The Valachi Papers (11 page)

"What's the matter with you?" Buster says. "Are you out of your mind?"

"I don't care what the penalty is," I say. "That's the way I feel."

Buster, who was a real sharpshooter, was using a shotgun this time. He was just taking aim when the doorman waved at me and I waved back. Well, Buster was a nice boy, and he put the gun down. Now I could be in a lot of trouble. But when Buster went to see the old man—meaning Maranzano—and told him what happened, I got credit for what I done. Buster comes back and tells everyone that the old man backs me up and not to take any chances.

It was only a few days later that I was out with Buster somewhere and he left me off on the corner of Pelham Parkway in front of the apartment building. Buster left, and another car pulled up in front of me. Now we had all gotten pictures of Masseria to recognize him in case we ever see him. So, to my amazement, I saw Masseria get out of the car. I recognized him fast. This Ferrigno is with him, and they look me over suspicious-like. You got to understand this is a Jewish neighborhood, and they can see I ain't no Jew. I go into the building, and they're right behind me. In the court I got to turn right to get to my apartment, and I know they got to go left to get to Ferrigno's apartment. But they followed me into my entrance. I got into the elevator, and they got in with me. So I asked them where they want to go. They said, "Punch yours."

As I'm on the second floor, I punch six to throw them off. Going up, we were facing one another. I had my back to one wall, and they had their backs to the wall on the other side. Nobody said anything. When we got up to six, I come out of the elevator, walking like I didn't have a care in the world. As soon as the elevator door shut with them still in it, I flew down to the second floor yelling, "Joe the Boss! Joe the Boss! I just seen him."

They said it was impossible, that I was seeing things. With that, as we were talking, the one that was looking out of the window sees Masseria crossing from one side of the court to the other. He yells, "Jesus Christ, he's right! He's with Ferrigno. They're going into the apartment."

That night I was sorry I told them that I saw Masseria. They were all set to shoot him from my apartment. They had told me this wasn't to be. I got my stuff all over the joint, pictures and everything. The plan was to get him outside, not from the apartment. Now I was telling Buster to pretend not to see him. I don't know what all I was telling him. He said, "It is so important, Joe. Look, if he don't come out tonight, we'll get another apartment tomorrow."

Well, I was so worried that they gave me an assignment to watch the elevator. I was hoping and praying he don't come out that night. And he don't. Instead, a lot more of his people—maybe twenty—kept going in. They were having some kind of big meeting. Gee, was I happy.

The next day, at Valachi's behest, an apartment on the ground floor was rented. The plan now was to wait for Masseria to appear in the court, and as he passed in front of the windows of the new apartment, he was to be mowed down by a shotgun barrage. In midafternoon the meeting in Ferrigno's apartment broke up, the participants exiting in pairs. But after most of them had departed, Masseria still had not shown his face; later it was learned that Masseria had waited to be the last one out. Then when the original target, Ferrigno, came into the courtyard in the company of another Masseria lieutenant, the hidden killers decided that it was an opportunity they could not forgo. According to Valachi, the actual shooting was done by Buster from Chicago, Girolamo (Bobby Doyle) Santucci, and Nick (Nick the Thief) Capuzzi. All three fired twelve-gauge shotguns. Everyone then scattered. Valachi recalls that afterward Buster was stopped by a police officer about a block from the scene. Buster simply told him that a shooting had taken place down the street. The policeman took off, and so did Buster—the other way.

(New York Police Department records note that on November 5, 1930, at 2:45
P.M.
Steven Ferrigno, also known as Samuel Ferraro, and Alfred Mineo, while leaving Ferrigno
's
apartment at 759 Pelham Parkway South, on the east walk of a courtyard toward the street, were fatally shot by unknown persons occupying C-l of 760 Pelham Parkway South. The shots were fired from the ground-floor apartment through closed windows. Three shotguns were recovered.)

The day after the killing Valachi decided that the time was ripe for a long-delayed visit to his brother Anthony at Dannemora Prison in northern New York. Valachi wanted to take May along since he had seen little of her during the past several weeks. She was bedded down with a bad cold, however, and he was forced to make the trip alone. The brief time he spent with his brother was not very pleasant. "Already you could see he wasn't right in the head," Valachi says. "I didn't tell him anything I was doing. He wouldn't have understood it anyway. All he talked about was how I was to blame for all his troubles. I don't know why. We never did nothing much together. Naturally I felt bad, but what could I do? The only thing is to head back to New York."

