his business interests, keep a low profile and try to avoid problems. It wasnt that easy, especially with Tony Bender hanging around his neck.
Anthony Strollo, also known as Tony Bender and Tony Banda, was born in New York, in 1899. He grew up on Monroe Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, which opened up to traffic when he was ten years old. In his early thirties he worked under Masseria, but was renowned as a man who would switch sides quicker than a frog would blink. According to Luciano, Bender was pretty good at working both sides of the street, and getting away with it and He was always for sale to the highest bidder. He transferred from Masseria to Maranzano, shifted to work under Luciano, and then moved to be with Genovese before relocating to Costello. Then he went back to Genovese, accomplishing all of this in less than seventeen years.
Standing only five feet seven, and weighing about one hundred and fifty pounds, he was a doleful man with sandy brown hair who always looked like he had just come from a funeral. His front was real estate sales, but he was known as the racket czar of Greenwich Village. In addition he was a power on the Jersey docks. When the U.S. Army opened the Claremont Terminal on the Jersey City waterfront in 1951, Bender assumed control for the mob and made it a haven for the underworld.
One day Santucci approached Joe and told him Bender wanted two men disciplined. They had beaten up a member of Benders crew, a man called Eddie Copobianco, and Tony wanted retribution. The trouble was, the two men belonged to another crime family. It was the one that Joe had originally joined, which was controlled by Gagliano and his right hand man, a tiny, tightly wound hoodlum called Gaetano Lucchese.
Although Joe had his doubts, he arranged to have the two men suitably chastised with baseball bats, courtesy of two goons. One of them, Tommy Eboli, would eventually be leader of the family. Sure enough, Joe was called on the mat for the beatings. Although he had been acting under orders, he felt it better to accept full responsibility, knowing the kind of vindictive nature that Bender could display. Fortunately for him, Lucchese (also known as Tommy Brown) had been a close friend of Mildreds late father, Gaetano Reina, and was warm towards Joe. As a consequence, the matter was soothed over. Yet this wasnt to be the end of Joes problems with Tony B.
The loan sharking business Joe had created with another gangster called Johnny Robilotto came under the scrutiny of Bender. A compulsive gambler, he let it be known he was losing heavily on the horses and wanted a share of Valachis action. Joe refused to give up any and was called to a meeting with his boss at a famous gangster rendezvous, Dukes restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. In the end Joe had to give in, but rather than split his half he bought out his partner and passed that share over to Bender. Although he took a loss and had to break up a successful business, in his own eyes he had maintained his integrity and stood up for his rights.
In 1941, America entered the war and Joes business ventures went off on a different tangent. By now he had sold his restaurant, but his clothing factory was working overtime meeting military orders. His numbers and shylocking business went into decline because there were plenty of jobs and as a consequence, plenty of money to spread around. Like all resourceful members of your everyday crime family, Joe looked around and came up with a way to fill the vacuum created by the diminishing returns of his gambling and lending ventures.
From 1942 until 1945, he made big money in the black market. His source of revenue was gas ration stamps. He formed a partnership with another member of the Cosa Nostra, a man called Frank Luciano (unrelated to Lucky). Together they wholesaled the ration stamps that had been stolen from local offices of the OPA (Office of Price Administration) by independent gangs of thieves, who then sold them to people like Joe and his partner. Although the profit per stamp was only between 3 and 5 cents, the scale of the operation was huge. The OAP estimated that over 2 million stamps were stolen every day for the duration of the war, generating illegal annual revenues of over $20 million dollars.
Often the wealthier mob members would purchase stamps in blocks of $250,000 lots and pass them on down the chain to people like Joe. He would then resell to garages and gas stations, which in turn would eventually pass them on back to the OPA. It seemed to be a never-ending circle of opportunity for the underworld.
Joe prospered sufficiently with his gas stamp scam-to the tune of $150,000-to buy himself another racehorse and another restaurant, the Aida in Harlem. Things were progressing nicely into the 1940s, and then Vito came back.
In 1945, Vito Genovese returned to America and life would never be the same for the mob…or for Joseph Valachi. Arrested in Italy by the United States Military Police as the ringleader of a massive black market operation, Genovese was returned to New York. The Brooklyn District Attorneys office then held him to face indictment in connection with the Boccia slaying from 1934-the reason he had fled to Italy.
