The Valachi Papers (3 page)

But this seemingly senseless killing by apparently so unremarkable a hand would end with Valachi becoming the first person to unmask the Cosa Nostra, whose very existence had been a subject of fierce debate even in law enforcement circles. Almost overnight, as a result, Valachi's name became as familiar as that of a Capone, Luciano, Costello, or Genovese. Not only did he dominate newspapers, magazines, and television after some of the bizarre tidbits of what life was like with Vito, Joe Bananas, and Buster from Chicago were revealed, but he achieved true status when comics began cracking jokes about him.

There was, however, really very little to laugh at. Organized crime is America's biggest business. According to the best estimates of the Department of Justice, admittedly an educated guess, it grosses better than $40 billion a year. Even if such a staggering statistic was off by as much as half, it would still dwarf anything else in sight. Organized crime, of course, pays no taxes, but it does pay to corrupt countless public officials at all levels, and besides its lucrative illicit rackets, it has increasingly infiltrated and taken over legitimate businesses and labor unions—applying, naturally, its own ethical standards. While the Cosa Nostra does not embrace all organized crime, it is its dominant force, virtually a state within a state—a "second government" as Valachi puts it—painstakingly structured, an intricate web of criminal activity stretching across the nation, bound together in a mystic ritual that sounds like a satire on college fraternity initiations and at the same time caught up in a continual swirl of brutality, savage intrigue, kangaroo courts and sudden death.

Valachi lived in this world for more than thirty years without breaking its blood oath of allegiance—and silence. The circumstances that eventually caused him to do so began in Atlanta.

For weeks he had led a terror-filled existence. He was marked for death, and he knew it. Another prisoner, also a member of the Cosa Nostra, had accused him of "ratting" to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. All at once Valachi found himself the target of the same sort of underworld execution that he had so often and so efficiently carried out in the past. While he had supplied narcotics agents with some fragmentary information about illegal drug traffic, in a not unusual bid for a lighter prison sentence, he ironically had never mentioned anything about the Cosa Nostra itself. Just what caused him to be fingered has yet to be entirely resolved. One dieory is that the Bureau of Narcotics, convinced that he had a lot more to say about die movement of heroin across U.S. borders, deliberately spread the word to bring enough pressure on Valachi to break him down completely. A second theory, which Valachi, among others, subscribes to, is that his accuser, a codefendant in the same narcotics case, did it to divert suspicion from himself.

In June 1962, time was running out fast for Valachi. He had already survived three classic attempts to murder him in prison. One was to offer him poisoned food. Another was to corner him alone and defenseless in a shower room. Still a third was to goad him into a fight in the penitentiary yard, so that in the confusion of the rubbernecking crowd which would automatically gather around, he could be knifed.

Worse yet, he had no avenue of appeal. The Cosa Nostra is divided into major units, each of which is called a Family. Valachi belonged to one such Family in New York City ruled by Vito

Genovese, the most feared
capo,
or boss, in the Cosa Nostra. And it was Genovese, also in Atlanta serving a narcotics conviction of his own, who had decreed Valachi's death. At first everything seemed cozy between the two convicts, and Valachi could not believe that Genovese, who not only had invited him to become a cellmate and then arranged the move, but had been the best man at his wedding years before, would turn against him now. But all the warnings from friendly sources along the prison grapevine, as well as die hostile behavior toward him of other inmates currying Genovese's favor, were confirmed for Valachi in an eerie confrontation with Genovese. This is his account of what took place:

One night in our cell Vito starts saying to me, "You know, we take a barrel of apples, and in this barrel of apples there might be a bad apple. Well, this apple has to be removed, and if it ain't removed, it would hurt the rest of the apples."

I tried to interrupt him when he was saying this, but he waved at me to keep quiet. Finally I couldn't stand it no more. "If I done anything wrong," I said, "show it to me and bring me the pills—meaning poison—and I will take them in front of you."

He said, "Who said you done anything wrong?"

There wasn't anything I could say.

Then he said to me that we had known each other for a long time, and he wanted to give me a kiss for old time's sake. Okay, I said to myself, two can play the game. So I grabbed Vito and kissed him back.

