The Valachi Papers (33 page)

Then one afternoon after the workday had ended, DiPalermo offered him a steak sandwich that he said had been smuggled out of the prison kitchen. "Now Joe Beck ain't even been speaking to me," Valachi recalls, "and now he wants to give me a sandwich. Naturally, I figured there was something in it, and I threw it away." Fearful of being poisoned, Valachi began eating only packaged foods he bought in the commissary. He also started avoiding the shower room, a favored spot in prison to corner a victim. "The next thing I know," he recalls, "Johnny Dio says to me I must be working late as I missed the last two shower days. Now Johnny hands out the clean clothes in the shower room. He says to come in tomorrow. He will be there, and he will give me my clothes. Well, tomorrow was Wednesday, and the next shower day ain't until Saturday. I said I'll be there, but of course, I don't go."

A few nights later Genovese delivered his little homily to Valachi about removing one bad apple from the barrel before it spoils the rest and solemnly kissed him. "The kiss of death," as Ralph Wagner warned Valachi at the time.

(Wagner perhaps would have been wiser to have said nothing. He was paroled from die Atlanta penitentiary in October 1967. Two weeks later he disappeared. He was last seen in a Manhattan bar at 4
A
.M.
on October 19. He told his drinking companions that he was on his way to an important meeting in the Bronx. His car was later found abandoned at Broadway and 72d Street.)

After that, all the pretense stopped. The next evening Valachi was walking near the
boccie
courts when Vito Agueci, playing cards on a bench about a hundred feet away, suddenly hurled a stream of curses at him in Italian. "I can't remember all the names he was yelling," Valachi says. "It don't matter. It was the same thing—that I am a filthy dog and a rat. I took a quick look over there, and I could see a lot of guys around him. If I go after him and them grcascballs close in with a knife, that's the end of Joe Cago. So I pretend I don't hear him and keep walking."

When he returned to his cell, he says that not even Genovese could mask his surprise at seeing him alive. Neither man spoke. Valachi lay on his bunk awake through die night. In the morning

he requested solitary confinement. "By going into the hole," he told me, "I'm a dead duck. It's just like walking into a police station on the outside. But what's the difference? I'm a dead duck anyway if I get caught in a crowd. How long can I stay away from these guys?"

In solitary he refused to eat. In his fruitless attempt to see George Gaffney, then chief of the New York office of the Bureau of Narcotics, he says he had no real intention, even dien, of talking. "I was just going to stall him along to get out of Atlanta." His last hope was crushed when the letter to his wife through which he intended to invoke the aid of Thomas Lucchese was returned to him by prison officials. It was at this point that he decided that if he was going to die, he would at least take "someone" with him. He would not, however, go after Genovese. "I wanted Vito to live," he says, "so someday he should stand accused for the way he treats his men."

On June 22, 1962, after having been ordered back into the prison proper because he would not explain why he had requested solitary confinement, Valachi moved like a mechanical man in the yard. "You can't understand how I felt," he says. "I don't know if I'm coming or going." When he saw three inmates lurking behind the baseball grandstand seemingly in wait for him, he backed up until he saw a pipe lying on the ground. At that moment another prisoner who he thought was DiPalermo went past him, and all the pent-up rage and frustration and despair within Valachi finally exploded. DiPalermo had been one of his chief tormentors. Just before Valachi had gone into solitary, he had sneered, "Hey, Joe, how do you stand with the old man now?"

Then Valachi picked up the pipe and killed the wrong man.

Since Valachi's day
two of the Cosa Nostra's grand council, Thomas (Three-finger Brown) Lucchese and Joseph Profaci, have died —of natural causes. The
Commissione
normally consists of from nine to twelve Family bosses. At this writing, according to the best estimate of the Justice Department, they are: Vito Genovese, currently in the Levenworth Federal Penitentiary, but still so feared that no one has as yet dared displace him; Carlo Gambino, Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonanno, and Joseph Colombo, who succeeded Profaci, all of New York; John Scalish of Cleveland; Joseph Zerilli of Detroit; Salvatorc (Sam) Giancana of Chicago; Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo; and Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia. Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, as powerful as any boss on the council, sits in occasionally but seems content to observe its rulings. Raymond Patriarca of New England, who was on the council, has lately fallen into disgrace, having allowed himself to be caught and convicted in a murder conspiracy case.

