The Valachi Papers (23 page)

Legitimate gas ration stamps were obtained by breaking into local boards of the Office of Price Administration. This was relatively hazardous, and according to Valachi, it was generally left to independent gangs, which, lacking the organization to distribute the stamps, then sold them in bulk lots to Cosa Nostra dealers. In time another source was developed. "With all the burglarizing," Valachi notes, "a lot of OPA offices stuck the stamps in banks overnight. So the next thing is certain OPA people themselves started sneaking them out and selling them."

Since the average profit on "black gasoline," as it was called, ranged between three and five cents a gallon, the volume had to be large enough to make it worthwhile to the organized underworld. It was. OPA records at the time showed that at least 2,500,000 gallons were being diverted for illegal use
every day
throughout the war. It was next to impossible for the OPA to cope with the alliance formed by the racketeer, the chiseling service station owner, and the conniving driver. The entire OPA enforcement staff added up to less than one man for each county in the United States, and since there were a number of other rationing rackets, not all the available inspectors could concentrate on the black market in gas. OPA Administrator Chester Bowles was finally obliged to issue a national appeal reminding citizens that the "lives of our boys in uniform depend on millions of gallons of gasoline."

Indeed, things got so far out of hand that a thriving trade also developed in used ration stamps. Once turned in by stations and garages, they were supposed to be burned. But very few of them, as Valachi recalls, "went into the fire." The Cosa Nostra simply infiltrated the incineration centers with men who retrieved the stamps so they could be put back into circulation.

Of Cosa Nostra members in the racket, only the most affluent could afford die cash outlay—as much as $250,000 —for blocks of stolen stamps. These stamps were then bought by middlemen like Valachi and Luciano, who sold them primarily to gas stations and garages. These retail outlets completed the circle by handing in the stamps to the OPA to cover their own black-market sales of gasoline to the public.

The middlemen did not necessarily have to belong to the Cosa Nostra. The great advantage of being a member, however, was that one with a good credit rating did not immethately have to plunk down cash for the stamps. He could, as Valachi did, pay for each allotment out of his profits. He learned later that this was the reason why Luciano had asked him to become a partner. "They— meaning die boys—did not think too highly of Frank," Valachi says, " as far as him meeting his debts is concerned, but everybody knows Joe Cago will always pay what he owes."

A number of stamp heists took place in New Jersey and Valachi usually got his quota from Settemo (Big Sam) Accardi, a powerful figure in the Newark branch of the Cosa Nostra, who is now in prison on a narcotics conviction. Another source was Carlo Gambino, then a lieutenant in one of the New York Families and currently its boss. "Big dealers" like Accardi and Gambino, according to Valachi, controlled the market. As he notes, they did not sell to "everybody." The idea, of course, was to maintain enough tension between supply and demand to keep the stamps moving steadily at the best possible price. "Now maybe they have too many stamps," Valachi told me, "and it will break the market if they let them all go. So they will he to some guy who is trying to make a buy. I'll give you an example. They will say to him that they ain't got no more stamps and to see Joe Cago. Then I will get a call advising me how much I should charge the guy for the stamps and how many I can sell him. That way they hold the price and we all benefit."

Absolute control of the stamp flow, however, was not always feasible. The gas stamps issued by the OPA bore serial numbers which were good only for specific time periods. Occasionally a robbery would result in a quantity of stamps with a relatively short negotiable life. In such instances, the Cosa Nostra would double-cross the rest of the underworld without hesitation. "It was easy," Valachi says. "They would dump the stamps on the in-between guys who ain't members. They called all these guys, and they would tell each and every one of them, 'Listen, we just have a small amount, but we will let you have them.' Now you must understand that each guy thinks he is the only one, and naturally he breaks a leg to get the stamps."

One memorable morning ration stamps representing 8,000,000 gallons of gasoline were unloaded in this fashion in the New York area within an hour. By nightfall the market price per stamp had plummeted from nine cents to two cents. "Well," Valachi recalls, "a lot of guys took a bath. But a deal is a deal, and they are stuck. Anyway, what could they do against this Cosa Nostra?"

