The Valachi Papers (5 page)

In his blackest moments, pacing ceaselessly back and forth, chain-smoking cigarettes, he dwelt on the futility of trying to break die power of the Cosa Nostra. "What good is it what I'm telling you?" he would cry. "Nobody will listen. Nobody will believe. You know what I mean? This Cosa Nostra, it's like a second government. It's too big."

To counter this, he was constantly reminded that in Kennedy and Hoover he had some heavyweight help on his side. There were also elements of his own character that could be capitalized on. One was his habit of blaming his troubles on everyone else. "Joe," Flynn recalls, "thought everybody was responsible for Joe, except Joe. He only took up crime, for instance, because he never had a chance as a kid. It was the prison administration's fault that he had to kill a man he didn't even know. He doesn't even consider himself a traitor to the Cosa Nostra; in his mind Vito Genovese was the real traitor."

Another characteristic that proved immensely valuable was Valachi's frustrated ambitions within the crime syndicate. "Why," he would often complain, "should some guy who put in less time be ahead of me?" Still a third was his need for ego satisfaction. "You say you want to destroy the bosses," he was told. "This is the way you can help do it."

Thus alternately coaxed and prodded, Valachi continued to describe his life in the mysterious and violent underworld of the Cosa Nostra. As he did, a remarkable physical transformation began to occur in Valachi. "In the beginning," one of his custodians remembers, "he was fat, maybe forty pounds too heavy, and he looked like a bum. He was a guy without pride. All he wanted to do was exist. We had to order him to change his clothes, and he went for days without shaving. All of a sudden he started going on a diet. Then he asked if he could have some exercise equipment, and he would work out at least an hour every day. It was like he had gone into training for a fight."

His spiritual catharsis, however, never quite kept pace with his physical rebrith. A Roman Catholic, he was asked several times if he wanted to see a priest. He always refused. "I got no time for that," he would say. On the other hand, he displayed one unexpected bit of gallantry in refusing to name any of the women in his life. When die subject came up, he said, "Let's just say that I never abused a girl. So don't ask no questions. What's my business is mine."

The only deal federal officials ever made widi Valachi was an agreement "to leave his family out of it." Valachi is married and has one son. His wife, Mildred, is the daughter of a Cosa Nostra boss named Gaetano Reina who was gunned down in 1930. His son is in construction work in New York. Valachi, who had various legitimate fronts, which included three restaurants, a dress factory, and a jukebox operation, says his son knew nothing of his criminal activities. "The kid," as he once put it, "is a square. I didn't want him to know nothing about me. I didn't want him in the life."

During his interrogation nothing fed Valachi's ego more than to play the prima donna, although he was always careful not to overdo it. The tip-off came at the beginning of an interview session when he would grandly announce, "I don't want to talk about anything today. I want to relax." A rabid Yankee fan, he would inevitably start discussing baseball. Or he would reminisce. Once he described his first crime to Flynn. As he told it, his father could not meet the rent. So Valachi, who was nine years old, and his brodier stole a crate of soap cakes from a neighborhood grocery and sold them door to door at half price. With his amazing memory, he even recalled the brand name, Fairy Soap, and seemed disappointed that Flynn had never heard of it.

He was supplied with his favorite reading matter, the
New York Daily News,
every morning. The first thing he would do was turn to the racing results. As the onetime owner of four thoroughbreds, he spent his spare time handicapping the horses, and Flynn always knew he was in for an especially productive day whenever Valachi told him that he had picked "some winners." Next he would scan the obituary page. It occasionally gave him a chance to display a morbid sense of humor. One morning he found die death notice of a Cosa Nostra member whom he had collaborated with on a murder assignment. In between chuckles Valachi recounted how his late friend's trigger finger had "frozen" after he had lined up his intended victim.

