The Valachi Papers (14 page)

Now I say to Bobby, "Buster wants to fight. How do you feel?" He says, "No, all the guns are pointed at us. Give me a few days. I know Vito pretty good." I said, "What's on your mind?" and he says, "We may go with Vito." To tell the truth, I was shocked, but I said, "Okay, what do you want me to do?" He said, "Just call me in a couple of days."

In the meantime, I get in touch with my good friend The Gap, and we took a ride. I said to him, "Look, what will
I
do? I understand Mr. Maranzano was doing a lot of dirty work, and anyway it looks like we ain't going to be making a comeback. Tom Gagliano wants me to go back with him, and now Bobby is saying we may go to Vito. Give me your advice."

The Gap says, "Go with Vito."

I'm still not so sure. But The Gap explains that with me being so close to the old man, the best way to get out of the spot I'm on is to go with Vito, who is with Charley Lucky. That way, nobody can ever question where
I
stand.

So I call Bobby, and he says he has made a meet with Vito Genovese for tomorrow. Then he says, "You know where you can get them other guys?"—meaning Buck Jones, Petey Muggins, and Johnny D. Well, we all meet with Vito at the Cornish Arms Hotel on West 23d Street downtown. When we get there, Vito speaks to us. He says, "I want to take you boys along with me because I want to see you get the respect due you." In other words, he means he would fix it so we wouldn't have to worry about nobody going after us because we had been with Mr. Maranzano.

"By you being with us," he says, "you have prestige, and everything will be just the same." He was showing us that his people are in power
now.
After all, he is underboss to Charley Lucky. Believe me, I was thinking hard. You don't know what it's like to be on the top floor one day and in the cellar the next. I heard that at the old man's wake nobody showed up.

Then Vito says, "You know, we made it by minutes." That's when I learned what was behind it all. Remember when I went out to Brook lyn to see the old man and he told me he was going to have an appointment the next day with Charley Lucky and Vito? Well, it was to set them up. He had an Irish guy, Vincent Coll, coming in to get them. He was

using Coll, as this mad dog was going around shooting up everybody in New York anyway, so who would figure Mr. Maranzano was in on it? Coll was just coming into the building when the old man got his, and there had to be a double cross somewhere. The rat smelled like Bobby Doyle, but there was nothing I could say.

It was lucky I wasn't in the office. The Gap saved my life by getting me out of the way. But a lot of others around Mr. Maranzano who got caught sleeping slept forever. They got Jimmy Marino sitting in a barber's chair in the Bronx, and they threw Sam Monaco and some other top guy in New Jersey into the Passaic River. Sam had an iron pipe hammered up his ass.

(New York City police records show that at 5:45
P.M.
on September 10, 1931, the same day Maranzano was killed, James LePore, also known as Jimmy Marino, male, white, while standing in the doorway of a barbershop at 2400 Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, was shot six times in the head and body, causing his death. New Jersey police records show that on September 13,1931, two bodies washed ashore in Newark Bay. One body was identified as Samuel Monaco; the other was Louis Russo. Both men had their heads crushed and their throats cut. They were wrapped in sash cord and weighted down with sash weights. A missing persons bulletin had been sent out re Monaco on September 10. His car was eventually discovered parked on 46th Street near Park Avenue, New York City.)

I asked Vito how come there had to be these killings, and he said that whenever a boss dies, all his faithful have to go with him, but he explained that it was all over now, and we didn't have a thing to worry about. Then he went on to explain how Maranzano was hijacking

Charley Lucky
's
alcohol trucks and I don't know what else. Vito said, "If the old man had his way, he would have had
us
all at each other
's
throats."

So I said, "If you people thought that he was doing so much wrong, why didn't you approach me?"

"We couldn't approach you," Vito said. "The old man pulled 100 percent with you." In other words, he was saying he feared that
I
would warn Maranzano, and he was right.
I
told him so. I said, "If I am coming on your side, I want to come not being known as a double crosser." I don't like being with Vito, but what can I do?

So now I am in Charley Lucky's Family. Vito takes us down to the Village and introduces us to Tony Bender, real name Anthony Strollo. Now you got to remember that every Family is split up into what we call crews. Vito put me in Tony's crew. This made him my lieutenant.