As a rule Valachi could expect to make a profit of one-third on his sale of stamps. A typical transaction with Accardi would always begin the same way:

I will call Sam—Jesus, my phone bill at the time was up over $100 a month—and I will say, "Do you have something on hand for me?" and if he has something, he will tell me, "I got some B-2's."

"What's the market?"

"The market is eight."

"How much will you charge me?"

"For you, Joe, six."

So my profit will be two cents a gallon, and Sam will give me 500,000 gallons. Naturally I try to have Sam take off another eighth [of a cent] at his end, but really it is just play, as I am happy with the price. Sam will say, "The market will hold. Be satisfied."

"Okay,"
I
say, "I will pick up the package this afternoon."

Now we have the stamps on credit, and we owe the guy in Newark, meaning Big Sam, $30,000. But I hustle around, and my partner Frank Luciano has his customers, too. We peddle the stamps in a few days and have a nice profit of $10,000 after paying back Sam. That was all there was to it. If you want to know how we got rid of the stamps, it was mostly to garages. Boy, they were glad to get them. They needed the stamps to cover all the gas they were selling without them. It was the best business I was ever in, some of the big dealers made millions out of it, and it lasted right up to when they threw that A-bomb on the Japs.

Except for a brief period, thoroughbred racing continued throughout the war, and Valachi, in excellent financial shape because of his stamps sales, was able to return to die track, his most treasured acquisition now a light-brown gelding named Son of Tarra. He also used some of his profits to purchase another restaurant, the Aida, on 111th Street and Second Avenue, not far from where he had been born—"Believe me, it was a fine eating restaurant; the head chef cost me $250 a week, and I even had a second chef at $175" — when he received a telephone call one night early in 1945 that would have profound implications for the Cosa Nostra in general and Valachi in particular.

"Hey, Joe did you hear the news?"

"No."

"Vito's coming back!"

The circumstances surrounding
Vito Genovese's return to this country were as bizarre as the reason for it—the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia. A companion piece to the Boccia slaying, you will remember, was the inept attempt by Ernest (The Hawk) Rupolo to do away with Boccia's friend, William Gallo. When last seen on these pages, Rupolo had been sent to prison for his part in the affair. He was paroled in 1944, but Rupolo apparendy carried around his own built-in banana peel.

Within weeks he was involved in another shooting, and once more his intended victim lived to identify him. Understandably dismayed at the immethate prospect of being put behind bars again, Rupolo now decided to reveal the role Genovese played in Boccia's death in the hope that this might help him avoid another prison sentence. Since in the absence of any physical evidence New York State requires a corroborating witness who had nothing to do with either planning or carrying out a specific crime, Rupolo s testimony by itself was not enough. But as he dickered for his freedom, Rupolo came up with such a witness • who was present when Boccia was killed. The witness was a smalltime hoodlum named Peter LaTempa, by odd coincidence the same man who had knifed Valachi so many years before in Sing Sing.

LaTempa under pressure reluctandy confirmed Rupolo's story, and Genovese was indicted for the Boccia murder. At the time it seemed academic since nobody had the faintest idea where the long-absent Genovese was, a fact that had gready encouraged Rupolo and LaTempa to talk in the first place. What might have been—how many lives, especially Valachi's, might have ended up differendy—had it not been for a former Pennsylvania State College campus cop, then in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division in Italy, is beyond measure.

The CID man, Sergeant Orange C. Dickey, had been assigned to look into black-market operations behind Allied lines in southern Italy. In early 1944, during a routine interrogation, an Italian suspect boasted that he had nothing to fear since he was under the protection of "Don Vito Genovese," whom he described as someone with powerful connections in the Allied Military Government. The name meant nothing to Dickey, but it stuck in his mind because of the obvious respect in the suspect's voice when he uttered it. Then, in May, Dickey broke up a gang of Italian civilians and Canadian deserters who were helping themselves to huge quantities of U.S. Army supplies and channeling them into the black market. One of the Canadians identified Genovese as the ring's mastermind. In all the confusion of the war it was extremely difficult to trace people, but finally on August 27,1944, acting on an informer's tip, Dickey caught up with "Don Vito" and had him jailed.

