The Valachi Papers (25 page)

With his worse fears seemingly realized, Valachi tried to interject, "Albert, I—"

"Shut up. Like I said, you should know better. A rule is a rule. You know you can't take the law in your own hands. You know you could start a war with die kind of thing you pulled."

"But, Albert, this guy was clipping me bad. He put die place behind about $18,000."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Anastasia said. "From right you wind up wrong."

Luciano chose this moment to defend himself, and Anastasia abrupdy turned on him. "What I want to know from you is what kind of shape the joint is in?"

"It's in bad shape," Luciano replied.

"Why is it in bad shape?" When Luciano hesitated, Anastasia said, "Okay, I already looked into this, and I know what's been

going on. You're lucky Joe took a swing at you. Now I have had enough of this. Let's make it short. You two guys are to split up. You can't be together no more. I rule that Joe gets the joint. Frank, how much do you have in it?" "Fifteen thousand."

"Albert," Valachi said, "I don't want to pay him no $15,000 considering all the money he took out of the business."

"I understand that," Anastasia said. "Nobody said you had to pay him that. Give me $3,500, and the joint is all yours." When Luciano started to protest, Anastasia cut him short. "Frank, I have decided. Take what I allow, or take nothing."

Emboldened by this, Valachi sought to round out his victory. "Albert," he said, "what about the license? The license is in the kid's name; you know, Frank's son. Without the license I got nothing.

"Yeah, I forgot about that. It's good you reminded me. From now on, Frank, you see that your son keeps that license up there. It stays there until that place goes down to the ground. As long as Joe wants that license, he has it. Remember what I'm saying. I hold you responsible if anything goes wrong."

After Anastasia left the table, a chastened Luciano said to Valachi, "When do I get my money?"

"If there's anything left when I finish with the bills, you get it right away. Otherwise, you wait. Now stop bothering me. Every time you open your mouth I feel like rapping you again."

Then Valachi went upstairs to talk to Vito Genovese for the first time in a decade. They greeted each other with studied casualness. "Hey, boss," Valachi said as they shook hands. "It's good to see you. You look good."

"I feel good. How's Mildred and the kid?"

"They're fine, couldn't be better." "And you?"

"Well, I just got through a table."

"I know. How did things go?"

"Fine. Everything has been worked out."

"Are you short?"

"Well, the place is in bad shape. This dog stole around $18,000 to $20,000.1 don't know. I may need some cash."

Genovese turned to one of the men in the room with him, Salvatore (Sally Moore) Moretti, and said, "You heard him. Lend Joe whatever he has to have."

This uncharacteristic offer of financial support was part of an overall effort begun by Genovese to regain the loyalty of the soldiers in his old Family. Still, he did not act immethately to displace Frank Costello as acting boss. There loomed over everyone's head, for instance, the uncertain shadow of Charley Lucky Luciano,* who had never officially relinquished his post. And during this period Luciano, having been deported to Italy, suddenly popped up in Havana, his Italian passport and Cuban residence visa in perfect order. Luciano in Italy was one thing. Luciano in nearby Cuba, however, was something else again, and a parade of Cosa Nostra chieftains shuttled back and forth from the U.S. mainland to huddle with him. How far Luciano would have gotten in dominating the Cosa Nostra again from his new base will never be known, but he put up quite a fight to stay there. He spread so much money in the right places that not until Washington threatened to cut off all legitimate shipments of medical drugs to Cuba did Havana reluctantly agree to pack him back to Italy.

*No relation to Valachi's Lido partner, Frank Luciano.

Even then, after Charley Lucky had signaled his support of Genovese, Don Vito had a problem as a result of his long absence. Costello, while he had not been a forceful administrator of Family affairs, was held in high regard by most of his lieutenants, as well as other Cosa Nostra bosses, because of his shrewd moneymaking talents, and while he may have been a remote figure to his soldiers, he solidified his power not only by acting as a financial counselor to the underworld aristocracy, but cutting key members of it into some of his ventures.

