The Valachi Papers (15 page)

A couple of days later Bobby Doyle and me started talking about her somehow. Bobby knew the family pretty good. He even knew the old man before Masseria had him killed. Bobby told me that his wife, Lena, was saying that Mildred liked me a lot. "Oh," I said, "Mildred is okay, but that mother she's got is a tough woman, and I think the brother is like the mother. I don't even want to think about her uncles."

"What are you worrying about them for?" Bobby said. "It's what the girl says that counts." I said I don't know. After all, my people are from Naples, and they are Sicilian.

Well, after one thing and another, Bobby's wife tells me that Mildred wants me to speak to her brother about us. I said I wouldn't. Finally Lena says that Mildred is willing to take off with me. By that she means that Mildred was ready to leave home to marry me. At this time I was living at 335 East 108th Street. The building had just been done over, and it had steam heat and hot water, and we had four rooms, so it was a place to stay for a while. I asked Lena how I would know when Mildred was home alone, and she says leave everything to her.

When she gives me the word, I head for Mildred's house. She is all packed and ready to go, but then her sister Rose says that she has to go, too, or they'll beat her to death. After I heard this, I told Mildred to unpack. I said, "Okay, I'll talk to your brother."

I was amazed when her brother said that it was all right by him to marry her. But the next thing I hear is that Mildred's in the hospital. She had swallowed a bottle of iodine. I found out why. Her brother told her that I didn't want anything to do with her. So now I know how they work. Her brother says okay to me and tells her just the opposite. Lena told me not to go up to the house, as there was a big commotion going on there. I told her maybe I better drop the whole thing, but she says, "A fine guy you are. Here she's taken iodine for you, and you're talking this way."

Well, I went down to see Vito at his office on Thompson Street next to that junkyard he owned and explained the whole mess to him. He told me he would pass the word around that he wants to see Mildred's uncles about it. "Don't worry," he said. "I know what to tell them."

"Will you let me know what happens?" I asked.

"Of course," he said. "In the meantime, go about your own business and let me handle it. Don't get into an argument with any of them. Don't blow your top, as that's just what they're looking for you to do. I know those girls. They were brought up like birds in a cage. They've never been anywhere. The only place they let them go alone is to a neighborhood show."

In a couple of days Vito called me and said that the Sicilians, meaning Mildred's uncles, had been down. He said he told them that they should keep their noses out of this matter. If they are fit to marry their wives, Joe is fit to marry Mildred. If Joe ain't fit, none of us are fit. Besides, he says, just so they know how he feels about it, he told them that he wants to be my best man. He told them that Charley knows about it and feels the same way. By Charley, of course, he meant Charley Lucky.

Then Vito said to me, "I'll do even better for you. I'll go up to the house and talk to the mother. Make an appointment for me." So I did, and Vito went up there and told her that he took full responsibility for me. That settled it, but the old lady still wasn't ready to make things any too easy. Mildred and me would have to wait six months before the engagement could be announced. She couldn't go out alone with me, and the only place I would be allowed to see her was at home and only on Sunday.

To tell the truth, I almost gave up. When I would go up there on Sundays, Mildred and me would never have a chance to be by ourselves. After eating, all we could do was just sit there and talk. The old lady or the brother was always around. If Mildred and me got too close sitting on the sofa, they always had some phony excuse to call her out of the room. I don't know how I lasted until the engagement party. That's when the wedding was set for September 18, 1932. Between the time of our engagement and the wedding, it was the same Sunday business, only now Mildred and her sister Rose were busy lining up bridesmaids, buying clothes, looking at apartments, and all that kind of stuff. Naturally, I was busy taking care of my slot machines.

The party after the wedding was at the Palm Gardens on 52d Street, right off Broadway. It was very large and cost close to $1,000 just for the hall. That was big money in them days; you must remember there were a lot of people in the street selling apples. I got two bands so that everybody could dance without stopping. For food we had thousands of sandwiches and about $500 worth of Italian cookies and pastries. There was plenty of wine and whiskey, even though it was Prohibition. I also got twenty-five barrels of beer as a present from one of the boys.

