The Valachi Papers (9 page)

"Well," he was told, "we don't like this kind of work."

Aware that he could never change their ways, Valachi began to think about leaving them. Any doubts he might have entertained vanished forever when one member of the gang was wounded during a holdup. "By the time we got him to a doctor," he recalls, "this guy was in bad shape. As I understood it, he was hit in the lung, and it was a good dung it was winter, as it was so cold die blood kind of froze in him. If it didn't freeze, he would have bled to death."

Valachi's predicament was resolved when a truce between the Irish gang and his former cohorts on 116th Street was arranged by the Artichoke King, Ciro Terranova. Ostensibly, this got Valachi off the hook, but within days he was brought to trial on the loft theft in which his car had been traced by the police. Fie was convicted and was returned to Sing Sing to serve not only his new sentence, but the remaining time on his first offense as well — a total of three years and eight months.

Valachi's arrival there was something of a reunion. "It was my second time," he notes. "I knew most of the inmates and they wanted to know, first of all, how much I was in for. You got to understand that the guys that I was close with in Sing Sing were all Italian, and I was surprised they welcomed me and didn't have no hard feelings because I went with the Irish." His relief, however, was short-lived:

I'm at Sing Sing, all settled in, when I read in the papers that one of the Italian members of our gang, a kid named Frank LaPluma, got killed. They shot him sitting on a stoop one morning. The way I made it out, it didn't make no sense. Well, all I could do was wonder what was going on. Then this other guy who was in with us, Dutch Hogey, comes up on a twenty-year rap. See what happens when you use guns all the time. He had hit a cop and got wounded himself. I went up to the prison hospital to see him and we talked old times. I told him, "You should've listened to me. Pete Hessler is already in the death house."

"I know," he said, "you're right, Joe." Then the Dutchman tells me what I can't believe. "They sold you out," he said. I said I didn't know what he was talking about. "I mean they made peace," he said, "on the condition that you and Frank must die. Ciro Terranova fixed the whole thing." Then the Dutchman told me to watch myself. He said that if they got one, they'll get the other—meaning me. But I figured I was safe enough where I was.

Right after this I was mopping up one day in the dormitory with Dolly Dimples. His real name was Carmine Clementi, but he was known as Dolly Dimples because he was a handsome kid with blue eyes and light brown hair. There were two singers in those days called the Dolly Sisters who were very big, and everyone at Sing Sing used to call us the Dolly Sisters because we went around together all the time. Anyway, to get back to the dormitory, Dolly had gone off somewhere, and another guy who was helping to clean up, his name was Angelo, was in the toilet.

Just then there was a knock on the dormitory door, and a kid by the name of Pete LaTempa said he wanted to get something from under his bed. I didn't think anything about it. I knew this LaTempa. He had come up the river after I did, but I never had much to do with him, so I let him in and went about my business with the mop.

All of a sudden I felt sort of a sting—that's the best I can describe it—under my left arm. I looked behind me, and I saw this LaTempa with a knife in his hand. By now Angelo had come out of the toilet and was standing there, looking at me with his eyes bugging out. He was trying to tell me that I was cut, but he was stuttering so much that I couldn't make out what he was saying. I put my hand down under my arm where he was pointing, and I kind of felt it going right inside me. Then I saw all the blood. Believe me, it was all over the place. So naturally I went after LaTempa, and he started to yell how bad I was cut, hoping I would forget him and worry about myself. But I just kept going, and when I caught him, I let him have a couple of good raps on the mouth. He was smaller than me, and I would have killed him with my bare hands, but by this time my knees were getting weak, and he ran out.

Maybe after a minute Dolly came back. If he had made it sooner, LaTempa would never have gotten away. I was down on the floor bleeding worse than ever. What saved me was that the hospital was only one flight above the dormitory. Dolly carried me up there. He said, "Don't worry, I'll get the son of a bitch." In the hospital they kept asking me, "Who cut you, Joe? Who cut you?"

I said I didn't know.

When they finished sewing me up, I had thirty-eight stitches running from right under my heart and around to my back. I still got the scar.