Salvatore Luciano earned his nickname the hard way. Once, as he was rising through racketeering ranks in the Italian underworld, he was kidnapped by rival hoodlums who were after a cache of narcotics he had stashed away. Luciano was taken to a deserted section of Staten Island and hung up by the thumbs from a tree. He was tortured with razors and lighted cigarettes but refused to talk. Believing him near death, his inquisitors left him to his fate. Luciano lived, however, and the legend of Charley Lucky was born. From such untidy incidents he would eventually become the most powerful chieftain the Cosa Nostra has ever known, holding court in an elaborate suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he resided as "Mr. Charles Ross." In time no significant racket in New York — bookmaking, numbers, industrial and labor extortion, narcotics, loansharking,
etc.
—operated without his cooperation or cut.

After the initial purge of the Maranzano "faithful," the massive bloodletting that had racked the Cosa Nostra was largely curbed. Indeed, according to Valachi, Luciano moved swiftly to reduce the special tensions that existed in the New York area by establishing
consiglieri,
or councilors, six men in all, one from each of the five New York Families, and the sixth representing nearby Newark; the function of the councilors was to shield individual soldiers from die personal vengeance of various lieutenants who might have been their targets during the Castellammarese War. The councilors, Luciano declared, had to hear the precise charge against a particular soldier before his death was authorized. If there was a tie vote, any one boss could sit in and break it. While the councilors were as often as not ignored, their formation at least projected an aura of the stability Luciano was bent on achieving.

Luciano also abolished the position of Boss of all Bosses, so dear to Maranzano's heart; the fact of his power was infinitely more important to him than its formal trappings. And the organization of his own Family symbolized, to the naked eye at any rate, the final breakdown of the old Neapolitan versus Sicilian hostility. Luciano came from Sicily; his number two man, Genovese, was born in Naples. But most important by far was the way Luciano revolutionized the scope and influence of the Cosa Nostra in the U.S. underworld. Shrewd, imaginative, and, above all, pragmatic, he abandoned the traditional clannishness of his predecessors and joined in cooperative ventures with such non-Italian criminal associates as Dutch Schultz, Louis (Lcpkc) Buchaltcr, Meyer Lansky, and Abner (Longy) Zwillman. At die same time, however, he carefully maintained the identity of the Cosa Nostra since, for Luciano, peaceful coexistence was merely a step toward total domination of organized crime.

Nonetheless, to consolidate his power base, Luciano immethately had to justify his elimination of Maranzano to Cosa Nostra kingpins elsewhere in the country. "When a boss gets hit," Valachi notes, "you got to explain to the others why it was done." And to his amazement Valachi was told by Genovese that Charley Lucky desired him to testify personally against Maranzano in Chicago, where Capone, although on the verge of being imprisoned for income tax evasion, was still a force to be reckoned with.

"Why me?" Valachi asked.

"First, because you are known to be close to the old man," Genovese said. "And second, by being one of his soldiers, you gained nothing when he went. So why should you lie?"

Valachi begged off on the ground that he wasn't eloquent enough for such a delicate chore and suggested that a more experienced member, like Bobby Doyle, be sent instead. Actually the battle-weary Valachi, ever cautious, feared that this sort of assignment held unforeseen perils should some new coup be in the making. However ill-founded his misgivings were, he made his point. Genovese agreed, and Doyle, delighted at the status he would gain from the trip, was dispatched to appear before, as Valachi describes them, "our friends in Chicago."

Soon afterward Valachi, in partnership with Doyle, received his first tangible benefit as a member of the Luciano Family. Frank Costello, then a wily Luciano lieutenant, had long since forsaken muscle for political influence to advance his career. New York City was ideal for Costello in diosc days. Under the dubious reign of Mayor James J. Walker, he had "opened up" the town for slot machines and ran their operation.

Valachi and Doyle approached their own lieutenant, Tony Bender, and asked if there was a chance for them to have a "few machines." Bender took them to the offices of a scrap company on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village which Vito Genovese used as his legitimate front. It happened to be a day when Luciano was present. When the door to the inner office was opened, Valachi suddenly felt himself being pushed in by Bender while Doyle, apparently suffering an acute case of cold feet, stayed outside. Luciano, in the grand manner, spoke not to Valachi, but to Bender: "What's he want?"

