The Valachi Papers (4 page)

But die hope that he would promptly spill everything he knew soon vanished. At the time he murdered the wrong man in prison, Valachi was serving concurrent terms of fifteen and twenty years for peddling dope. While he freely admits to a number of specific crimes, including complicity in several previously unsolved gangland killings, he still maintains that on the second of diese convictions, which led to his being labeled an informer, he was framed. So, once out of the reach of Vito Genovese, he took out all his hostility on agent Selvagi. "You were the cause of me getting into trouble," he jeered. "Where were you when I needed you?"

Valachi nonetheless was careful to hint at just enough to keep Selvagi interested. And the Bureau of Narcotics, angling at best for inside information on heroin traffic, got a peek at considerably more than it bargained for. Gradually the shadowy outlines of a national crime cartel involving a vast array of rackets began to emerge out of the give-and-take between Selvagi and Valachi. Toward die end of August, as a result, Henry L. Giordano, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, called a key Justice Department figure, William Hundley, who headed a special section set up by Attorney General Kennedy to pull together the previously uncoordinated efforts of various government investigative agencies against organized crime and racketeering. "We're talking to a guy," Giordano told Hundley. "It could be important. I'll send you copies of the reports we're receiving."

Almost at once Hundley found himself in the middle of some bitter bureaucratic infighting. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had gotten wind of what was going on, asked him for a look at the reports. Afterwards, according to Hundley, FBI interest in Valachi became "overwhelming." The FBI formally requested access to Valachi on die ground that the information he had to offer "transcended" traffic in narcotics. Informally, Hundley was told, "We have to have him." Such pressure was startling. "It puzzled me," Hundley recalls. "Here suddenly was the most prestigious law enforcement agency in the world all worked up over one man. They usually don't get that excited."

But Valachi meant a great deal to the FBI for a very special reason. Prior to the advent of Kennedy as Attorney General, it had been paying little attention to organized crime. In 1959, for example, only four agents in its New York office were assigned to this area, and their work was primarily in-office "bookkeeping" chores collating such routine information as the whereabouts of known racketeers. On the other hand, upwards of 400 agents in the same office were occupied in foiling domestic Communists. Although FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover nominally takes orders from the Attorney General, he had operated under a succession of them as if they never existed. Kennedy was able to change much of this, at least during his tenure. Not only was he knowledgeble and concerned about organized crime and determined to crimp its mushrooming growth, but he also had a brother in the White Flouse. Thus by 1962, again using New York as an example, about 150 agents, the bulk of them drawn from security work, were specializing in organized crime, assigned to specific cases, ferreting out leads, actively engaged in surveillance,
etc.
Still, embarrassingly caught off guard by Kennedy's initial demand for underworld intelligence data, the FBI high command had been forced to resort to widespread wiretapping and bugging to provide information which it euphemistically ascribed to sources like "confidential informant T-3, known to be reliable in the past." Now all at once here was Valachi, die first warm body to come forward whose statements jibed with this electronic eavesdropping and apparently a hot prospect to fill in the gaps.

With Kennedy's backing, however, Hundley decided to give the Bureau of Narcotics more time to develop Valachi on its own. But two weeks later, when a progress report from Selvagi proved disappointing because of Valachi's continuing hostility toward the Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI request was granted, and a crack special agent from its New York office, James P. Flynn, entered the picture ostensibly to delve further into the circumstances of the Atlanta murder. For a time Flynn and Selvagi jointly questioned

Valachi, who was in his glory playing one agent off against the other. He had yet to mention the Cosa Nostra by name, and there have since been charges that he fabricated it. The fact is that the words "Cosa Nostra" had been cropping up on wiretaps, and at least a year before Valachi came along the FBI had reason to believe that it represented what was commonly called the Mafia.