However, the DA could not make a case against Genovese, because their chief witness, Peter LaTempa, had died in prison under mysterious circumstances. On the evening of January 15th, 1945, he had swallowed some painkillers prescribed for his ulcer, gone to sleep and died. An autopsy showed he had enough poison in his system to kill eight horses.
Peter LaTempa was the same man whod almost killed Valachi twenty years earlier in Sing Sing.
As Genovese languished in prison in Brooklyn, Joe and his gas stamp partner, Frank Luciano, went partners in a restaurant called the Lido, in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx. It opened in the winter of 1946 and was immediately successful. Valachi had invested $15,000 of his earnings in the place and it was soon grossing $2500 a week.
Then Valachi discovered that his partner had been dipping into the takings to fund his gambling habit. In a fit of rage, Joe beat him nearly to death.
In due course, Joe was called to a tablea mob hearing held to determine culpability. The Cosa Nostra had very strict rules regarding personal conduct among its members, as established by Maranzano back in 1931 at the grand meeting in the Bronx.
In the New York area, the rule about members not raising their hands to each other made a lot of sense. There were six crime families (including the one based in New Jersey) all competing for a share of the areas riches, which often resulted in animosity between soldiers of the different groups. Without a strictly enforced code of conduct, it would have descended into anarchy.
Joe was called to his hearing at Dukes restaurant, the mobs favored place in New Jersey. Accompanied by Tony Bender, Joe was grilled by the underboss of Lucianos family, then headed by Albert Anastasia, a gangster with a ferocious reputation for violence. However, the meeting went in Joes favor. In settlement of the dispute, he was awarded the restaurant…upon payment of a token sum to Luciano. Afterwards Joe went upstairs to a private room and met up with Genovese, whom he had last seen almost ten years before. Their meeting was cordial, and Genovese even offered to help Joe out of his temporary financial predicament. Unknown to Joe, this was all part of a scheme Genovese was putting in place to regain the loyalty of the soldiers of his old Family. He had a long-term plan to regain control-which he would achieve ten years down the road.
Around 1950, Joe and Mildred decided to forsake apartment living. They bought into suburbia, purchasing a house at 45 Shawnee Avenue in Yonkers, Westchester County. Their son, Donald, returned home from his final year at a private boarding school, and Joe found him a legitimate job.
A year later on October 4th, 1951, Willie Moretti was shot dead at 11:00 a.m. in Joes Restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Willie was a close friend and ally of Frank Costello, and the killing was viewed as Genovese’s the opening gambit in his dangerous game of power chess. His aim was to checkmate Costello and depose him.
Early in September 1952, Joe was issued with another mob contract, this time to hit a man called Eugenio Giannini. He was a soldier in the Gagliano Family, which since death by natural causes of Gagliano in 1951, was now under the control of Tommy Lucchese,
Giannini was an informer for the Narcotics Bureau, the one government agency the mob feared and which caused them a lot of heartburn. In 1950, Giannini had traveled to Europe to peddle counterfeit currency in order to finance a heroin shipment back into America. Caught and imprisoned by the Italian police, he divulged information to the Bureau regarding his drug dealings with the exiled Luciano, who was now living in Naples. He was subsequently released and returned to New York, but Genovese found out and decided he should die. Strictly speaking, this was a matter for the Lucchese Family, but Genovese was anxious to maintain his pressure on the underworld, so he decided to execute the warrant, using his long friendship with Luciano as the excuse.
The body of Eugene Gianinni (CORBIS)
The murder of Giannini illustrates the way the mob hierarchy would isolate itself from the commission of a crime. The chain of command that would eventuate in Gianninis death started with an aggrieved Luciano in Naples. Genovese commissioned the hit, but would be nowhere near the victim at the time of the killing. Tony Bender transmitted the orders, but would also isolate himself with a perfect alibi. Even the man responsible for the murder, Valachi, would not be physically present when it went down. He in turn subcontracted the job to three East Harlem hoodlums anxious to make their bones and be inducted into Joes crime family. They were the brothers, Joe and Pat Pagano, and Valachis sisters boy, Fiore Siano.
Valachi had been chosen because he and Giannini had known each other for years, and as always in the mob, when killing time came down, the target was often set up by a good friend or a relative. Late in the evening of September 19th, Giannini was shot in the head and left for dead outside a deli on west 234th Street. For twelve years, it was another unsolved gangland killing, until Joe came along and cleared it up.