Dickey next paid an eye-popping visit to Genovese's apartment in Naples. As he would later report, he had never seen such a lavishly furnished residence in his life or so extensive a wardrobe for one man. Even more intriguing was a pile of highly priced permits allowing Genovese unlimited travel in occupied areas of Italy, as well as letters from a number of American officers extolling his virtues. One typically declared that Genovese was "absolutely honest and, as a matter of fact, had exposed several cases of bribery and black market operations among so-called trusted civilian personnel." This was in particular reference to his service as an interpreter to the Allied military courts when Naples was first taken, an opportunity Genovese had actually used to eliminate any competition to himself in the black market.

At this point Dickey still had no idea who his prisoner really was. But Don Vito had apparently made some enemies during his tenure as a Mussolini favorite. Two days after his arrest, another informant slipped Dickey a treatise on American crime, written in the 1930s, which featured a photograph of Genovese and identified him as a "notorious gunman." When Dickey showed him the photograph, Genovese — unaware that barely two weeks before he had been indicted back in Brooklyn for the Boccia killing—readily grunted, "Yeah, that's me. So what?"

A less conscientious person would have let it go at that, but Dickey forwarded notification of Genovese's apprehension to the FBI in Washington in case there were any outstanding charges against him. It was not until the end of November that he received word that Don Vito was wanted for murder. In the meantime, enormous pressure had been applied on Genovese's behalf in Italy. Not only had nothing been done about bringing him to trial for his black-market activities, but Dickey had been ordered by his superior officers to remove Genovese from a military prison and have him either post bond or placed in a civilian jail. Determined

to hold him in custody until he got some word from Washington, Dickey transferred Genovese to the most secure Italian facilities he could find and kept a close watch on him.

Then, in December, word came from Brooklyn that a warrant for Genovese's return would be forthcoming. It never arrived, however, and nobody in the Allied Military Government, it seemed, wanted to get involved. Dickey might as well have had a leper's bell around his neck. He went so far as to journey to Rome to see Lieutenant Colonel Charles Poletti, chief of the U.S. sector of the AMG, but Poletti, who had been Lieutenant Governor of New York under Thomas E. Dewey before going into the Army, refused to discuss the matter. Dickey even tried Brigadier General William O'Dwyer, in Italy on leave from his job as Brooklyn District Attorney, to no avail. O'Dwyer told Dickey that the Genovese case was of no "concern" to him. Back in Naples, Sergeant Dickey was informed by his superiors that they, in effect, were washing their hands of the whole business. "I was told," as he put it, "that I was on my own, to do anything I cared to."

He decided to bring Genovese back to the United States to face trial. When Genovese learned this, he offered Dickey, whose Army pay was $210 a month, $250,000 in cash if he would just "forget" about him. "Now, look, you are young," Genovese told the twenty-four-year-old investigator, "and there are things you don't understand. This is the way it works. Take the money. You are set for the rest of your life. Nobody cares what you do. Why should you?"

During the winter of 1945, after it had dawned on Genovese that Dickey was not going to cooperate, his manner turned ugly. He told Dickey that he would live to "regret" what he was doing. Then, just as Dickey had completed arrangements to escort his

prisoner back on a troop ship, Genovese's demeanor abruptly changed. "Kid," he said, "you are doing me the biggest favor anyone has ever done to me. You are taking me home. You are taking me back to the U.S.A."

The reason for Genovese's surprising switch was quite simple. Having failed to prevent his return from Italy, the Cosa Nostra now moved swiftly. The key witness against Don Vito, Peter LaTempa, had requested protective custody as soon as he found out that Genovese had been arrested. It did him little good. Held in a Brooklyn jail, LaTempa was in the habit of taking pain-killing tablets to quell a stomach disorder. On the evening of January 15, 1945, LaTempa swallowed some tablets in his cell and went to bed. He never woke up. An autopsy showed that he had enough poison in his system "to kill eight horses."