Now this was when the Maranzano killing and all the trouble before that was still in everybody's mind. There was a lot of friction right under the surface, so I had to weigh the invitations very carefully. But I must say it was a hell of a turnout of people either coming or sending money.

Vito Genovese couldn't make it to the wedding—I forget why—so he had Tony Bender represent him. But he made it to the party. Tom Gagliano and Tommy Brown were there. Charley Lucky sent an envelope. Willie Moore, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, and Joe Profaci also sent envelopes. The Raos came in person. Doc from the old group that used to be with Mr. Maranzano came, but Buster was dead by this time. Albert Anastasia and Carlo Gambino were there. So was Vincent Mangano, who was a boss then, but now has been missing for a long time. Joe Adonis sent an envelope. John the Bug came. So did Bobby

Doyle, Tommy Rye, Frank Livorsi, Joe Bruno, Willie Moore's brother Jerry, Johnny D, Petey Muggins, naturally The Gap, Mike Miranda, and all the boys with Tony Bender, which was my crew. It's impossible to remember everybody's name, but the hall was full.

After all the expenses of renting an apartment and buying the furniture, even an Oriental rug, we had about $3,800 left over from the envelopes of money we got. The only thing wrong was that the apartment Mildred picked was on Briggs Avenue in the Bronx near Mosholu Parkway—in other words, just a stone's throw from her mother.

Despite this romantic interlude, it was back to business as usual. Soon after his marriage to Mildred, Valachi was handed his first contract to kill since joining the Luciano Family. In the Cosa Nostra a soldier like Valachi was not paid for such an execution; it was simply part of his job. He did not know the victim and was only vaguely aware of the reasons why he had to die. His lieutenant, Tony Bender, relayed the order. The information was fragmentary. The marked man was known as Little Apples, and Valachi never did learn his real name. Bender said that he was about twenty-two years old and frequented a coffee shop on East 109th Street. Bender mentioned in passing that two brothers of Little Apples had tangled with Luciano and Genovese several years before and were slain as a result. Apparently there was some concern that he would now attempt to avenge their death. Valachi did not press Bender for details; he really could not have cared less.

When a soldier is given a contract, he is responsible for its success. He can, however, pick other members to help him carry it out. Valachi chose Petey Muggins and Johnny D, both of whom joined the Luciano Family at the same time he did. Then he began hanging out in the coffee shop and eventually struck up an acquaintance with Little Apples. During the next two or three days Valachi would drop in periodically for coffee and more conversation with him. Meanwhile, he scouted out various locations for the killing and finally settled on a tenement a block away on East 110th Street. For Valachi's purposes it was ideal. The ground floor was unoccupied, and there was no backyard fence to hinder a quick exit. His plan was first to station Muggins and Johnny D in the hallway and then to lure Little Apples to the tenement on the pretext that a crap game was going on in an upstairs apartment.

On the night of the hit, Valachi had arranged to meet Little Apples in the coffee shop. "Hey," he said, "let's take a walk. I hear there's a big game going on up the street."

"Great! I got nothing else to do."

According to Valachi, he positioned himself behind Little Apples as they were entering the tenement and suddenly wheeled away. "I heard the shots," he says, "and naturally kept walking down the street."

(New York police records reveal that about 9:20
P.M.
on November 25, 1932, a male, white, identified as one Michael Reg-gione, alias Little Apples, was found in the hallway of 340 East 110th Street. Cause of death: three gunshot wounds in the head.)

Valachi went straight home. "After all," he recalls, "I was just married a couple of months, and I didn't want Mildred to think I was already starting to fool around."

Valachi's slot machine operation,
so nicely protected by Frank Costello's stickers, fell apart not long after his marriage. Charges of municipal corruption had already forced Mayor Jimmy Walker to resign, and reform candidate Fiorello H. LaGuardia had vowed to run the machines out of die city. Even after LaGuardia became mayor of New York, Costello stubbornly fought to keep the racket going, and his political pull was such that he actually managed to obtain a court injunction restraining LaGuardia from interfering with the slot machines. But LaGuardia simply ignored the order and sent flying squads of police around town smashing them wherever they were found. A bit nonplussed at this "illegal" act, Costello eventually gave up and, at the invitation of Louisiana's Governor Huey Long, moved his slot machine base to New Orleans.