After I did this, he asked me, "How many grandkids you got?" I said, "Three. How many you got?" I think he said six. So I said, "It's good to know." In other words, if he's going to be concentrating on my grandkids, I'm letting him know I'll concentrate on his.

I went to my bed, and Ralph, who was in the next bed, mumbled, "The kiss of death." I pretended I didn't hear him and just laid on my bed. But who could sleep?

I didn't go for this "kiss of death" stuff. But I knew that just before a guy was going to be hit, the thing to do was to be very friendly with him, so as not to put him on guard. Now in the old days when you met another member, the habit was to kiss him. Charley Lucky* put a stop to this and changed it to a handshake. "After all," Charley said, "we would stick out kissing each other in restaurants and places like that."

On June 16 Valachi took a last desperate step to save himself and asked to be put in the "hole," prison lingo for solitary confinement. When the guard he had approached demanded to know why, he replied, "Someone's going to kill me, or get killed. Is that good enough reason for you?" Once in solitary, Valachi informed the prison's chief parole officer that he wanted to speak to George Gaffney, currently Deputy Director of the Bureau of Narcotics and former head of its New York office. Valachi's message to Gaffney —that he was "ready to talk" —was never relayed. In the inquiry that followed, the parole officer said that since Valachi refused to elaborate, he took no action on the ground that Gaffney would not make the trip to Atlanta without more information. Next Valachi wrote a letter to his wife. Through her he hoped to send word to another Cosa Nostra boss in New York, Thomas (Three-finger

^:>
The
late Salvatore Lucania, also known as Lucky Luciano, one of the chief architects of the modern Cosa Nostra.

Brown) Lucchese,* that the way in which he was being summarily judged violated the Cosa Nostra code. His frantic letter read:

I advice
[sic]
you that just as soon as you will receive this drop everything and come and see me. Don't let money stand in your way. It is most important. Don't waste one day. Understand. Then I will never bother you any more. When you come make sure you get in. Remember don't lose any time.

What Valachi planned was to fence with Gaffney at least long enough to allow Lucchese, who had been friendly to him over the years, to intervene in his behalf. But the letter never left Atlanta. Instead, according to Associate Warden M. J. Elliot, it was returned to Valachi for rewriting on die chance that this might give prison officials some insight into why he had requested solitary confinement. Valachi would not do it. By now he had concluded that he no longer could trust the prison administration. And from his standpoint the idea was perfectly reasonable; to him the power and influence of a Vito Genovese were limidess.

Ordered out of solitary because of his continued silence, Valachi decided to act on his own. He would die, perhaps, but he would take with him as many of those in the cabal to kill him as he could. High on his list was a veteran Cosa Nostra enforcer and Genovese crony, Joseph (Joe Beck) DiPalermo. At no time, however, did he consider striking directly at Genovese. For Valachi,

"Such aliases are common in the Cosa Nostra. Lucchese, now dead, acquired his in 1915 when he lost his right index finger in an accident. At the time there was a well-known major league pitcher called "Three-finger" Brown because of a missing digit.

fantasizing like an angry child, "Vito must live" to stand exposed before the rest of the Cosa Nostra as someone who sentenced his men to death without any sort of a hearing and then dismissed it by calling them "rats."

Everything came to a head on the morning of June 22. Half out of his mind under this grinding pressure, and having eaten practically nothing for days for fear of being poisoned, Valachi finally exploded against a man he diought was DiPalermo:

I was out in the yard down by the baseball diamond. All of a sudden I saw three guys behind the grandstand looking at me. They were about fifty yards away. Then they started towards me. I had my back against the wall. There was some construction work going on, and I saw a piece of pipe lying on the ground. Just as I picked it up, figuring that if I'm going to go, they're all going to go, a guy walked by and said, "Hello, Joe." I looked up as he had passed me. He looked just like Joe Beck, so I said to myself, I might as well take him, too. I took the pipe, and I let him have it over the head. He fell. Then I ran after those three guys. One of them had a knife. I went about ten yards, when they turned and started to run away, so I ran back to the guy on the ground. With all the blood, who could tell who the hell he was now? I gave him two more shots with the pipe.