A few days later LaTempa, apparently fearful of retribution from Valachi, turned himself in to Sing Sing officials and was transferred to another penitentiary. No more attempts were made on Valachi's life during the rest of his term. In the prison school he finally completed the seventh grade, learned how to read and, however crudely, to write.

But nothing left a greater impact on him than a series of talks he had with an old-timer named Alessandro Vollero, one of the most prominent of the early Italian gangsters in Brooklyn, who was serving a life sentence for murder. What especially attracted Valachi to him was that his victim was a brother of Giro Terranova. From Vollero he got some idea of the deep-seated hatreds that raged then in the Italian underworld between its two chief elements, the Sicilians and the Neapolitans."' Vollero told Valachi, "If there is one thing that we who are from Naples must always remember, it is that if you hang out with a Sicilian for twenty years and you have trouble with another Sicilian, the Sicilian that you hung out with all that time will turn on you. In other words, you can never trust them. Talk to me just before you get out of here, and I will send you to a Neapolitan. His name is Capone. He's from Brooklyn, but he's in Chicago now."

From Vollero, Valachi also received his first inkling of a secret criminal society he would one day know as the Cosa Nostra. But when Valachi tried to delve further into it, Vollero simply said, "Take it easy, kid. You'll learn all there is to know in good time. It's not for me to say it."

^:;
'Vollero was a member of the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia. Vollero's trial in 1918 was a sensation of the day. In court it was revealed that his gang had a standard toast: "Health to all Neapolitans and death and destruction to all Sicilians!"

Valachi was released from his second go-around at Sing Sing on June 15, 1928. He looked on the experience as not without advantages. "I came home," he says, "with an education. I didn't learn much in that school, but at least I could read something and know what I was reading. Before I went back to Sing Sing, I could hardly make out the street signs. But the real education I got was being worldly-wise. I could sit here all day and how am I going to explam what I mean? It's just all the things you learn about human nature in another world, and believe me, Sing Sing was another world."

Valachi faced some immethate problems when he was released. Even if he had wanted to, he could not return to the Irish gang. His old worry that their ways would do little for his life expectancy had clearly come to pass; of its seven members, one hanged himself in prison, a second had simply disappeared, a third had been electrocuted for killing a police officer, the fourth, Frank LaPluma, had been murdered on Terranova's orders, and two others had ended up killing each other in a drunken brawl. Only Dutch Hogey, in Sing Sing, and Valachi still survived.

He could have opted for Chicago, as Vollero had suggested, and joined Capone, but the prospect of leaving the familiar surroundings in East Harlem held little appeal for him. Having decided to stay, however, it was vital for Valachi to resolve his situation with Ciro Terranova, Vincent Rao, and the rest of the 116th Street group. He had some reason for hope. Shortly after the knife attack in Sing Sing, his friend The Gap was sent up on a robbery conviction, and Valachi sought his advice. "I don't think you have to worry," The Gap said. "You know, time heals everything. Just play dumb and keep to yourself for a while. A lot of people think you got a bum rap from the boys."

Remembering this, he now approached Frank Livorsi, Terranova's chauffeur and bodyguard. Valachi told him what The Gap had said and added, "I just got out. See if you can find out what's what for me."

A few days later Livorsi reported, "You mind your business, and everybody else will mind theirs. There are no hard feelings. What's over is over."

This stopped far short, however, of an invitation to rejoin his boyhood pals in the 116th Street gang, a number of whom had moved up into racketeering."' "In other words," as Valachi notes, "they were no longer stealing. They were mobbed up. But as I am not with diem anymore, I don't know exacdy what they are doing. I have to hustle for myself. Well, I figure if it has to be, it has to be."

Left to his own devices, Valachi returned to die one occupation he knew—burglary—and put together a gang of six young Italians. They operated two or three nights a week, and their total "swag," as he calls it, averaged about $1,500 a week. "It didn't leave so much when we split it up," he says, "but it kept us going, existing, and that was all I could ask."