Valachi turned to pinball machines, but it was only a temporary measure. The best he could hope to realize from them was about $200 a week. He got the pinball machines from a jobber who suggested forming an association to control their distribution in upper Manhattan. Valachi was tempted, but still unsure of his position in the Cosa Nostra since the Maranzano murder, he was hesitant to strike out so boldly on his own. "After all I done to get rid of Joe the Boss and them other guys," he bitterly recalled during one of my interviews with him, "I had to walk with my head down because the old man went crazy trying to control everything."

Finally Valachi and Bobby Doyle asked Vito Genovese for permission to enter the already well-established numbers racket. The policy game, as it is sometimes called, is perhaps the simplest form of mass gambling ever devised. The name comes from the penny insurance that was being peddled in the late 1920s and early '30's; playing the numbers was just like taking out a cheap policy. All a bettor has to do is pick three numbers from 000 to 999 which make up the winning combination on a given day. The mathematical odds against this, of course, are 1,000 to 1, but the payoff is never more than 600 to 1 and often less.

How the winning combination is determined differs throughout die country — spinning a wheel, the daily dollar volume on the stock market, the total parimutuel handle of a previously designated racetrack,
etc.
When Valachi started, New York had its own version based on racetrack betting. The win, place, and show figures for the first three races were added, and the first digit to die left of the decimal point of the total became the first number of the winning combination; thus if the total was $189.40, "9" was the first number. The same procedure was followed in the fourth and fifth races to arrive at the second number, and in the sixth and seventh races for the final number.*

This staggered system of selecting the winning combination in New York allows a variation of the policy game called single action, in which a player can wager on individual numbers instead of all three. The payoff in this instance is 7 to 1. For a numbers banker like Valachi, single action betting had a special advantage. If, for example, the first two numbers of the winning combination were 58, he would quickly check his overall play as charted on a blackboard. "I only charted from a quarter up," he told me. "I didn't fuck around with dimes. Now I look for all my 58 leads. Maybe I'm lucky and don't have any. And maybe I got a 580 on the board, but it ain't being played heavy. So I take a chance and stay pat. But maybe there's a heavy play on 589 and I'm going to be crucified if it hits. I got to protect myself, so I bet a couple of hundred, whatever I have to, on 9 with another bank that handles single action. In other words, I'm edging off. I'm still hoping the 9 don't come up, but if it does, at least I'm breaking my fall."

For years the policy game had been a particular favorite of lower-income groups. Much to the annoyance of die Italian underworld, however, the celebrated Prohibition beer baron Dutch Schultz was the first to perceive the fortune that could be made by organizing it into a gigantic racket. Nowhere was it—or is it now —more popular than in Harlem. When Schultz moved in there, some thirty-odd policy banks were fiercely competing with

^:!
Today this system is still prevalent in Harlem, where Valachi operated, although one may also play the so-called Brooklyn number based on the three digits immethately to the left of the decimal point in the parimutuel handle at a specific racetrack. In case anyone has money left over, there is, finally, a "night number," which is determined by the betting at trotting races.

one another. He put them together into one combine. His methods were simple. First, he terrorized individual bankers into paying him protection. Then, when he had them thoroughly cowed, he took over their business. "To keep the peace," as Valachi puts it, Schultz appointed Giro Terranova, who was still the local Cosa Nostra power in I larlem, as a sort of junior partner. There were also two other major banks in the city formed by Willie Moretti and two brothers in the Gagliano Family, Stephano and Vito LaSalle, but the operation run by Schultz was by far the biggest.

Vito Genovese's blessing was necessary before Valachi could be admitted into the organized structure of the numbers racket. While some independent or, as Valachi says, "outlaw" banks remained, they not only were unable to participate in the fixed winning combinations the organization periodically arranged, but were often fleeced by these fixes. They could not, moreover, always take the advantage of edging off against potentially heavy hits or enjoy the general protection the organization afforded.