Returning somewhat gingerly to the Pelham Parkway building, he learned from the doorman that "something" had happened during his absence. When Valachi innocently inquired what it was, the doorman related the killing of Ferrigno and Mineo in great detail and reported that the police had been all over die building. "I told them," he said, "that you were a new tenant who was away on a trip. They told me to tell you when you came back to go over to the precinct house. You know, Mr. Valachi, it's terrible. A lot of tenants have moved out because of this."

"Yeah," Valachi said, "I can imagine. I'm thinking of moving myself. A thing like this gives die place a bad name. Well, don't worry. I'll go see the cops, but there ain't nothing I can tell them."

Valachi immethately called a moving company and arranged to have all his belongings put into storage. Then he went strolling along Lexington Avenue in Harlem looking for friends. None seemed to be in sight. Suddenly an automobile screeched to a stop next to him. At the wheel was a Gagliano man, Frank (Chick 99) Callace, who frantically motioned for him to get in the car. "Jesus Christ," Callace said, "are you crazy walking around like that? We are marked. Joe the Boss is on to us after that business on Pelham Parkway. I don't know how you made it so far."

"Oh, my God," Valachi replied. "Me walking up and down like that. I didn't know. I was up in Dannemora seeing my brother."

"Well," Callace said, "light some candles. You are lucky."

Callace then drove Valachi to an apartment in the Bronx, where he found two members of his 1929 burglary gang, Nick Padovano and Salvatore (Sally Shields) Shillitani, both of whom he had recommended to Gagliano during the recuitment drive to fight Masseria. "Stay put," Callace said. "You're going upstate to meet the rest of us and the top guy. I'll let you know when."

The moment of Valachi's initiation into the Cosa Nostra had arrived. Two days later Callace came for them:

I was so worried waiting for him I didn't even take a chance calling May to see how she was.

Chick said, "Get ready. We're going on a ninety-mile trip." He knew the way and did all the driving. Besides me, there was also Sally and Nicky. We were a little nervous and didn't do much talking. We had an idea of what was going to happen.

I never knew where we were when we got there, but the house was what you would call Colonial style. Anyway, it had two stories and was painted white, and it was in the country. I don't know whose house it was. What I don't know, I don't know. It was night, and I couldn't make out any other houses nearby. I remember when we went in, Chick took us into a little room on the right. The "Doc"—that's all I know him by; he was with us for a while at the Pelham Parkway apartment—and Buster from Chicago came right in and started bullshitting with us for a minute about this and that. Then me, Sally, and Nicky were left alone. After a time some guy, I forget who, comes to the door. He waves at me and says, "Joe, let's go."

I follow him into this other room, which was very big. All the furniture was taken out of it except for a table running down the middle of it with chairs all around. The table was about five feet wide and maybe thirty feet long. Now whether it was one table or a lot of tables pushed together, I couldn't tell, because it was covered with white cloth. It was set up for dinner with plates and glasses and everything.

I'd say about forty guys were sitting at the table, and everybody gets up when I come in. The Castellammarese and those with Tom Gagliano were all mixed up, so they are one. I don't remember everybody. There was Tommy Brown—you know, Tommy Lucchese, I never heard anyone call him "Three-finger Brown" to his face. There was also Joe Profaci and Joe Bonanno and Joe Palisades—real name Rosato— and Nick Capuzzi and Bobby Doyle and The Gap and Steve Runnelli and others too numerous to mention.

I was led to the other end of the table past them, and the other guy with me said, "Joe, meet Don Salvatore Maranzano. He is going to be the boss for all of us throughout the whole trouble we are having." This was the first time I ever saw him. Gee, he looked just like a banker. You'd never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.

Now Mr. Maranzano said to everybody around the table, "This is Joe Cago," which I must explain is what most of the guys know me by.*

^::
'As a boy, Valachi was noted in his neighborhood for his ability to build makeshift scooters out of wooden crates. This earned him the nickname Joe Cargo, which later in his criminal career was corrupted to Cago.