Valachi dramatically confirmed this. Alone with him for a brief period on the afternoon of September 8, Flynn suddenly said, "Joe, let's stop fooling around. You know I'm here because the Attorney General wants this information. I want to talk about the organization by name, rank, and serial number. What's the name? Is it Mafia?"

"No," Valachi said. "It's not Mafia. That's the expression the outside uses."

"Is it of Italian origin?"

"What do you mean?" Valachi parried.

"We know a lot more than you think," Flynn said. "Now I'll give you the first part. You give me the rest. It's Cosa— "

Valachi went pale. For almost a minute he said nothing. Then he rasped back hoarsely, "Cosa Nostra! So you know about it."*

*It can be argued that Cosa Nostra is a generic, rather than a proper, name. Although the literal translation is "Our Thing," Valachi, when referring to it in English, would do so in a lower-case sense—e.g., "this thing of ours." There is also evidence that other terms are used in the United States. For instance, while the structure of a Cosa Nostra Familv in Buffalo is identical to one of its counterparts in New York City, it is known locally as "the arm." It is really an academic question since, whatever the term, it adds up to the same thing.

According to Hundley, Flynn became the indispensable figure in getting Valachi to talk. "Without him," Hundley says, "we could have blown the whole thing. Flynn is an unusual agent with great imagination and initiative. He had a tremendous knack of winning Valachi's confidence. He knew exactly when to be tough and when to baby him along. If Valachi was sick, for instance, he was the one who would bring him his medicine. If Valachi went into one of his depressions, he would always come up with the right thing to snap him out of it. Every so often he would bring some of the delicacies—cheeses and spiced sausage—that Valachi liked. These may sound like small things, but they made all the difference. Flynn practically lived with him for eight months, and Valachi wound up thinking he was the only friend he had—and quite frankly, Valachi was right."

A successful interrogation is a complex art. Some measure of the problem of dealing with Valachi is contained in a probation officer's report written in 1960 while he awaited sentencing after his last narcotics conviction. "There is little to be said in his favor," the report concluded, "since he has failed to demonstrate any real semblance of moral conscience and social conformity. He has never been quite in tune with the society in which he lives, and at this late date there is little reason to indicate that he ever will."

For Flynn the key was to isolate the motivations that finally led Valachi to talk and to play on them constantly. "Revenge was a large part of it," he later noted, "but it was also a cold, calculated move for survival. Don't think for a moment that this was a repentant sinner. lie was a killer capable of extreme violence. He was devious, rebellious against all constituted authority, and he lived in a world of fear and suspicion. Fear especially marked him. Fear of what he was doing and at the same time fear that nobody would believe him."

By the end of September Valachi was placed entirely in the FBI's hands. And until the following January Flynn, subsequently joined by another FBI agent, questioned Valachi at the Westchester County Jail on an average of four days a week. A typical session lasted about three hours, after which Valachi tended to become increasingly jumpy and difficult to manage. During this period it was soon established that Valachi's remarkable memory worked best when he was allowed to tell his story in stretches without interruption even though any one sentence might feature a half dozen unidentified "lies," "hims" and "thems" which had to be tracked down in later interviews.

After the initial breakthrough, Valachi sketched the broad organizational structure of the Cosa Nostra with comparatively little prodding. And for the first time the Justice Department got a picture of its enormous scope. He revealed that the Cosa Nostra is divided into Family units, each supreme in its own area. These areas include Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. In Valachi's words, resort centers such as Miami and Las Vegas (or pre-Castro Havana) are "loose" or "open." This means that any Family, regardless of its base, can maintain members and conduct operations there.

The ruler of a Family is known as the
capo,
or "boss." Next in command is the
sub capo,
or "underboss." Then came a number of
caporegime,
or "lieutenants." Each lieutenant is in charge of a
regime,
or "crew." A crew in turn is composed of "soldiers," whose actual status depends a good deal on their individual experience, contacts, and ability. Some soldiers, for instance, work directly for their lieutenants. Others run their own rackets. From boss to soldier, however, the members of the Cosa Nostra are united by one great common bond: they must be Italian. But by no means does the Cosa Nostra ethnically limit its operations. It is a closed society within a large framework, constandy involved with a whole spectrum of "outsiders"—Jewish, Negro, Irish, French, Puerto Rican, English, and so on down the line.