The Commissione is subject to immethate change. Magaddino is seventy-five; Gambino has pleaded a bad heart condition for so long every time he was supposed to appear in court that now even he is reported to be worried about it; Joseph Zerilli, who likes to think of himself as a pillar of the community in Detroit's exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb, is also getting on in years; and Giancana in Chicago has been so hounded by the FBI that his effectiveness as the Family boss is practically nil at this point.

Besides these fairly normal changes, brought about by nature and the law, there may be other, more abrupt ones. Even after Genovese went to prison, no one rushed to challenge his position as the dominating force in the Cosa Nostra for fear that he might win a reversal on his narcotics conviction.

(He lost. The earliest he will be eligible for release is February 6,1970. After that he faces a deportation order. This does not necessarily mean he is going to go. Paul DeLucia, also known as Paul [The Waiter] Ricca, who followed Frank Nitti as boss of the old Capone Family for a while, was ordered deported in 1957 and is still here, still fighting it. Genovese faces an infinitely more serious problem in the Cosa Nostra itself. It was a member of his Family who talked and who confirmed once and for all the existence of a national crime cartel, whose revelations not only focused public attention on the Cosa Nostra, but spurred a renewed federal law enforcement campaign against it that continues today. Worse yet for Genovese, it was his baseless charge that Valachi was an informer that ultimately led Valachi to speak out. Now he will have to explain away all this to fellow bosses.)

When it became evident that Genovese would not be sprung,

Joseph Bonanno decided to follow in his footsteps. Bonanno had already expanded from his Brooklyn base and, working out of Phoenix, Arizona, claimed a good chunk of die Southwest as his own. Then he decided to go all-out and issued contracts for at least three bosses, Frank DeSimone in Los Angeles, Buffalo's venerable Magaddino and his fellow chieftain in Brooklyn, Carlo Gambino. The grand council, having gone though this once with Genovese, struck back swiftly. Shortly after midnight on October 15, 1964, Bonanno was kidnapped at gunpoint on a Manhattan street by two members of the Magaddino Family. He managed, however, to talk his way to freedom by promising to parcel out his rackets, abdicate as Family boss, and retire to a leisurely life in Phoenix. He laid low for almost two years and suddenly came back fighting. Currently he is engaged in trying to grab Magaddino's Canadian interests. Meanwhile, much to the Cosa Nostra's distress, he is making headlines regularly in New York and littering its streets with bodies in an effort to quell a rebellion in his own Family, led by members who thought he really had resigned.

Publicity of this sort is abhorrent to the modern Cosa Nostra, which envisions itself a much more businesslike operation and considers such goings-on as an unwelcome echo from the past. This is not to say that the younger generation, kept down by their elders hanging onto power, won't make rash moves. Or that, given the opportunity, it will not revert to type. Elements of the Angelo Bruno Family in Philadelphia practically raped the city of Reading, the self-described "pretzel capital" of the world in the heart of the bucolic Pennsylvania Dutch country. Operating in conjunction with a local underworld figure, most of the municipal administration from the mayor on down was corrupted. As a result, the biggest illegal still since Prohibition was tied into the city water supply, the biggest red-light district on the East Coast was set up, and the biggest dice game east of the Mississippi, within an easy drive of either Philadelphia or New York, was launched. Nothing was done for the city. Industry started leaving; downtown Reading became an eyesore. When murmurs of public discontent grew too loud, mob-controlled "reformers" were promptly whisked on the scene. As the city steadily began to wither, a Justice Department task force noticed that the only sign of civic improvement was new parking meters. The company involved in the installation of these meters had a history of kicking back to municipal governments to get the business. It was this thread that eventually unraveled the whole mess, but until outside aid arrived, the local citizenry was truly helpless.

Corruption of public officials has always been a cornerstone of Cosa Nostra operations. A recent example occurred in New York when Antonio (Tony Ducks) Corallo, a lieutenant in the old Lucchese Family specializing in labor racketeering and shylocking, got his hooks into a member of the mayor's inner circle who had gone to him for cash to cover plunges on Wall Street, and a seemingly endless vista of rigged municipal contracts and crooked real estate deals opened up. In this instance an FBI informer was a party to the scheme, and it was stopped almost before it got started. How many similar cases there are in cities around the country where no informant is handy is, of course, the question.