Then he tells me to sit down in an empty chair on his right. When I sit down, so does the whole table. Someone put a gun and a knife on the table in front of me. I remember the gun was a .38, and the knife was what you would call a dagger. After that, Maranzano motions us up again, and we all hold hands and he says some words in Italian. Then we sit down, and he turns to me, still in Italian, and talks about the gun and the knife. "This represents that you live by the gun and the knife," he says, "and you die by the gun and the knife." Next he asked me, "Which finger do you shoot with?"

I said, "This one," and I hold up my right forefinger.

I was still wondering what he meant by this when he told me to make a cup out of my hands. Then he put a piece of paper in them and lit it with a match and told me to say after him, as I was moving the paper back and forth, "This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra." All of this was in Italian. In English Cosa Nostra would mean "this thing of ours." It comes before everything—our blood family, our religion, our country.

After that Mr. Maranzano says, "This being a time of war, I am going to make it short. Here are the two most important things you have to remember. Drill them into your head. The first is that to betray the secret of Cosa Nostra means death without trial. Second, to violate any member's wife means death without trial. Look at them, admire them, and
behave
with them."

I found out later that this was because sometimes in the old days if a boss fell for a soldier's wife, he would have the poor husband killed, whether she liked it or not. Now I was told that this wasn't an everyday thing, but once is enough. Right?

Mr. Maranzano then says, "Everybody up. Throw a finger from zero to five." So all the guys around the table threw out their right hand at the same time. Some of them had no fingers out; some had two or three, the limit, naturally, being five. When all the fingers are out, he starts adding them up. I forget what it was. Let's say they came to forty-eight. So Mr. Maranzano starts with the first man on his left and keeps counting around the table, and when he got to forty-eight, it fell on Joe Bonanno, also known as Joe Bananas. When Mr. Maranzano saw where the number fell, he started to laugh and said to me, "Well, Joe, that's your
gombah"
—meaning he was kind of my godfather and was responsible for me.

So Joe Bananas laughs too, and comes to me and says, "Give me that finger you shoot with." I hand him the finger, and he pricks the end of it with a pin and squeezes until the blood comes out.

When that happens, Mr. Maranzano says, "This blood means that we are now one Family." In other words, we are all tied up. Then he explains to me how one member would be able to recognize another. If I am with a friend who is a member and I meet another friend who is a member, but the two of them don't know each other, I will say, "Hello, Jim, meet John. He is a friend of ours." But like if the third guy is just a friend and not a member, I would say, "Jim, meet John. He is a friend of mine."

Now the ceremony is over, and everybody is smiling. I'd say it took about ten minutes. So I move away and leave the chair for the next man, who was Nicky, and there is the same routine. After him it was Sally's turn.

Then they take the knife and gun from the table, and Mr. Maranzano orders the food to be brought in. I didn't see no women, and I didn't go into the kitchen to look. I figured it was no time to be nosing around. The men around the table who were members brought the food in on big platters. First came the spaghetti
aglio ed olio.
Next there was chicken, different kinds of meat, I think also veal. There was a lot of whiskey and bottles of wine in those straw baskets, but nobody was drinking much. During the meal Sally, Nicky, and me, being the new members, talked among ourselves—mostly about how great it was to be in the mob and how we were going to put all our hearts into the "trouble."

After the coffee Mr. Maranzano got up and said, "We're here together because Joe Masseria has sentenced all the Castellammarese to death. At the same time you other guys started at your end because he had Tommy Reina killed without justice. So now we are all one. We're only a few here, but in a month we'll be four or five hundred. We have to work hard. The odds are against us. The other side has a lot of money, but while they're enjoying themselves, we'll eat bread and onions. You all will be placed in different apartments around the city. We will have spotters out on the street. These spotters will have the telephone number of our main headquarters. Headquarters will have each of your numbers. When a call comes in from the Bronx, for instance, that somebody has been spotted, the apartment we have in the Bronx will get a call. And when that call comes, you have to respond as fast as you can. Each of you new members will be placed with someone who knows what the enemy looks like. Of course, you have been given a picture of Masseria. He's the most important one. I also want to tell you that the business at Pelham Parkway has got them confused. They don't know how we found out about the meet they were having, and that's in our favor. Already they don't know who to trust. We must concentrate on getting their main bosses, and we must get Masseria himself. There will be no deal made with Joe Masseria. The war will go on for ten years if we don't get him."