In June 1953, Joe was again summoned to a meet with Tony Bender. There was another killing to be carried out. This time it was an act of revenge by Genovese, although Bender used the usual excuse that the victim had become an informer and family security was at stake. The target was a man called Steve Franse. When he fled to Italy in 1937, Genovese had left Franse to chaperone his wife, Anna. Franse had been a partner with Vito in some nightclubs in Greenwich Village, and had also been in partnership with Mrs. Genovese in interests that lay outside of the mob. In 1952, Anna sued for divorce. In court, she had embarrassed Vito with her disclosures about his business interests, legal and illegal. A furious Genovese laid the blame for his wifes defection with Franse. Bender ordered Joe to set up the killing, and on June 18th, 1953, Franse was lured to Joes restaurant in the Bronx and brutally murdered. Joe again used Pat Pagano and his nephew Siano to do the job.
Joes problems originated not just with Tony Bender, but also from the attention he was receiving from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Under their hard-driving boss, Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, the FBN was feared and despised by the mob. It continually harassed them, often using undercover operatives to infiltrate and gather evidence. It also established a major network of informants that gave Cosa Nostra a constant case of diarrhea. The FBN was the first government agency to recognize the existence of organized crime and no other law enforcement agency had done more to dislocate it.
Frank Costello, 1939 (CORBIS)
In 1948, Frank Costello ordered his men to stay out of drugs. In the absence of Luciano and Genovese, he was the acting boss, and in his opinion, the risks of drug dealing far outweighed the benefits. Other families chose to either pay lip service to this philosophy or simply ignore it. At this time, the Luccheses were possibly the most heavily involved in drug trafficking of all the crime families in America.
The Bureau had kept Joe under observation, booking him in November 1944, and again in March 1948. Valachi claimed that at this point in his life he was not dealing in drugs. He said that he had come under the FBNs scrutiny simply because of his associates. One of these was his old pal and mentor, Dominick Petrelli. The Gap had been arrested and sent to prison on drug charges in 1942, and upon his release was deported to Italy. In November 1953, Joe was again on the receiving end of disturbing news emanating from Tony Bender.
It seemed that Petrelli had returned to New York, having made a deal with the junk agents to try and set up members of Joes Cosa Nostra family. Joe knew what was coming and was adamant he would not get involved in a hit on his old friend. I dont care what the Gaps doing…dont mix me up,” he told Bender. “Let his own people handle it. Petrelli was part of the Lucchese group and Joe, quite understandably, thought they should handle the problem the way it should have been with the Giannini hit.
However Joe did meet up with his old pal, who called into the Lido one night for a drink and to reminisce. After he left, Joe called Bender and told him he had made contact. A few days later, in the early hours of the morning of December 9th, three men walked into a bar in the Bronx, found Petrelli, backed him into the mens room, and blew his brains out.
Joe was sad, but resigned when he heard the news. I wouldnt have done nothing to him…how could I forget he took me to Brooklyn and kept me out of the way when Maranzano got his?… Gee, I felt bad, it wasnt much of a Christmas.
There was a lot worse to come.
In 1955, Joe was arrested and convicted on a narcotics conspiracy charge and sentenced to five years in prison. The appeals court then reversed the indictment, but he was arrested again in 1956 in a drug case involving his brother-in-law, Giacomo Reina. It was the first time Valachi had seen the inside of a prison cell in over thirty years. However, he was soon released on bail, pending an appeal. He won.
It was not Joes first venture into drugs. This had been in 1952, and illustrates the perfidy of the top men in Cosa Nostra. As Joe said, It was a mess…I want the boys who are in it [Cosa Nostra] today to know how the greed of the bosses is ruining this thing of ours.
Valachi set up a deal with Pat Pagano to import fifteen kilos of heroin via a Corsican source in Marseilles. Cognizant of the familys edict regarding the no-go rule on drugs, Joe went to Tony Bender and got him involved. He knew that, with Benders backing, he was in the clear. Bender put up the initial $8000 for the down payment. He agreed to this proving that he was included with Joe and his partner on a fifty-fifty basis of the $165,000 that would be realized after they wholesaled the dope. But when the drugs arrived, Joe suddenly found that, in addition to Bender, he had to include Genovese and four other members of Benders inner circle. At the end of the day, Joe and his partner, Pat Pagano, ended up with 2 kilos each of heroin. To rub salt into the wound, Joe later discovered that the profits he thought he was sharing among six people was in fact split only between Bender and Genovese.