Thus in his own Family, Genovese at first could only count on two of its six crews for support in a showdown, those headed by Tony Bender and Michele (Mike) Miranda. Outwardly he kept his composure. Privately, according to Valachi, he raged at the position he found himself in. Valachi recalls one meeting he attended when Genovese whirled on Bender and shouted, "You let these people sew up everything."

"You told me to lay low," Bender replied.

"I didn't tell you to let them bury you!"

"Well," as Valachi
Observed,
"it is easy to see that sooner or later there was going to be plenty of trouble. Vito is building up to something. We just got to wait for him to make his move."

Save for this, however, it was a relatively stable period for Valachi. The Lido was doing well, his horses were winning, he still had his dress factory, his shylocking brought in a steady income, and having achieved a reconciliation of sorts with Tony Bender after his table, he became a partner with Bender and Vincent Mauro in a profitable jukebox operation called Midtown Vending Inc. "It was Tony's idea that I go in with them," he explained, "because he knows I am an old hand with the machines and could

hustle a route—meaning locations—pretty good. Well, I accepted as, after all, time heals everything."

The 1940s closed widi a notable change in Valachi's mode of living. Since his marriage he had resided in various apartments in the Bronx. Now Valachi joined the ever-fashionable flow of mobsters to the suburbs. Like his colleagues, he never engaged in anything remotely connected with the underworld in his new surroundmgs. Indeed, when Genovese heard of his prospective move, he drew Valachi aside for some words of advice. "It's different from living in the city," Genovese said. "Make the people in the neighborhood like you. Don't fool around with the 'weak' [ordinary, law-abiding citizens]. Give to the Boy Scouts and all the charities. Try to make it to church. Don't fool around with the local girls."

His wife, Mildred, was responsible for the move:

Around 1950 or so Mildred decided that nothing will do except that we had to own a house. One day she calls me and she says she has found a house in Yonkers, New York. She wanted me to see it. I told her if she liked it, that was good enough for me. She said the house would cost $28,000, so I gave her $5,000 to make a deposit.

By this time the boy had finished his days in school. It was one of the best in New York City. Its name was Mount St. Michael. As I remember, it cost about $1,600 or $1,800 a year to keep him in that school. He boarded there and came home only on holidays, as we wanted to keep him off the streets of the Bronx.

When he had finished, I asked him if he wanted to go to any other school, and he said no, he wanted to go to work. Well, the kid took up mechanics, but he didn't do too well at that. So I got him a good job. I'm not going to mention it, but he can have it for life, and the last I
heard he is doing all right. He married young, and I built three rooms onto the house in Yonkers for him and his wife.

The three rooms that I added cost about $10,000. I spent another $2,500 for awnings, and I had to do a lot of work on the grounds. A houseowner will know what I mean. I spent quite a few dollars putting in a fence, trees, and whatnot, and also a concrete driveway so as not to mess up the house from the dirt road. I painted the whole house inside and out, and I used the best paint. I was very handy at home, that is, when I was home, as I was always busy with this and that. All in all, I'd say the house cost me over $40,000. Well, it was worth it. It was a beautiful corner house. My address was 45 Shawnee Avenue. As far as the neighbors are concerned, I was always a gentleman. Naturally by the hours I kept they got around to asking Mildred what did I do for a living. Mildred told them that I had the Lido, so they figured I was just a guy who ran a restaurant. Some of the neighbors would come into it every now and then, and they all said they liked the food very much. I ran a clean place. Any girl could come in there alone— you know, without being escorted—and if some guy bothers her, he gets thrown right out on his ass.

I'll say one thing thinking about them days. I am a happy man that I brought up my kid naive, so he wouldn't be in the life I was.

Despite this surface tranquillity, Valachi's career would soon enter its most turbulent phase since the Castellammare War tore the Cosa Nostra apart. Not only did "trouble" erupt when Genovese at last made his bid for boss, but his mere presence on the scene seemed to trigger all sorts of explosive side effects:

It was a bad time for us. Everyone was a little nervous. I felt that at any moment I could get hit with a shotgun blast. I would come home in the wee hours, and it would be very quiet, and I would stand in front of my door sometimes, and I would hold my shoulders tight expecting a blast. I did not carry a key for the house, as I used to lose them. It seemed like hours, those few minutes I would have to wait until Mildred opened the door. But I must say other times
I
just didn't care, and I would stand there relaxed. What could I do about it anyway?

