The Valachi Papers (18 page)

outside the state capital at Albany. Just what he actually did has never been pinned down. Even more debatable was what followed. In 1945 Luciano's lawyers pushed for his parole because of his contributions to the war effort. It was eventually granted. Closely tied in with this decision was the fact that he had never bothered to take out U.S. citizenship, and once paroled, Luciano was promptly deported to Italy on the fallacious theory that he would cease to be an American problem.

Dewey's successful prosecution of Luciano produced shock waves in the Cosa Nostra that a lesser organization might not have survived. Not since Capone had such a potent figure in its ranks been toppled. Charley Lucky's fall, moreover, was far more dramatic. Capone, after all, was a crude loudmouth, while Luciano with his urbane veneer epitomized the "new racketeer," anxious to be portrayed as just another business tycoon pushing buttons from behind his mahogany desk.

For Valachi it was a personal loss of considerable magnitude. "Gee," he says, "I thought why did it have to be Charley Lucky? Why couldn't it be somebody else? Everything was going swell with me. He helped me a lot in the numbers, and I was getting closer to him. Who knew what was coming up next? Believe me, I felt terrible. Every time somebody took an interest in me, I was deprived of him."

Luciano's departure from the scene
would also affect Valachi in a

way he could not possibly have imagined. It opened an avenue to power for Luciano's second-in-command, Vito Genovese, the man who some twenty years later would sentence Valachi to an underworld execution. At the time, however, nothing seemed less likely. While Luciano allegedly was doing his patriotic best for the

United States, Genovese was in, of all places, Italy, where it later turned out he became such a darling of the Fascist regime that Mussolini himself had decorated him with the highest award he could bestow on a civilian.

Genovese is a man of Byzantine bent. "If you went to Vito," Valachi says, "and told him about some guy who was doing wrong, he would have this guy killed, and then he would have you killed for telling on the guy." Born on the outskirts of Naples in 1897, he was educated there through the equivalent of the fifth grade. Genovese arrived in this country when he was sixteen, and his earliest known haunts were in New York's Greenwich Village, an area favored at the time by Italian immigrants, as well as artists and writers. He was married at some point prior to 1924, but his wife died in 1929.

Later he met the love of his life, Anna Petillo, who was unfortunately married. Then, as luck would have it, her husband was murdered, and within two weeks Genovese married her in a civil ceremony witnessed by Anthony (Tony Bender) Strollo and his wife. According to Valachi, Peter (Petey Muggins) Mione and Michael Barrese killed him on Genovese's orders:

Now this is back in 1932, and I'm close to Petey Muggins. Remember he is one of the guys who went with me to Charley Lucky and Vito after Mr. Maranzano got his. One day we're talking about this Mike Barrese from the Village who is hanging around in Harlem where we are. So Petey says it's on account of him and Barrese strangling a guy on a roof downtown on Thompson Street.

Petey says some people saw them doing it. It's okay, they have been straightened out, but this Barrese can't stop being worried, and he's staying up in Harlem, where nobody knows him. In other words,

he
's
afraid to go downtown and be seen. Petey says that ain't so good. He should go back and let the bulls question him if they want to, and the whole thing will blow over.

"I don't know nothing about this," I say. "Who was the guy that got killed?"

Petey looks around nervouslike, and he says to me, "Joe, don't tell a soul. It's only on account of you being you that I would tell you. The guy was Anna Genovese's husband."

"Eh," I say, "so that's how things are."

Well, this Barrese disappeared. I never saw him again. I don't know what happened to him, but it ain't hard to figure.

(According to New York City police records, one Gerard Vernotico, age twenty-nine, of 191 Prince Street, was found dead at 2:15
p.m.,
March 16,1932, on the roof of a building at 124 Thompson Street. Vernotico's widow, the former Anna Petillo, married Vito Genovese twelve days later in the Municipal Building, Manhattan. Vernotico's arms and legs were bound, and a tightly drawn sash cord was around his neck. Also found dead with Vernotico was one Antonio Lonzo, age thirty-three, of 305 East 28th Street. It is believed that Lonzo was killed because he was a witness to the slaying of Vernotico. Case open.)