The three of them from the grandstand started running back towards me. They were about twenty yards away when a guard ran up and told me he wanted the pipe. I said I wouldn't give it to him.* He kept after me. I said, "Leave me alone or I'll use the pipe on you." He said, "There's a guy

"Guards within physical reach of prisoners do not carry weapons lest they be overpowered and the weapons seized. Guards on the wall, however, are armed.

dying." I said, "Good. Let him die," thinking all the time it was Joe Beck.

Now there were about twenty inmates around us. The guard said, "Let's go to the associate warden's office." I said, "Okay, but I'm keeping the pipe."

It was in the associate warden's office that I found out I got the wrong guy. I was there about fifteen minutes when he went out of his office for a second and came back in and threw a picture at me. "Do you know him?" he said. I said, "No," and he said, "Well, that's the man you just hit."

I didn't know what to think. I was in a fog.

The object of Valachi's raging attack was named John Joseph Saupp, in Atlanta for mail robbery and forgery, a man with no organized crime connections, whom Valachi did not even know, but a man who bore a remarkable, and fatal, physical resemblance to his intended victim, DiPalermo. This, in the opinion of a special agent of the FBI who would later spend more time with Valachi than anyone else, was the turning point. "Valachi," he says, "has no real remorse for anything he has done in his life, except this. Nodiing crushed him more than die fact that he got the wrong man. It really plagues him. Getting a guy who was going to get
him
was die one satisfaction he was willing to setde for. If he had been successful, he probably never would have talked."

Saupp, despite multiple skull fractures, lingered on without regaining consciousness for almost forty-eight hours before he died. Even though Valachi was now facing a murder charge, he still insisted that "I just went crazy" to prison officials who questioned him. As one of them unprophetically noted at the time, "I get the feeling that Valachi. .. will never come out with a full account of the whole story."

In view of his later decision to talk, however, the report of the neuropsychiatric examination he underwent before trial makes fascinating reading. While "amiable in manner," it says in part, Valachi "appeared under much tension and his mood was characterized by moderate anxiety and depression. Speech was relevant and coherent; there was hesitancy and emotional blocking of speech in discussing his present difficulty."

The report goes on:

Regarding the subject's present predicament, he said ... he had gone to the associate warden the Saturday before and got himself "locked up" because of rumors all over that he had "squealed."
He
was so afraid that he had been skipping meals and had stopped bathing. He stated that when he went into solitary he was in "bad shape" and that it would be hard for anyone to understand how it felt to be so accused. He was in great torment because of having been "branded a rat and marked bad."

As for Valachi himself, the report concludes:

No hallucinatory experience or suicidal tendencies could be elicited. Comprehension and memory showed no gross defects. Whether his ideas in reference to having been "called and branded a rat" were delusions or had an actual basis in fact, this examiner could not determine. ... At the present time he is considered not psychotic. He understands the proceedings against him; he is able to intelligently advise counsel, assist in his own defense and stand trial.

For approximately three weeks no one in the Justice Department either in Washington or New York, where Valachi had been prosecuted for dealing in narcotics, knew what had happened. Meanwhile, the local U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, who had jurisdiction over the case, was preparing to ask the death penalty for Valachi because of the "brutality and senselessness" of the killing. At this critical juncture Valachi himself finally managed to get word of his plight to Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, via a go-between whose name, for obvious reasons, is still being kept under wraps by the Justice Department. A phone call to Morgenthau on July 13 briefly sketched the situation and advised him that Valachi "now wants to cooperate with the federal government." Morgenthau, after a hurried conference with the New York office of the Bureau of Narcotics, immediately contacted his counterpart in Atlanta and informed him of Valachi's potential value. The upshot was that on the morning of July 17, Valachi, represented by two court-appointed lawyers, was permitted to plead guilty to a lesser charge of murder in the second degree and received a life sentence. That same day he was taken in tow by narcotics agent Frank Selvagi and flown to the Westchester County Jail, a few miles north of New York City. There he was given the cover of "Joseph DeMarco" and installed apart from other prisoners in the jail's hospital wing.