At this point, in early 1929, The Gap returned from Sing Sing. "The Gap," Valachi says, "was like my schoolteacher, only in crime." Valachi found everything about him admirable—his expensive clothes, his insistence on always picking up a check, his toughness, his "personality" —so he went to him for help in

^:
'The word "racketeering" has come to be applied to a number of criminal operations whose common denominator is extortion of one kind or another. Its origin
is
somewhat obscure. According to the most popular theory, it stems from late-nineteenth-century neighborhood get-togethers given by New York City political clubs —affairs that were called rackets because of their boisterous nature. Local gangs then began sponsoring their own rackets, for which merchants in the area had to buy tickets or suffer the consequences.

improving his own status. "I knew The Gap was mobbed up," he says. "When I asked him how I could get in, he told me I would have to wait. He said to sit tight and keep in touch, and in time everything would be all right."

Buoyed by The Gaps promise to move him eventually into the rackets, Valachi continued to run his burglary ring. Money pressures, meanwhile, continued to build up. He had taken a separate apartment next to that of his parents. But he was dieir mam source of support, since his older brother, an inept loner, had been sentenced to life imprisonment as a fourth offender for armed robbery.

Then his father died. Valachi had found him moping in his apartment one afternoon and grandly gave him $10 to get himself some wine. By the time The Gap stopped by to pick him up for a night on the town, the old man had already passed out on the floor. The two friends, laughing at the sight, simply put him to bed and went out. When Valachi returned later, he found his father in exactly the same position, except for a curious foaming around his mouth. Scared now, he did the unthinkable. He ran to the neighborhood cop and asked him to call an ambulance. But it was too late. His father never recovered from his alcoholic coma and was buried at the age of fifty-two.

Valachi had also taken his first mistress, a hostess he will only identify as May —"What the hell, she's married now" —who worked at a dance hall he frequented on 125th Street called the Rainbow Gardens. "She was my first steady girl," he says. "She was Jewish, but who cared about that? She was pretty, and she had a million-dollar personality. I remember she wore a size twelve, so when we burglarized a dress factory, I always held out a few instead of giving everything to Fats West, the fence."

Setting up housekeeping with a woman came as a surprise to young Valachi. He had, he recalls, been going out widi May for about six weeks when she suddenly informed him that she had located an apartment in the Bronx for them and had already ordered the furniture. He made one feeble attempt to back out, claiming that he did not have a steady income, but May replied in classic fashion that she would continue working. "So I said okay," Valachi recalls. "If something went wrong, I figured she could always go back to her mother."

Life with May and the death of his father combined to have a salutary effect on the uneasy relationship Valachi had maintained with the Italian underworld ever since the days of the Irish gang. May's closest girlfriend was the mistress of Frank Livorsi, who had smoothed things over for Valachi after his release from Sing Sing. And as the two couples began to party regularly in the Bronx apartment, Livorsi even began to talk about completely patching things up with Giro Terranova. Valachi was dubious about the prospects as much because of his own hatred for Terranova as anything else.

His father's death was equally effective in putting Valachi in contact with his old friends. Several of them came by to pay their respects at the wake, and after the funeral still more of them began to greet him cordially. Then he had a fateful encounter:

Through one guy, you naturally meet another. And now The Gap introduces me to Bobby Doyle. His real name was Girolamo Santucci, but he was a fighter once, and his ring name was Bobby Doyle. In those days a lot of Italian fighters used Irish names. I guess it was because they were easier to say. You could tell Bobby Doyle was an ex-fighter by the way his nose was flattened. He was very polite, a slow speaker, always beating around the bush. One day he asks me, "How are those guys you steal with?" and all that kind of stuff. Then he wanted to know if I could get six or seven good boys together in a hurry. I said, "I can get a dozen of them." Then he asks me how Frank, meaning Frank Livorsi, stands with me. I say, "He is the best. Didn't he straighten out everything for me when I got out of Sing Sing and no one would touch me? Why?"

"Nothing," he says. "I just want to know." But I can tell from the way he talks that he don't think too much of Frank.