The Valachi Papers (22 page)

Now the word gets around among the boys that Joe Cago—meaning me—is doing okay at the track, and one day Tony Bender calls me and says to meet him that night at Duke's in New Jersey. I ain't in the habit of going over to Duke's except when I'm on the carpet for something, so as I walk in, one of the guys that hangs out there sees me and says, "Oh, God! Are you on the carpet again?"

"Nan," I say. "I got an appointment with Tony."

It don't take no genius to figure what
Mr.
Bender wants. Tony was a real sucker with horses. If my grandmother told Tony about some horse in the sixth race, the only sure thing is that Tony would bet on the horse. A lot of mob guys are like that. They are supposed to be so tough and smart, and they act like the biggest squares in the world when they get a tip—it don't matter from where—on a race.

So after talking about this and that, Tony says, "Joe, I need a winner." Now this is before he made me and Johnny Roberts split up in the shylocking business, or
I
wouldn't do what I done, which was to give Tony a horse. This kid, I think he was with the George D. Widener stable, told me about a horse that was ready, and he is running the next day. I still remember the horse's name. It was Harvard Square.

Tony has the form sheets with him, and right away he looks up the race and says, "Hey, he is up against a horse that ain't lost this year."

I say, "I ain't going to argue with you. This kid told me the other horse will get beat tomorrow, and the kid knows what he is talking about. Do what you want."

Well, Tony bets Harvard Square, and Harvard Square comes on in the stretch and pays
$12
and change to win. Tony is a very heavy bettor, so this means he wins a lot. I tell the story because it is the only time I ever got satisfaction from Tony Bender. He is so happy about that he forgets himself. He went around telling everybody, "Boy, Joe can really pick them!"

Naturally I am sorry I ever made him win. Tony ain't with us on earth no more, and when the right time comes, I will explain how he got his, not that I'm losing any sleep over it.

Valachi's fascination with racing inevitably led to the purchase of his first horse. At the end of the 1940 racing season in New York a contact informed him that the owner-trainer of several horses, unable to pay his feed bill at the track, was willing to part with a five-year-old gelding named Armagnac, provided he was kept on as the trainer. Valachi knew about Armagnac, having bet on him and won a few weeks earlier, but he was wary about the conditions of the sale. "What kind of a trainer can he be," he asked, "if he is broke with a fine horse like that?"

"It's just one of those things," he was told. "The man is a fine trainer, but he's a gambling fool. He bets every race, even when he knows better. You'll be all right so long as you don't let him tout you.

The temptation to have his own horse overcame whatever doubts Valachi entertained. His police record was no problem. With Armagnac, as with his other horses, he simply had various people, including his wife, front for him as the owner of record:

Well, I got a horse, but I can't run him right away. The trainer tells me that Armagnac is tired and should rest over the winter. I am disappointed, but the horse must come before my feelings. We figure out what the bill will be for putting him on the farm—which was around a couple of thousand—and I can't wait for the next season.

When the time comes, Mildred is so excited she can hardly talk. I try to explain that the first race Armagnac will run in is just a test. It ain't meant for him to win. She don't understand. She says to me, "Why are you going to race him if you don't think he can win?"

I try to explain, but she still doesn't get it, and nothing will do but that she must come and see him. Then when we get to the track, I see that Armagnac is in what they call the field. I'll explain what this is. If there are more than twelve horses in a race, they put these extra horses in the field. There could be three or four horses in the field, they are usually long shots, and if you bet the field and one of them wins, it don't make any difference which one, you win. So I find that one of the horses in the field with Armagnac has got a chance, and I tell Mildred to go ahead and bet on Armagnac across the board.

They're off, and at the wire they are all bunched up and Mildred could not tell where Armagnac is. He ran a nice race and I think he finished sixth, but this other horse in the field comes in second, so Mildred collects place and show money. "You see," she said to me, "you must have faith." To this day she thinks it was Armagnac.