"He wants some machines."

As Valachi waited, nervously silent in the great man's presence, he finally heard Luciano say, "Okay, give him twenty."

This did not mean actual machines; Valachi and Doyle would have to finance that themselves. It signified that Valachi was entitled to twenty stickers supplied by Costello. In theory, while slot machines were nominally illegal, any enterprising soul could install one in the rear of a candy store, a pool hall, and so forth. In fact, if a machine did not have a Costello sticker, the color of which was periodically changed, it was immethately subject to not only mob action, but police seizure. Once, according to Valachi, a patrolman walking his beat in a Manhattan neighborhood dumped, for whatever reason, a bottle of catsup down a "protected" machine and was prompdy transferred to the far reaches of Queens. "Now," Valachi reflects, "it don't take too much to figure who had him sent out there."

It was up to Valachi to place his own machines. He selected the area most familiar to him, East Harlem, and he and Doyle, as soon as they had them suitably installed, were grossing about $2,500 a week. Valachi hired the brother of his former fence, Fats West, to service the machines and pick up the money. Occasionally Valachi would play one of diem himself, doubling or tripling its normal take to see if the extra amount was returned to him. Fortunately for young West's health, he turned out to be an honest man.

Valachi derived just as much pleasure, if not profit, from being "recognized as a mob guy" with connections. His first opportunity along these lines came when old Alessandro Vollero was paroled from Sing Sing after serving fourteen years for the murder of Ciro Terranova's brother."" Vollero, fearful that Terranova would seek revenge, sent an emissary begging Valachi's help. "The old guy don't know nobody now," the emissary said, "but he hears you're with Vito and them others. Can you straighten things out for him?"

Valachi remembered Vollero with fondness, promised to see what he could do, and discussed the matter with Vito Genovese. At first Genovese was reluctant to get involved in such ancient history—"When the hell did this happen, twenty years ago?" —but eventually he reported that Vollero could stop worrying. When Valachi relayed the good news, nothing less would do than for him to come to Vollero s house for dinner. "It was really something," Valachi says. "He had the whole family lined up to greet me. He called me his savior. Well, we ate, and it was die last time I saw him. I heard later he went back to Italy and died in peace."

Now twenty-six years old,
newly affluent and respected, Valachi was ready to get married. His affair with his dance-hall mistress, May, had continued, but he discovered she had been unfaithful to him during his frequent absences in the Castcllammarcsc War. "I told her that I'd stay on with her for a while," he says, "but she could forget about anything permanent."

^:!
"Vollero, according to Sing Sing records, was released on April 28, 1933.

True love began to bloom for him when he was hiding out in the Reina household and met the dead racketeer's eldest daughter, Mildred. Then twenty-two, she would come up to the attic each afternoon to keep him company. And once out of hiding, he became a frequent visitor in the Reina home. But Mildred's mother, brother, and uncles, as soon as they realized what was happening, did not cotton at all to the idea of Valachi as a prospective bridegroom. Romeo and Juliet had nothing on die tribulations endured by Joseph and Mildred. Before it was all resolved, their romance featured a foiled elopement, an attempted suicide, and, finally, the intervention of Vito Genovese himself:

When I was in the attic, Mildred would come up the steps through sort of a trapdoor and talk to me. She told me that she had heard a lot about me. I asked her who it was that told her, and she said Charley Scoop, who was a guy I used to sell dresses to when I was out stealing.

Then after everything was straightened out with Vito about the Maranzano business, I was invited back to the house for supper by her brother. I accepted and brought Johnny D along with me. All through supper Johnny kept kicking me under the table and whispering that Mildred is nuts about me and can't help showing it. When we left, I told Johnny that Mildred was a beautiful girl, all right, but her family looked pretty strict to me, and I better not get mixed up with them. Anyway I figured I didn't know how to act around her as I was only used to hanging around with dance-hall girls. I was going to forget the whole thing, but this idea of finally settling down began to get to me. I tried going out with some of the nice girls in the neighborhood. It didn't work. They all looked bad next to Mildred.