One of Frank Costello's
most powerful supporters in the old Luciano Family was William (Willie Moore) Moretti. Costello and Moretti had been born barely a block apart in East Harlem and had remained close through the years. In the 1930s Moretti, as a lieutenant, had moved out of New York proper and headquartered himself in northern New Jersey. There he supervised the operation of a variety of rackets that had grown out of his initial success as a bootlegger and later as a numbers kingpin. "Willie had lots of men," Valachi says, "about fifty or sixty men in Jersey, throughout Jersey. He had some in New York too, but Jersey was his stronghold. Most of them were members, and some of them were not—he had a lot of things going for him—but they were all with Willie Moretti. He was like independent. He had his own little army. That was the way we expressed it among ourselves. That was the way we thought."

Moretti, however, had a personal problem that was becoming a matter of concern to his fellow chieftains in the Cosa Nostra. He was suffering from advanced syphilis, as had Al Capone, and it was getting to his brain. It had not completely overwhelmed him yet; there were times when he was rational as ever. But there were other intervals when he babbled on crazily about things better left unsaid. During these lapses Costello sequestered him under medical care. Widi Genovese circling around him, he needed Moretti more than ever for his symbolic support, if nothing else. This shepherding of Moretti reached its heights during the national crime hearings conducted by Senator Estes Kefauver. Moretti, who had been subpoenaed, was in a bad way, and Costello kept him on the move along the Cosa Nostra network all through the Far West, accompanied by a doctor and a male nurse. Only when Costello was certain that he had come out of it did he permit Moretti to return East to answer questions. Even so, while he did not say anything especially damaging, he often seemed on the verge of it in the course of his ramblings on the stand. The situation grew more serious in a subsequent appearance before a New Jersey grand jury. Worse yet, he grew increasingly garrulous with reporters, apparently enjoying die attention and the opportunity to reminisce about the "old days."

Now, according to Valachi, Genovese used this in a cunning ploy to undercut Costello:

Vito is like a fox. He takes his time. He wants everything to be legal. He starts talking it up, first among us that are closest to him, which is Tony Bender's crew, so then we will talk it around, and the word will spread, and other members will start thinking about it. What Vito says is that Frank Costello is right about a lot of things, but he is

wrong about this. He says it is sad about Willie and that it ain't his fault. He is just sick in the head, but If he is allowed to keep talking, he is going to get us all in a jam.

You see how Vito is agitating to get Willie Moretti killed, and it ain't making Frank Costello look any too good. One time Vito has this meeting with some of us downtown in the Village, and he says, "What are we, men or mice?" Well, he is scheming like this, saying Willie has got to be hit because he is not well. I remember him telling us, "He has lost his mind and that is the way life is. If tomorrow I go wrong, I would want to be hit so as not to bring harm to this thing of ours." Then, after the seed has been planted, it naturally grows, and there is agreement in the
Commissione—
meaning all the bosses—that Vito is right.

The contract to murder Moretti was "open," with no specific member of the Cosa Nostra assigned the task. "They will take their time about it," Valachi explains. "They are not going to worry about this week or next. Whoever has the opportunity, more or less, will hit Willie."

The opportunity, as it happened, came to Valachi's former shylocking partner, John (Johnny Roberts) Robilotto, who was now with Albert Anastasia. Robilotto and a "couple of other members," according to Valachi, had a morning appointment with Moretti in New Jersey. "It wasn't at Duke's," he says. "It was about seven doors away on the same block. I forget the name of the joint. Anyway, that's when Willie gets his, from Johnny and these other people."

Valachi heard about it over the radio. He had slept until early afternoon, as was his habit, and then left for the Lido. He was looking for a new waitress, and on the way he stopped by a girl's