For all this, he never lost his instinctive guile. In his Cosa Nostra days, when he was handed a "contract" to kill, Valachi went to great lengths to make sure it had been formally authorized and not one, as was often the case, motivated by personal greed or revenge which could land him in hot water between rival bosses. At the Westchester County Jail he applied the same technique. The place, he suddenly began complaining to Flynn, was giving him the "creeps." For one tiling, there was a prisoner there who had known him in die "old days." For another, "everybody" knew the jail was regularly used by the Bureau of Narcotics to question informers, and it would be just a matter of time before Cosa Nostra tracked him down. Then, applying the clincher, he protested, "If the boys knew I was in a dump like this, they'd laugh me out of town."

No one doubted that Valachi's real motive was to test the interest and power of Attorney General Kennedy, but it dovetailed nicely with plans to take him out of Westchester anyway. After weeks of looking around the country, the FBI had finally made arrangements with the Army to lodge him temporarily at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, ideal because of its tight security as a communications center and also because of its proximity to Flynn's residence. For both Valachi and the FBI, Monmouth accomplished another cherished objective: it placed him completely beyond the reach of the Bureau of Narcotics.

(Still, Valachi's fear about Westchester were not so far-fetched. The FBI has since established that the Cosa Nostra had traced him to the New York area. Flis former associates, however, believed that he was being hidden in a Manhattan hotel and concentrated their search in that direction.)

Once the Justice Department's William Hundley authorized the move, Valachi was brought by federal marshals to Fort Monmouth in January 1963. He went by car, wearing civilian clothing obtained from his home by an FBI agent. "He looked like a hood on the late late show," one of his escorts says, "wide-brim hat, collar tabs halfway down his chest, and a cashmere polo coat with the biggest lapels I ever saw. He made quite a sight." At Monmouth Valachi was put in the stockade under the immethate protection of hand-picked guards from the Federal Correctional Institution at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The head of this detachment, told only that he would have a prisoner in his charge requiring maximum security, chose the Army's version of it— a tiny enlisted man's cell completely surrounded by bars. Valachi took one look and blew up. "What the hell is this," he raged, "some kind of fucking cage?" He was finally mollified the next day after agent Flynn arrived on the scene and saw to it that he was shifted to more private quarters in the stockade reserved for officers.

In a way the incident served to reinforce Valachi's confidence in Flynn and the FBI, and from then on his interrogation proceeded without a serious hitch. Valachi had been scheduled to stay at Fort Monmouth for three weeks. But it required the rest of the winter to cover the gaps in his story, to recheck key episodes, to gadier, as Flynn put it, the "fine type" of information necessary to substantiate what Valachi had to say, and to pin down the Cosa Nostra membership—who precisely was in it and, just as important, who was not. This phase of interviewing was handled with extreme care. If, for instance, Valachi was describing a gangland killing, he had to supply detail upon detail for later comparison with die data contained in FBI or police files. As for all the members of the Cosa Nostra he personally singled out, Valachi first had to identify them from photographs either by name or by a known alias.

By now he also had expressed a willingness to testify in public. Three key points caused Attorney General Kennedy and his staff to favor the idea. One was die fact that Valachi had never said anything that conflicted with fragmentary information already known to the Justice Department. Another was the possibility that his testimony might create support for dormant anticrime legislation and could perhaps pave the way for legalized wiretaps under stringent federal court control. The diird was the belief that Congress and the country ought to hear, as only an insider could tell it, what had been privy to only a handful of law enforcement officers.

While this was being considered, however, the question of whether or not to keep Valachi's revelations secret became academic. The Bureau of Narcotics, having lost control over his interrogation, feared that it would never get any credit for breaking him down. As a result, the bureau began to leak some details of Valachi's story, emphasizing its own role in the affair, to a friendly Washington reporter.

That settled the matter. And on September 9, after considerable preparation, Valachi was flown by helicopter to the District of Columbia Jail in Washington to face an investigating subcommittee chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. Valachi was greatly impressed by the flight and the security steps taken to assure his safety; since word of his presence at Fort Monmouth had gotten out by then, both he and his guards were disguised as Army MP's when they left the stockade. He was less impressed when Senator McClellan visited him privately at the D.C. Jail, just before die hearings began. According to Valachi, he requested he please skip any mention of Hot Springs, in McClellan's home state, and the Senate testimony contains no reference to that then-notorious city.