About a third of the Cosa Nostra membership is in New York City, which is unique in having five Families. Valachi named the boss of each. While police had long recognized them as major racketeers, their exact position in the underworld was uncertain. All pretended to be respectable businessmen, and all were so swathed in protective layers of underlings that they hadn't seen the inside of a jail cell for years. Indeed, so exceptional was the conviction of Vito Genovese that the Cosa Nostra universally believes that he was framed. Genovese, who purports to be nothing more than your friendly scrap dealer, was asked once if he had any moral scruples about killing a man. Fie gave die stock underworld reply: "I respectfully decline to answer on the ground that my answer may tend to incriminate me."

A second Cosa Nostra boss in New York City named by Valachi is Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonanno. In an effort to achieve legitimate status, Bonanno took up residence
in
Arizona, where he posed as a successful dabbler in real estate until he was forced to return to quell a mutiny in his Family. Still a third, Carlo Gambino, blandly describes himself as a labor-management "consultant."

Two of the bosses Valachi identified have since died. One was Joseph Profaci, ostensibly an olive oil importer, who ran his Family in Brooklyn for more dian thirty years and whose flower-wreathed funeral was in the best underworld tradition. The other, Thomas Lucchese, conceded only to being a prosperous dress manufacturer. Lucchese's last recorded conviction was for grand larceny in 1923. A few years later the wife and mother of a murder victim identified him as the killer, but before he was brought to trial, they changed their minds. One can sympathize with them; when Vito Genovese faced a murder charge of his own, the chief witness against him, despite being held in protective custody, was poisoned.

On a national scale, the Cosa Nostra has no Mr. Big, although Genovese was bidding for the title until he was sent to prison. Instead, it has been governed in recent years by a
Commissione
of from nine to twelve bosses across the country. The
Commissione
has one main function: to keep the Cosa Nostra a going concern. It is the final arbiter on disputes between Families. And when a boss dies or is otherwise removed, it must confirm the man who takes his place. Thus, Valachi revealed, one of the reasons for the celebrated 1957 Cosa Nostra conclave near the little town of Apalachin, New York, was to bless Carlo Gambino as the successor to Albert Anastasia— familiar to tabloid readers as the Lord High Executioner of Murder Incorporated —after his bloody demise in a Manhattan barbershop.

At the Westchester County Jail,
having gone this far, Valachi with typical ambivalence began trying to learn how much the FBI really knew about the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra. Flynn spent endless hours in this sort of sparring. Each time it happened, he would patiently say to Valachi, "You must be our teacher. It doesn't matter what we know. You must tell us."

Flynn also repeatedly warned Valachi that he must tell the truth and that if caught in even one lie, it would discredit his entire story. Sometimes Valachi sulked at such a suggestion. Other times he would blow up. Once he shouted back angrily, "The truth! The truth! You're always yelling about the truth. What the hell do you think I'm telling you?"

These warnings nonetheless had the desired effect, and Valachi followed a consistent pattern. If he described a situation that he knew about personally, he would make a flat declaration. If the information was secondhand, he would preface it by saying, "One of the boys told me." If Valachi believed it himself, he would refer to the source as "solid."

The tension Valachi was under was enormous, and his moods took violent swings up and down. Scarcely a day went by without some reference to Vito Genovese and the death sentence he had decreed. When Valachi was depressed, he would complain, "That bastard! Why did he do it?" When he was up, he would laugh bitterly and say, "I was as smart as he was. I was waiting to see his moves while I was making my own." On one occasion he told Flynn, "I'm a dead man already. I know it. But the more I live, the more shame it is for Vito."