At least Genovese's love for Anna seems to have been undying. Even when she testified in 1950 during divorce proceedings against him about his racket connections and the size and sources of his income—an unheard-of act for anyone who valued his heakh— she remained unscathed. "Nobody could understand why Vito didn't do anything about her," Valachi recalls. "The word was all around, why don't he hit her? But he must have really cared for her. She had something on him. I remember when we—Vito and me—were in Atlanta together later on, he would sometimes talk about her, and I would see the tears rolling down his cheeks. I couldn't believe it."

If so, she is Genovese's only discernible soft spot in a brutal career. During the 1920s he was periodically arrested on various charges, including homicide and felonious assault. He had, however, only two convictions, both for carrying a concealed weapon—a pistol. The first, when he was twenty, got him sixty days in the workhouse; the second time he escaped with a $250 fine.

After that, as he loomed increasingly large in the Cosa Nostra, he generally managed to stay out of the way of the law with one apparently minor exception at that time. In 1934 he and a Luciano lieutenant, Michele (Mike) Miranda, bilked a gullible merchant out of $160,000 in two stages—initially in a crooked card game and then in that hoary flimflam, a machine that supposedly made money. To their intense annoyance, one Ferdinand (The Shadow) Boccia began to pester them for the $35,000 he had been promised as his share for enticing the victim into their clutches.

Boccia should have left well enough alone. He had gotten involved in the swindle in the first place trying to get back in Vito's good graces after he and a sidekick named William Gallo had held up a liquor store which belonged to a friend of Genovese. To catch Boccia off guard, it was decided to use Gallo and another smalltime hoodlum, Ernest (The I lawk) Rupolo, to dispatch him. Then Genovese and Miranda got a bit too devious for their own good. They gave Rupolo $175 to kill Gallo, once Boccia had been taken care of.

Apparently Genovese and Miranda had some second thoughts about the whole diing and ended up assigning the contract to Cosa

Nostra professionals. A ludicrous sequence of events followed which doubles Valachi over with laughter every time he thinks about it. When Rupolo heard that Boccia had been murdered, he proceeded with phase two of the original plot. He and Gallo attended a movie in Brooklyn one night, and as they walked down the street afterward, he took out a pistol, put it against Gallo's head, and pulled the trigger: The pistol misfired. Rupolo quickly tried again. Still nothing. When Gallo demanded to know what was going on, Rupolo lamely passed it off as a joke and said that the pistol was not loaded. The two continued on to a friend's house, where Rupolo examined the pistol, discovered that the firing pin was rusty and oiled it. Upon leaving the house, they walked together for several blocks, and then Rupolo took another crack at Gallo. This time the pistol went off, but all Rupolo managed to do was wound him. Rupolo, identified by Gallo as his would-be assassin, was sentenced to nine to twenty years in prison.

There for a moment the matter lay. Some rumors circulated about those involved in the murder of Boccia, and Genovese was brought in for questioning. But little came of it. Then a more threatening situation developed. After Dewey had convicted Luciano, he named Genovese the new King of the Rackets and began probing into his affairs. All in all it appeared to Genovese to be an excellent time to drop out of sight for a while. He had visited Italy for three months in 1933, presumably liked what he found, and skipped back there in 1937.

According to Valachi, Genovese told him in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta that he had taken $750,000 with him when he fled to Italy. The figure is not far-fetched. Genovese's wife testified in her divorce suit that he had large amounts of cash in various

European safe-deposit boxes, including $500,000 in one in Switzerland, and after he was located in Italy near the close of World War II, it was discovered that he had donated $250,000 toward die construction of a Fascist party headquarters.

"Well," Valachi told me, "with Charley Lucky gone and then Vito, I must say it was a shock to all of us."

With both Luciano and Genovese
at least temporarily out of the picture, Frank Costello became acting boss of the Luciano Family. This would have immethate and serious repercussions for Valachi. Not that he had any personal difficulty with Costello. "Frank," he notes, "was a peaceful guy, a diplomat." The trouble was that he did not know Costello well, and this left Valachi vulnerable to the whims of his lieutenant, Tony Bender, whom he had intensely disliked from their first meeting.