Valachi's televised appearances before the subcommittee were a disaster. But Valachi was the least to blame. Flustered by the circuslike atmosphere, he was out of his depth. While he does have nearly total recall, his mind is not the kind that jumps quickly from one subject to another. Yet the Senators almost to a man constantly broke in to ask wildly disparate questions. Even worse, although they all had been briefed on the specific areas of Valachi's knowledge, die minute die lights went on, he was bombarded with queries designed to appeal to the voters back home.

Perhaps the high point of the nonsense occurred when Nebraska's Senator Carl Curtis asked Valachi about the state of organized crime in Omaha. After a moment's reflection Valachi carefully cupped his hand over his mouth, turned to a Justice Department official sitting next to him, and whispered something. Those viewing the scene could be forgiven for supposing that Senator Curtis had hit on a matter of some import which Valachi wanted to check out before answering.

He was in fact asking, "Where the hell is Omaha?''

I first met Joseph Valachi
on January 6,1966, at the D.C. Jail, where he was still being kept on the top floor in what is nominally the death house, although no execution had taken place there for years. To get to Valachi, once inside the jail proper, I had to pass muster at an electronically controlled gate. A phone call then was made to one of the U.S. Bureau of Prison guards specifically assigned to be with him around the clock. Next I was escorted down a corridor to a heavy steel door with a massive key lock and taken up three flights of stairs to still another steel door, featuring a glass peephole through which I was again observed before being allowed into Valachi's quarters. These security precautions were not designed to keep him from escaping. They were there to keep him alive against the $100,000 price tag that has been placed on his head by the Cosa Nostra.

My initial reaction on seeing him in person was surprise that such a bandy-legged little man could cause so much commotion. Instead of the usual prison outfit, he was wearing a gray sweat suit, one of the two that made up his wardrobe, white athletic socks and gym shoes. Down to 145 pounds from his Atlanta days, he continued working out religiously with an isometric exerciser. His belly was flat and hard, and he had bulging shoulder muscles. Although he was then sixty-three, he could do thirty push-ups with little effort. His only vice was smoking sixty-odd cigarettes a day. "I know I shouldn't do it," he told me, "but what else can I do in here?" Still, it bothered him and he had shifted from Camels to Salems on the theory that they were less harmful to his health. "What do you think?" he asked. "Do you agree?"

I saw Valachi in the D.C. Jail twenty-two times from January
6
through March 19 for four to five hours at a stretch. Following each session, I also left him questions which he would then answer in longhand on the legal-size note pads he favored. His writing style was simple, declarative, and almost devoid of punctuation. He was apologetic about what he felt were literary shortcomings in these responses. "You got to remember," he told me, "I only made it dirough the seventh grade. But I'll say I'm a 65 percent better writer than when I started all this."

These interviews all went quite smoothly with one exception. He became extremely upset when I questioned him about the use of strong-arm methods in his loanshark operations. This had been prompted by an FBI report that he often carried a baseball bat with him while making the rounds to delinquent debtors. But except for "maybe two or three times," he was outraged at the suggestion that he ever used force to collect loans. "What did I want to do that for?" he snapped. "I only dealt with people I knew would pay—bookmakers, policy men, guys like that. I stayed away from businessmen. What good was it beating up somebody? The idea was to keep die money moving."

He was as adamant about his role in underworld slayings. With the rebellious personality traits that would have made it difficult for Valachi to fit smoothly into any organization, much less the Cosa Nostra, the Justice Department is convinced that he lasted as long as he did because he performed a vital function as an expert killer in, according to its count, at least thirty-three murders. While Valachi doesn't deny being involved in many such "contracts,"* he contended that particularly in his younger days his specialty was to drive the getaway car and that with few exceptions he was never actually present when a victim was shot or otherwise dispatched. Later in his career, he insisted, his job was to supervise all the details of a hit, so that even in those instances when he acknowledged being physically on the scene, someone else always did the deed. No matter how I pressed him, he would not budge on this point. "Why should I lie about it?" he argued with disarming logic, as well as an eye perhaps cocked on his public image. "What do I gain ? Legally I'm just as guilty."