Initially, however, Valachi enjoyed considerably less success as an owner than he did as an amateur handicapper. The next time Armagnac was scheduled to run, the morning line, or advance odds, on him was 50 to 1. "Now he is very sharp," Valachi recalls, "and there ain't another horse in his class in the race. I am going to put $2,000 on him to win, and even if the price drops, I will clean up." But when Valachi arrived at the track, he learned that during the night Armagnac had badly bruised a foreleg against the side of his stall and would be out most of the season. Valachi took the news philosophically. "What could I do?" he says. "After all, the poor horse didn't kick himself on purpose. I advised myself to be patient, as there is always another day."

By now he also had Knight's Duchess. But she, as Valachi puts it, was still being trained to "run the right way." He then acquired a two-year-old colt which he called Walter Raleigh after his sire, Sir Walter Raleigh. "I figured I would just Americanize the name," Valachi says, "but I had to do a lot more than that. Walter was a bad boy. He was a lover. Instead of racing, he wants to jump every filly in sight, including Knight's Duchess. So he has to have an operation. In other words, his balls got to come off, and he will be a gelding. You see what you must go through having horses?"

But Valachi the wide-eyed owner was one thing. He was on considerably firmer ground when, as happened periodically, someone tried to cross him at the track. A memorable attempt took place shortly after Knight's Duchess had won in such dramatic fashion at Rockingham Park. He says it marked the first— and only —time he deliberately had one of his horses lose:

I don't want to do it, but I got no choice. If I let this guy clip me, the word will travel, and everybody will be trying something against me. That is the way mob life is. Now the guy's name was Charley. He is in the furniture business, and all the guys with Tony Bender are buying furniture from him, as the price is right. Then he gets in some kind of trouble and Tony lends him around $15,000. Naturally he has to put up his inventory as security.

Around this time he comes to me and says he has got a lot of people who will bet for him if he has a good tip on a horse. He gets half the winnings. He says to let him know when Knight's Duchess is ready. He will recommend her, and if she wins, he will split with me.

Well, I like the idea. The trainer already has Knight's Duchess entered in a race which looks good for her. So I tell Charley, and he says, "Let's go." I take my girl, Laura, and I get this other girl, Helen, for him, and it looks like we will have a swell time and make some money, too.

The morning of the race I smell something fishy. We are at the hotel, and Helen comes into my room. I ask, "Where's Charley?" and she says he has gone to the lobby to make some calls.
I
don't understand why he ain't calling from his room, so I send Helen down to see if she can learn what this is all about. She comes back and says he is making one call after another advising people to bet on Knight's Duchess.

I still don't know what's going on, but I find out. We are on the way to the track, and Charley keeps asking, "Are you sure she's going to win?" I tell him that Knight's Duchess is a cinch unless—God forbid— she breaks a leg. Then all of a sudden at the track he says, "Joe,
I
ain't going to make any calls. I just don't feel lucky today."

That's all I have to hear. He is planning to cut me out of my end of the bets he told his people to make.
I
run to the trainer and tell him
that we got to teach this guy a lesson. The trainer says that he will take care of everything with the jockey and not to worry about a thing. Now I figure one of the people Charley called is Tony Bender. There is no need getting Tony steamed up at me for nothing,
so
I call him and warn him not to bet on Knight
's
Duchess.

After that I sit back and wait. I can hardly keep from laughing as I watch Charley
's
face. Knight
's
Duchess ain't never in the race, and I think she finished last. The sweat is pouring off Charley, and he jumps up and runs off without a word. I follow him and see he is on the phone again, and when he ain't on the phone, he is drinking pretty good. I
got
an idea what
's
coming next. Sure enough, when he is back, his face is all red, and he is shouting. "Did you make a call to Tony Bender?"

"Gee," I say, "that's right. I guess I forgot to tell you."

Now I let him have it. I tell him everything I done, and I thought he was going to make a move for me. I wish he had. I would have busted his head in. But he folds up and starts moaning, "I laid out all the furniture money...I told all my people to bet...what'll I do?"

I said, "Charley, you wanted to fuck. You got fucked."