1957 was a bad year for Cosa Nostra and it wasnt the brightest in Valachis almanac, for sure.
On May 2nd, Frank Costello was shot as he returned to his apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan. Although he was only slightly wounded, he knew that Vito Genovese had set up the assassination attempt and that the next one might not fail. He bowed down and retired gracefully from the family leadership.
Two months later, on June 17th, Frank Scalice, underboss of the family run by Albert Anastasia, was shot dead as he picked some peaches in his favorite fruit store in the Bronx. Then on October 25th, Anastasia sat down for what was to be his last haircut in chair number four at the barber shop in the Park-Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. He’d wrested control of the family by killing the Mangano brothers in 1951, and now it was his turn. Two masked gunmen walked in and blasted Albert out of the green leather seat.
Then three weeks went by and on November 14th, New York State police officers arrested dozens of men who had congregated at an estate in upper New York at a place called Apalachin. It turned out that these men-some from Italy and some from other parts of the country-all had police records. Surprise, surprise, all seemed to belong to some kind of secret criminal organization.
In the seamy, convoluted, Byzantine world of the Cosa Nostra, the Apalachin debacle set a new standard for duplicitous standards.
Ill tell you the reaction of all of us soldiers when we heard about the raid, said Valachi. “If it had been us, you can imagine what the bosses would have done…there they were, running through the woods like scared rabbits, throwing away money and guns…so who are they kidding when they say we got to respect them?
For Joe during this period, bad would only turn to worse, mirroring the mobs misfortunes. His liquor license at the Lido restaurant was revoked. He kept it going as a pizza place, and put all his ready cash into the construction of another eating-place in Yonkers. When he was convicted in the 1955 drug bust, he had to cancel the project and sell the Lido. Since it had no liquor license, it was worth little. Then his partner in the dress factory died and Joe discovered he had been withholding taxes, so the business was liquidated to satisfy a government lien.
Joe started dealing in drugs again and developed an interest in a jukebox operation in East Harlem and the Bronx. By 1959, he wanted out of drug dealing completely. His juke box business was doing nicely, he had developed a linen supply company, and had joined with another Cosa Nostra soldier in forming a numbers business.
In May of 1959, it all started to unravel. He was tipped off by one of his black operators in Harlem that the FBN were closing in and he only just evaded them as they raided his home. On the run, Joe went into hiding, first sharing an apartment with a girlfriend in the Bronx, then traveling up into northern New York State. There he stayed at a trailer camp near a small rural town called Thompsonville.
On November 19th, three federal agents arrested Joe as he waited at a pay phone near the camp. Joe had employed a young street hoodlum called Ralph Wagner to help him in his drug ring and this man had been arrested in the swoop that almost caught Joe back in May. Trying for a lighter sentence, Wagner had tipped off the FBN that Joe was waiting for a telephone call from him that night, at that particular phone box.
Taken back to Brooklyn, Valachi was charged and then released on $25,000 bail. His numbers and loan shark business had gone west during his six month absence, and he had a hard job raising the money. Because of the pressure the narcotic agents were exerting no one was interested in buying out his jukebox business. In February 1960, Joe agreed to plead guilty to his drug charge, providing that the court allow him a month to settle up his affairs. He had already decided to skip the country and move north to Canada to seek shelter with a man called Alfredo Agueci. Joe had been introduced to Agueci by family member Vincent Mauro while they were at a bar in Manhattan. Agueci and his brother Vito were Sicilian drug dealers working in and around the crime family based in Buffalo, under the leadership of Stefano Magaddino.
Afraid that the bail bondsman would foreclose on his house when he skipped, Joe sold it at a loss in a fire sale. He resettled Mildred and Donald into another, much cheaper home back in the Bronx, making sure the title of the property was in her name only. From this point in time, his real family would no longer be part of his life.
Shortly after arriving in Toronto, Joe received a telephone call from Tony Bender telling him to return. Get back here, Bender said. The fix is in. Youre only going to get five years. Although he flew back to New York, Joe got cold feet. For a month he moved around from place to place in the Bronx and New Jersey, but eventually turned himself in to the authorities. When he entered the courtroom on June 3rd, he realized that the atmosphere was all wrong. Instead of five, the judge sentenced him to fifteen years and fined him $10,000. Wagner, the man who had turned Joe in, received an eight- to twelve- year term for his part in the drug bust.