The Cosa Nostra also has its less news-making, but dependable, rackets. Because of the Bureau of Narcotics, it has finally retreated somewhat in one area; while it still controls much of the importation of heroin, it has increasingly left the wholesale market in this country to the Negro and Puerto Rican underworld. It continues to rake in, however, a huge income from illegal gambling and from "skimming"—taking a slice of the receipts off the top before taxes in any venture with a heavy cash flow—vending machines, cigarette machines, jukebox routes, and, perhaps most lucrative of all, licensed gambling casinos.

The current fashion in the Cosa Nostra is the movement into legitimate businesses. The lever is the new sophistication of the loanshark racket, second now only to gambling in generating income for its membership. The loan shark still preys on those who can least afford it, the poor, and looks for a quick return from such old reliables as bookmakers and B-girl clip joints.

But the idea today is to use the racket to legitimize mob money. It started in fairly obvious areas. If someone who had borrowed cash to acquire a hatcheck concession fell behind in his payments, he simply found that he had a new partner. Instead of wasting time trying to collect from a saloonkeeper who had defaulted, the saloonkeeper was forced to accept jukeboxes and cigarette machines controlled by the Cosa Nostra. Now the operation is infinitely more far-reaching. In an era when the nation's economy has been rapidly expanding, punctuated by periods of tight money in which even the most legitimate businessman can be desperate for cash, everything is fair game. A Wall Street securities house caught short by a sudden market reversal. A builder trapped in a credit squeeze. A garment manufacturer who guessed wrong on this year's line. In return for its money, more often than not, the Cosa Nostra wants a piece of the business.

Once inside a lawful enterprise, members of the Cosa Nostra usually apply their own extortionist ways. To keep a business going, they will use terror tactics to eliminate competition or arrange for advantageous labor contracts through corrupt union officials. Sometimes they simply decide to loot a captive company.

A classic instance of this occurred which involved Valachi's old protege Joseph Pagano. The management of a large meat wholesaler in New York made the mistake of borrowing money from the Cosa Nostra. Under the guise of safeguarding the loan, the company was required to accept Pagano as its new president. Once he was installed, his colleagues went to work. In ten days they made $1,300,000. They did it by buying huge quantities of meat and poultry on credit and selling it immethately for cash at below-mar-ket prices. Then, when they were through, they blithely ordered the thoroughly cowed firm to declare bankruptcy.

While the Cosa Nostra likes to keep out of sight, and often succeeds, its operations still affect everyone whether or not he is aware of it. When it moves into the waterfront, trucking, a huge air cargo center like Kennedy International Airport, service industries like garbage collection, or a monopoly position in hitherto-legitimate businesses, one thing inevitably happens: the cost goes up, and this cost is passed on to the consumer. Trade unionists, meanwhile, pay a special price every time labor racketeers engineer kickback contracts or, as has been particularly true in the teamsters union, use pension funds to finance dubious construction projects.

The drain on the national economy is so enormous that if the Cosa Nostra s illegal profits were reported, the country could meet its present obligations with a 10 percent tax reduction instead of a 10 percent surcharge increase. And nowhere is its impact more pernicious than in poverty-stricken ghettos, where people play the numbers not as a lark, but in a frantic effort to get money. In New York City alone the Cosa Nostra runs a numbers racket that scoops up around $250,000,000 a year. It takes all this cash out of slum areas and, of course, only puts a fraction of it back.

♦ ♦ ♦

Although the Cosa Nostra
remains a going concern today, in one respect it will never be the same. Much of its strength rested on its elusive, shadowy nature. Its mystique of secrecy, which had endured for so many years, made it seem omnipotent to its membership. Individuals might fall, but the organization continued, as silent and as real as night. Because of Joseph Valachi, this mystique has been shattered forever. Since he talked—and lived—others in the Cosa Nostra have been persuaded to speak about it for the first time, but none has yet provided the range of intelligence that he has.