Although Valachi's horses, notably Knight's Duchess, went on to win a number of races, his interest in them was diverted because of pressing economic problems brought on by the war. "I mean the war when the Japs bombed us," he was careful to point out to me, "not some trouble in the Cosa Nostra."

Its most immethate effect was to end Valachi's resolve to stay away from "mobs guys" as much as he could. He had by then sold his share of the Paradise Restaurant, at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue, since "the neighborhood was changing; the colored were moving in, and they don't eat our kind of food." This left Valachi with his numbers, his loanshark racket, and his dress factory. Of
these, only the factory, which had shifted production from its normal line to fill military orders, profited from the war. "Now," he says, "the numbers and the shylocking go dead on me. There is plenty of money around and plenty of jobs, so who needs to borrow? It's worse with the numbers. I'll tell you something about them. The numbers are good only when times are bad. It's poor people that play the numbers, and if you want the truth, most of them play because they are desperate for money and they don't have no other way to get it."

A traditionalist at heart, Valachi was reluctant to give up such an old standby as the policy game. But as his bank's daily play dwindled, he also ran into a streak of "extra bad" hits that forced him to dig into his capital to pay off. If this was not dispiriting enough, many of his best runners, vital to the success of a numbers operation, began drifting into war work. "When I lost my help," he recalls, "I quit. I am out $23,000 anyway. I am sick and tired of the numbers and being shaken down by the cops, and I got to find something else."

By now Valachi's two good friends Frank Livorsi and Dominick (The Gap) Petrilli were deeply involved in bringing morphine in from Mexico for conversion into heroin. They invited Valachi to join them, but after thinking it over, he declined. "At the time I don't know too much about junk," he says, "and I was suspicious of it." Valachi's instincts were correct. Within a year Livorsi and Petrilli, among others, were rounded up and sent to prison in the first major case built by the Bureau of Narcotics against the Cosa Nostra.

His problem, however, of what to do was solved soon enough. For the Cosa Nostra the war, like everything else, was simply a situation to be exploited. The only question was how. As a host of
shortages developed in the economy, necessitating price rationing and price control, the answer was evident—the black market. It was not perhaps quite the bonanza that Prohibition had provided, but the same classic mix was present for the organized underworld to fatten on: the illegal sale of a commodity—be it meat, sugar, gas, etc.—to a public that by and large was a willing, indeed anxious, accomplice.

This combination assured not only huge, tax-free profits, but also little risk. Valachi specialized in gas ration stamps, and from mid-1942 until 1945 he made about $200,000-"I wasn't so big," he modestly notes—without any interference from the law.

Valachi confesses that he did not immediately realize the potential of the stamp racket. "I thought it was penny-ante stuff," he says. "Then I find out how them pennies can mount up." He first got involved at the behest of the owner of the garage where he kept his car—"Joe, you got connections; I know you can get me stamps." Valachi finally agreed to see what he could do. Since there were various types of gas stamps, he had the garage man list the kind he wanted, the number of gallons, and the price he was willing to pay. A few nights later he bumped into "one of the boys who was in stamps"—another member of the Cosa Nostra named Frank Luciano—and asked what the order would cost. "Well," Valachi recalls, "I look at the price the guy at the garage will pay and what Frank will charge me, and I see I stand to earn $189. Now this was a small deal, I think only 10,000 gallons, but what did I have to do ? One guy gives me the money. The other guy gives me the stamps. Boy, I say to myself, this is the business for me."

Valachi's next transaction with Luciano, for 100,000 gallons, netted him $1,700. "I don't remember the price," he says, "just the profit." Soon afterward he eagerly accepted Luciano's suggestion that they form a partnership. Essentially Valachi became a wholesaler in a carefully structured operation. It was extremely important, in his words, to be "mobbed up." This guaranteed that all the stamps he handled would be genuine. "That was the catch in the business," he said. "It was dangerous fooling around with fake stamps. They could trace them too easy. They put them under these special lights which would bring out the phony ones. It was like try-ing to pass counterfeit money. There ain't any percentage in it."