Both men were sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to begin serving their sentences. In August 1961, Valachi was returned to New York to stand trial in another narcotics conspiracy trial. This was the case that Joe claims was a set up, the one involving Bender, Mauro and the Agueci brothers, and the one that led up to all of his troubles. Joe was found guilty in February 1962 and sentenced to twenty years, a sentence that was to run concurrently with the term he was already serving.
In the days leading up to the killing of John Saupp, Valachi was under intense strain. Apart from the suspicion that he was an informer, Genovese was also expressing his concern over Joes links to Tony Bender. Vito was mad at Bender, who he believed had grabbed some profits by going behind his back on numerous drug deals. It is also possible that Genovese had pieced together the jigsaw that had resulted in his own drug conviction. Apparently this had been masterminded by Charlie Luciano, Frank Costello and a man called Carlo Gambino, the new head of the old Anastasia family, and they had coordinated it through Bender. All had different reasons to see Vito behind bars, and their scheme had succeeded without qualification. Whatever the rationalization, reaching out from behind prison walls, Genovese finally settled his grudge with Tony Bender.
On the evening of April 8th, 1962, he told his wife he was going out for a few minutes and left his luxurious home in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He never returned. Rumors abound as to his fate, but one thing is certain: He died somewhere, somehow, that night. One day soon afterwards, while in a casual conversation with Joe, Genovese said, It was the best thing that could have happened to Tony. He wouldnt be able to take it [prison] like you and I.
Joseph Valachi testifies (AP)
In September 1963, Joseph Valachi appeared as the star witness before a government inquiry into the mob. Officially known as The Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee Operations, United States Senate, 88th Congress, Organized Crime & Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, it was generally referred to as The McClellan Committee because Democratic Senator John L. McClellan chaired it.
In the Old Senate Office building in Washington D.C., as the television cameras turned, Joseph Valachi went before the committee and told his story. The American public had their first view of the real article: a mob stone-killer, testifying about his life in Cosa Nostra
A short, bandy-legged little man, standing only five foot six and weighing 188 pounds, he had a face like a cracked walnut under a military style crew cut. As he gave his evidence in a low, gravely voice, he chained smoked each day through three packs of Camel cigarettes. Day after day he spoke about his life, tearing away the Mafias veil of mystery and exposing its secrets. For the first time the American public heard about omerta and blood oaths, soldiers and buttons, capos and consiglieri, and all the details of a vast, organized criminal syndicate, told by a man who had admitted to being involved in 33 underworld murders.
He revealed the existence of five crime families in New York and one in New Jersey. He placed other families in Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Tampa, Boston and Providence, identifying bosses and senior men in each group. He confirmed that there were at least 2000 made men in New York, and personally identified 289 of the 383 hoodlums that had been profiled by investigators. It had been 13 years since America had been exposed to the Kefauver hearings, but at that time the object had been for the interviewees to disclose as little as possible and take the 5th Amendment as often as possible.
There was an interesting exchange between Joe and the committee that illustrated his lack of moral reprehensibility in connection with his life-long career. In his subculture of crime, there was no concern over acts committed over the years. Well, he said, after you get used to burglarizing or committing crimes, you dont think these things are crimes. For instance, I had been in some machines. I dont think that was a crime; everybody else had them. I dont know how to explain them. I had dress shops. I had horses. Everyone was selling stamps. How am I going to explain it to you, senator?
Following his appearance in Washington, Joe was transferred to the District of Columbia jail. There, under the urging of the Department of Justice, he started to write his memoirs. When finished, they comprised an astonishing 1180 pages. It was hoped that, when published, they would be used by law enforcement agencies across the country to develop their knowledge of organized crime, an enemy they had been fighting with little success for over 30 years.
However, early in 1966, a massive campaign was instigated by an article in the Italian-American newspaper, Il Progresso, to stop the publication of the manuscript. They claimed that it was perpetrating the kind of image of criminality associated with the many Italian names in Valachis testimony. It was a slur on all Italian-Americans. By May 10th, under heavy political pressure and supported by such well-known Italian-Americans as Frank Sinatra, the Attorney General initiated proceedings to ban the book. It was the first time that action of this kind had ever been taken.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached. A third-person book could be produced using Valachis writings as source material, along with personal interviews between Valachi and the selected writer, Peter Maas. This resulted in the 1968 publication of The Valachi Papers. It was the definitive account of the life and times of Joseph Valachi.
