The Valachi Papers (7 page)

backroom?

I didn't see him myself. I saw Tommy Milo. A notorious gangster in New York? I imagine so.

They had a meeting as to who was to control the

jukebox union in Westchester?

Yes.

What did they decide?

From what diey told me, from what Valachi told
me at the time, my partner Jimmy Caggiano took
$500 and sold me out and for that reason I couldn't
get anything back no more. You have no racket
connections, so you arc nobody. You arc out.
You had Mr. Valachi, who has a pretty good record

Five years later, as Attorney General, Kennedy would say of Valachi: "For the first time, an insider—a knowledgeable member of the racketeering hierarchy —has broken the under worlds code of silence. Valachi's disclosures are more important, however, for another reason. In working a jigsaw puzzle, each piece in place tells us something about the whole picture and enables us to see additional relationships. It is the same in the fight against organized crime. Valachi's information [adds] essential detail and brings the picture into sharper focus. It gives meaning to much that we already know. The picture
is
an ugly one. It shows what has been aptly described as a private government of organized crime, a government with an annual income of billions, resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion."

*In a very real sense Valachi was as much on trial as Persico. His testimony linking Persico to a $50,000 hijacking lasted about fifteen minutes. For days, however, a battery of defense lawyers questioned his competency as a witness. When this strategy completely backfired, they continued to hammer away at Valachi, endlessly trying to catch him in a contradiction about his own past in order to discredit his memory, then attempting to prove that he had been coached on what to say by the Justice Department, finally trying to portray him as an alcoholic or molester of little girls —all of which turned out to be equally futile. It only took the jury five hours to find Persico and his codefendants guilty. The case is being appealed.

The information Valachi provided was primarily intelligence, although his testimony in April 1968 was crucial in the conviction of one of the fastest-rising young Cosa Nostra powers in Brooklyn, Carmine Persico, Jr.* By die time Valachi had been persuaded to talk, the statute of limitations had run out on practically all the specific crimes he discussed—except murder. And in New York State, where the murders which had involved him took place, a corroborating witness is required in the absence of physical evidence. Notably enough, in the two murder cases that offered the best prospects for a successful prosecution, an accomplice named by him mysteriously disappeared and is presumed dead after it became known that Valachi was talking.

How important was Valachi? According to William Hundley, operationally in charge of the Justice Departments drive against organized crime before, during, and after Valachi talked: "What he did is beyond measure. Before Valachi came along, we had no concrete evidence that anything like this actually existed. In the past we've heard that so-and-so was a syndicate man, and that was about all. Frankly, I always thought a lot of it was hogwash. But Valachi named names. He revealed what the structure was and how it operates. In a word, he showed us the face of the enemy."

Valachi was peculiarly equipped to do so. In the Cosa Nostra's paramilitary organization he was on the order of a master sergeant working out of headquarters, and there are few men still alive today who can match his thirty-three years of active duty. His service, moreover, exactly coincides with the birth and growth of the modern Cosa Nostra. He was, as they say, there when it happened; he knows where all the bodies are buried.

Italians did not invent organized crime,
nor did they introduce it to this country. Indeed, when the first great wave of Italian immigrants arrived in the late nineteenth century, they found a flourishing underworld then primarily in the hands of the Irish and the Jews, although just about every eduiic group has had a crack at it at one time or another, including good old-fashioned American families like the James boys. But what a very small number of these Italian newcomers—mostly from Naples, Calabria, and Sicily —did bring was a traditional clannishness, contempt for lawful authority, and a talent for organization that would eventually enable diem to dominate racketeering in the United States.

The first significant step in diis direction occurred in the 1890s, when a gang of Sicilians gained control of the New Orleans waterfront. No cargo moved on or off the docks without their being paid tribute. Then the city's chief of police, probing too energetically into their activities, was murdered. Nineteen members of the gang were brought to trial, the case against them apparently airtight. But a dreary pattern, so familiar today, was already being set. The best criminal lawyers in the country were hired and, helped no end by some jury tampering, won acquittals for all but three of the defendants. The first time, however, the strategy backfired; after the verdict was in, an enraged crowd wound up lynching eleven of them and very nearly caused a diplomatic break between Washington and Rome.

But such a bold penetration of the established underworld was exceptional in those days. The earliest organized Italian criminals in America, the Black Hand extortion rings, preyed almost exclusively on the vast majority of their decent, hardworking countrymen who had settled here. The name came from a crudely drawn black hand on the bottom of a letter demanding money from a particular victim and usually threatening the death or mutilation of his children if it was not paid. With the memory of the dreaded Mafia in Sicily or the Neapolitan Camorra still fresh in their minds, distraught parents promptly forked over the cash. Black Hand extortionists became such a problem that in New York City a special police squad, led by Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, was assigned to hunt them down. Furious that a handful of his own people was tarnishing the name of all Italians, he did his job too well; in 1909, while in Sicily to exchange criminal intelligence with local officials, he was shot in the back and killed.

Joseph Valachi was five years old when Petrosino died. He had been born on September 22, 1904, in Manhattans East Harlem where remnants of a once-large Italian population still can be found. Both of Valachi's parents came from Naples. They had seventeen children, but only six survived; Valachi was the second oldest. His alcoholic father was initially a vegetable pushcart peddler and then a laborer on a garbage scow. Of his childhood Valachi recalls:

My mother's name was Marie Casale. She was about 5 feet 7 and heavyset until she got older, and then she dropped down to about 120 pounds. My father's name was Dominick. I'd say he was about the same height and weighed about 160 pounds, never dressed clean, and had a big mustache. My older brother, Anthony, the last I heard is still in the bughouse.* My kid brother, Johnny, was a drifter, and I couldn't do a thing with him. He was found dead in the street, and the cops claimed it was a hit-and-run accident. I heard that they pulled him in for questioning and worked him over too much. My three sisters all got married, so I won't talk about them.