Costello, moreover, was far less concerned about Family matters than he was in caring for his own booming enterprise—his slot machine racket, which had become national in scale; his huge bookmaking operation; his gambling casino interests, including the famous Beverly Club outside New Orleans; and his partnership, necessarily silent since he was a former bootlegger, in a wholesale liquor firm dien realizing $35,000 a month as the exclusive distributor in the United States for King's Ransom Scotch.

To inquiring reporters Costello liked to emphasize his legitimate interests in real estate, oil, and similar ventures, and he is in fact probably one of the few Cosa Nostra chieftains who might have achieved great success as a businessman. He also is not without a sense of humor. Once pressed about his role in gambling, he observed, "Some people are common gamblers. I am an uncommon gambler."*

When Costello wanted to, however, he did not hesitate to show his hand. His habit was—and still is—to enjoy the steam baths at a Manhattan hotel in the late afternoon whenever he could. The night manager approached him on one such occasion and explained that other clients were expressing some dismay at his presence.

"You mean you don't want me to come here anymore?" Costello said.

"If it were up to me," the night manager said, "you could come all you want. But we have been getting these complaints. You know how some people are."

The next morning none of the hotel's employees —chambermaids, waiters, elevator boys, maintenance men, kitchen help, and so on—reported for work. Eventually the frantic general manager discovered what had happened and immethately telephoned Costello.

'While writing a magazine article a few years ago,
I
had dinner with him. During the meal a lackey brought him an evening paper that featured a frontpage story on Costello. I asked him if he ever read anything new about himself, or was it always the same old stuff? "Well," he replied in the gravelly voice that became so famous during the Kefauver crime hearings, "you won't believe it, but it's the God's honest truth. I never read nothing about myself. You know why? It only upsets my stomach."

"What are you telling me for?" Costello replied. "I don't have anything to do with the unions."

"I know that, Mr. Costello. I was really calling you to say that an unfortunate error was made last night."

"You mean I can use the baths?"

"Anytime you wish, sir."

Within hours the missing employees were back on the job.

Costello preferred to use political connections, instead of muscle, to advance his fortunes. But to hear him tell it, he had no more influence than any other man who lived in one neighborhood for many years. This is the same Costello of whom a Tammany Hall leader admitted, "If Costello wanted me, he would send for me." When Governor Huey Long was assassinated shortly after he invited Costello to bring his slot machines to New Orleans, it bothered Costello not at all; he simply cut Long's political heirs in for a share of the loot. Sometimes Costello's political power got a bit embarrassing for him. One memorable instance occurred when Costello backed the appointment of Thomas Aurelio to the New York State Supreme Court. At the time there was an authorized wiretap on Costello's telephone. Among other items it picked up was a call from Aurelio fervently thanking "Don Francesco" and pledging future fealty. Of his uncanny ability to persuade political figures to see things his way, Costello would explain, "I know them, know them well, and maybe they got a little confidence in me." Former Mayor William O'Dwyer offered a more practical solution. Asked what he considered to be the basis of Costello's appeal to politicians, O'Dwyer said, "It doesn't matter whether it is a banker, a businessman, or a gangster, his pocketbook is always attractive."

Such high-level wheeling and dealing did not leave Costello much time to administer Cosa Nostra affairs, even if he wanted to. Thus by default the various lieutenants in the Luciano Family— among them Willy Moore, Anthony (Little Augie Pisano) Carfano, Joe Adonis, Trigger Mike Coppola, Dominick (Dom the Sailor) DeQuatro, and Anthony (Tony Bender) Strollo—enjoyed vastly increased power. To complicate matters further for Valachi, besides Bender hanging directly over his head, his relations with his partner in the numbers game, Bobby Doyle, had begun to deteriorate:

Little did I know that I was drifting off with the worst troublemaker in the world. I'm talking about that dog, Bobby Doyle. No one on earth can match him for his treachery except Tony Bender, and I blame Vito Genovese for making Tony think he is such a big guy. They are all dogs to me. I'm sorry I ever got mixed up with them.