Following the furor over his writings, Valachi was removed from the relative comfort of the D.C. prison and transferred to a miserable jail in Milan, Michigan, forty miles south of Detroit. There on April 11th, 1966, Valachi attempted suicide by trying to hang himself in a shower. Despondent over the governments action on his book and confused by the move to Milan, he finally broke. The final straw appeared to be the removal from his cell of a small, portable hot plate and grill he used to cook himself a few delicacies.
Joe suffered from the cold weather in Michigan, so he was eventually transferred to the federal penitentiary at LaTuna, Texas, twenty-one miles from El Paso. Set on a flat, open landscape of Halopena peppers, corn and grass fields, populated by roadrunners and jackrabbits, the adobe prison became Joes home for the rest of his life. He was housed in a large cell near the prison hospital that had its own bathroom, rug, television set, small stove and several electric heaters. Even in the hot, dry, barren atmosphere of the Texas desert, Joe was forever cold.
Towards the end of his life, his health was letting him down. He suffered from arthritis, high blood pressure, gall bladder problems and prostate cancer.
On Saturday, April 3rd, 1971, Joe suffered a gall bladder attack. The prison doctor sedated him with a shot of morphine and he died late in the afternoon.
According to Vincent Teresa, a mob informant from Boston who served time at LaTuna and became Joe’s friend, Joe had corresponded for years with a woman from Buffalo. She was the one who claimed his body. She had the authorities ship it and she buried him in a cemetery in Niagara Falls. She left the grave unmarked, in case the mob might try to desecrate Joes final resting place.
He survived Vito Genovese, his old enemy, by two years and two months. The man who was still the titular head of the biggest Cosa Nostra family in America had died in a Springfield, Missouri prison in 1969 from a heart problem.
Joseph Valachi and his revelations did not destroy the Cosa Nostra. In fact, it hardly put a crimp in their style. He was an acute embarrassment to Genovese, who no doubt smarted under the humiliation of it all. He also caused J. Edgar Hoover all kinds of heartburn by forcing him to finally bite the knuckle in admitting that perhaps crime was being committed in a big way by a bunch of gangsters who did not conform to the agencies stereotyping, al la Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson.
It was not long after Valachis appearance at the McClellan hearings that Hoover instituted the Top Hoodlum program at the agency. Better late than never, and the FBI have been one of the more effective enforcement weapons over the last thirty years, doing significant damage to the mob nationwide. Cosa Nostra in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose has almost completely disappeared. Denver, Kansas City, Dallas, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Rochester are non-existent. New Orleans, Tampa, Buffalo are shadows of their former selves. The mob in Detroit, Philadelphia and New Jersey are on their knees and almost out. The once powerful syndicate of Chicago is greatly reduced in numbers and effectiveness. What is left of organized crime in Boston, Providence and Rhode Island struggles to compete with the rapidly expanding and developing crime groups made up of blacks, Asians, South Americans and biker gangs.
Only in New York does the mob maintain momentum, although they operate under pressure. The faces of the five families have changed dramatically over the last fifteen years. Relentless pressure from all government agencies makes it a lot harder for organized crime to stay organized. Of them all, the Genovese Family (as they are still referred to after all these years in memory of Vito) remains the biggest and the strongest. With their power over labor and the unions almost totally abrogated, they have resorted to their staple business of gambling, money lending and extortion.
There are soldiers and captains in the family who will still remember Joe Cago, and they no doubt wince whenever his name is mentioned-not because of the damage he did them but more for the fact that he brought it all out in the open.
During the Second World War, British fighter pilots used an expression to denote their tactical superiority when attacking German aircraft. Coming down on the enemy from above, with the sun behind them, they called it: Catching the Bounce.
Cosa Nostra had been Catching the Bounce for over thirty years. Then Joe came along and the ball went out of play.
The definitive book on Joseph Valachi is: Maas, Peter, The Valachi Papers, New York: Putnam, 1968.
His name is mentioned in many books on organized crime, but almost always they refer back to Maas as the source.
The other major reference is: Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, 88th Congress, First Session, Part One. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington: 1963.
This website uses cookies to ensure professional site functionality and to analyze traffic. We do not collect, store, or process any personal data from our visitors.