My father was a hardworking man, but he drank too much and my mother always had a black eye. The neighborhood in East Harlem was pretty rough in those days, and you could hardly walk around without catching a bullet. I remember my father had to pay a dollar a week for "protection," or else his pushcart would be wrecked.

He would make pretty good money selling all kinds of vegetables, but like I said, he would drink it all up. When I was a little boy, I used to help him with the vegetables. One time I was pushing the cart, which only had two wheels in front, and I slipped. To make a long story short, I dumped the tomatoes all over the street, and my father beat the hell out of me. Later, when he went to work at the City of New York garbage dumps at 107th Street and the East River, I worked with him.

We were the poorest family on earth. Anyway that's how it seemed to me. When I was growing up, we lived in different places but always around East 108th Street. One apartment was at 312 East 108th

"State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Dannemora, New York.

Street. I'll describe it for you. There were three rooms, no hot water, and no bath. The toilet was out in the hall. The only heat was from a stove in the kitchen. We would bring home wood and used coal that we got from the dumps; we stored it in the room me and my brothers slept in. It got so that the whole room would be stocked to the ceiling in the winter, and boy, was it dirty! For sheets my mother used old cement bags that she sewed together, so you can imagine how rough they were.

I dared not think of any girls.
I
feared that they would want to come into the house. If they did, I think I would have died—from shame, of course. There was one girl I liked who lived across the street. She lived on the top floor, and we were on the ground floor. She could look right into our house when the light was on, and when she told me that she saw me at night before going to bed, I used to get heart failure because I felt guilty about how filthy everything was. Lots of times
I
left my room in the middle of the night and sneaked into a stable down the block full of wagons. Why would I want to sleep in a wagon instead of my own bed? If you want the truth, it was to get away from all the bedbugs.

I did the best I could to keep myself clean, but with all the dust from the coal we had stored in the house, it wasn't easy. There was a public bath at 109th Street and Second Avenue. To get into the bath sometimes, the line would be a block and a half long. Then when you were in the baths, they would give you only so much time, and you had to get out of there. Believe me, it wasn't much time.

I was supposed to go to school, but to be honest about it, lots of times I didn't. I got picked up once by the truant officer; all
I
got was a warning. Then, when I was eleven,
I
hit a teacher in the eye with a rock.
I
didn't mean to do it; I was just trying to scare her. Anyway, I was sent to the New York Catholic Protectory, which is where the court sent you for being in trouble like I was, or if you were an orphan. It was in the Bronx, and it was pretty rough. As far as the brothers were concerned, some of them were okay and some were real bad. You wouldn't believe what some of them were like, fooling around with the young kids, but I don't want to go into that.

The roughest one was Brother Abel. He was in charge of the tailor-shop, and he would lay into us with his tape stick something awful. It didn't matter whether we did anything wrong or not. The best thing to do was stay out of his way unless you were looking for a beating. Then one day Brother Abel died. They put his body on display in the chapel. I'll never forget it. All the kids from the five yards of the protectory had to line up to view him and pay their last respects. All told, I'd say there were about 300 of us. I was near the end of the line, and when it was my turn to view the body, I almost fainted. Brother Abel's chest was all covered with spit, so what could I do? I spit on him, too.

I got out of the protectory when I was fourteen and went back to school for a little while. But when I was the age of fifteen, I got my working papers and went to work with my father at the garbage dump. At the end of the week my father would take my pay, too, and at night there would be war at home. This wasn't any good for me, so with one or two other fellows on the block, naturally I started to steal to have a little money of my own.

By the time he was eighteen, Valachi's petty thievery had led to full-fledged membership in a burglary gang, working out of East I Iarlem's 107th Street, called the Minute Men because of the speed of their operations. Valachi always had a great interest in cars, and his primary responsibility in the gang was to be the "wheelman,'' or driver. This gang pulled off literally hundreds of thefts between 1919 and 1923. Their methods were simple enough. A garbage can would be used to smash a store window, and whatever was inside, usually furs or jewelry, was taken out and sold to a fence. With police car radios not yet commonplace, the gang could count on several minutes before die law arrived from the nearest precinct house. Some merchants relied on a private alarm system provided by the Holmes Electric Protective Company to guard against thefts, but this did not appreciably close the time gap. Although Valachi's record shows that he was picked up five times on suspicion of burglary or larceny charges, he escaped a jail sentence until the spring of 1923:

The Minute Men were the talk of the underworld, even if it sounds like I'm exaggerating. We were real cowboys, meaning that we were riding high, and when we met other mobs in the cabarets around town, I must say everybody wanted to know who the wheelman was. The boys would point at me, and the other guys would always buy me a drink and say, "Well, good luck, kid." I must say it made me feel real good, as
I
was only nineteen at the time. It was the same when we went by Sadie Chink's place on Manhattan Avenue. She always had five or six girls in the house, and it was safe there because Sadie was paying off the cops. Boy, when one of the girls said, "Gee, I've heard about you," it made you feel like a real knock-around guy. They used to charge $5, but we always gave them $10. They were the only girls I saw because I didn't care to settle down. It was no time to start falling in love and worrying about a family.

I must explain that we were called Minute Men because we always got away in a minute's time or less. This gave us all the time we needed. Even the store that had what we called Holmes protection took from five to seven minutes to bring anybody. I know because I threw a brick through a store window on 125th Street to see how long it would take. The only thing we had to worry about was if the bulls were already in the neighborhood.