The Valachi Papers (28 page)

Approximately half an hour afterward, Valachi stepped out of the Lido and checked the street. No one was in sight. He next slipped behind the wheel of Franse's car and started the motor. At this signal, he says, Pagano and Siano emerged with Franse propped up between them as if he were drunk and put him in the back seat. Valachi got out of die car, and the two men drove off in the direction of Manhattan with Franse's corpse.

(New York City police records note that about 9:55
A.M.
on June 19, 1953, the body of Steven Franse, male, white, fifty-eight, of 1777 Grand Concourse, Bronx, was found in the rear seat of his automobile parked in front of 164 East 37th Street, New York City. Cause of death: manual strangulation, widi contusions and abrasions on face and body, as well as a fractured left rib.)

Out of the swirl of fear
and mistrust inside Cosa Nostra ranks brought on by pressure from the Bureau of Narcotics, Valachi now received stunning news about his old pal and mentor, Dominick (The Gap) Petrilli. After serving time for his 1942 narcotics conspiracy conviction, Petrilli, who had neglected to become a U.S. citizen, was deported to Italy, and Valachi had not seen him since then.

Around the middle of November 1953, Tony Bender told Valachi, "The Gap is back. He got picked up in Italy for something and made a deal widi the junk agents. They let him come back to set us up."

Petrilli belonged to the Lucchese Family, and Valachi quickly broke in. "I don't care what The Gap's doing. Don't mix me into it. Let his own people handle it. I ain't going to be in the middle again, like with Gene."

"Nobody is asking you to take the contract. He is certain to see you. Just tell me when he does. He will explain that he sneaked in on a boat and jumped off. Be careful he doesn't have a tape recorder when he's talking to you."

Bender's warning left Valachi badly shaken. Recalling his thoughts at the time, he told me, "It seemed like everything got messed up when Vito came back. At least with Frank Costello life was nice and peaceful. First it's one rumor; then it's another. Now The Gap is supposed to be a rat. To tell the truth, I don't want to talk to nobody no more. I'm afraid to hear what the next thing is, and I'll get in trouble just for knowing it."

Late one night, about three weeks after the conversation with Bender, Petrilli came into the Lido. He was drunk or else did an excellent job of acting as if he were. He greeted Valachi with an enormous bellow and threw his arms around him.

Valachi, feigning delighted astonishment, asked Petrilli how he dared to walk around so openly.

"I ain't walking around," Petrilli said. "I just got off the boat, and I got to see you, right? You're my friend, right? I couldn't take Italy no more. I had to get away. I was in the hold of this freighter for twenty-seven days. Twenty-seven days! You don't know what it was like. It cost me $3,000."

Petrilli then told Valachi to arrange a meeting with Vincent Mauro and another soldier in Tony Bender's crew, Pasqualc (Paddy Mush) Moccio.

"I'm going to make you guys rich," he whispered. "I got a line on a ton of stuff. Joe, you and me are going to Cuba to pick it up."

Valachi had listened silently to this. Now, to see if Petrilli was in fact carrying a recorder, Valachi suddenly opened his coat, simultaneously exclaiming, "Hey, you have lost weight!" Finding nothing, he lowered his voice and said, "Gap, listen to me. It's dangerous around here for you. If you're going to Cuba, don't wait. Go."

Petrilli gave no indication that he heard him. Instead, he called for another drink. After downing it, he lurched out, saying, "Set that meeting up. I'll be in touch in a couple of days."

Valachi waited an hour and dien telephoned Bender. "He was here."

"Is he still there?"

"Why didn't you call while he was there?" "I told you, I don't want no hand in this." "Did he say where he was going?" "No."

"How do you size it up?"

"Well, he said everything you said he would say."

It was the last time he saw Petrilli. On a slow December night Valachi closed the Lido early and went home. He was asleep around 5:30
a.m.,
when Mildred awoke him. Two detectives were standing beside her. One of them said, "Your wife says you got in at three. How come you're home so early?"

"There weren't anv customers. So what?"

"Your friend Petrilli just got hit. What do you know about it?"

(New York City police records show that at about 3:50
a.m.
on December 9, 1953, at a bar and grill located at 634 East 183d Street, Bronx, owned by Albert Mauriello, three unknown white men, all armed and wearing dark glasses, entered the premises and shot Dominick Petrilli, male, white, fifty-four, alias The Gap, causing his death. Case active.)

Valachi was questioned once more and denied any knowledge of the murder. But from a source who had been with Petrilli at the time—"He wasn't a member, just a guy around, so why get him in trouble?"—he learned that The Gap had been in a card game at the bar, which was owned by the brother of onetime heavyweight contender Tami Mauriello. Valachi was told that Petrilli was ahead $1,300 when the three killers, members of the Lucchese Family, walked in. He took one look and fled to the men's room, hoping to escape through a window, but was cornered there and had "his brains blown out." The source added a footnote. The players in the game had scattered immethately; one of them, however, managed to run back to rifle Petrilli's pockets before the police arrived.

"Well," Valachi says, "even if I was sure The Gap was a stool pigeon, I wouldn't have done nothing to him. How could I forget how he took me to Brooklyn and kept me out of the way when Mr. Maranzano got his? Gee, I felt bad, and it wasn't much of a Christmas. To tell the truth, I hit the bottle heavy."

The Cosa Nostra
and traffic in drugs, especially heroin, are almost synonymous. But like everything else about the Cosa Nostra, even this has not always been quite what it seemed. In 1948 Frank Costello, while still acting boss of the Luciano Family, ordered its membership to stay out of dope. According to Valachi, the canny Costello had two reasons for the edict. One was his realization that there were rackets and rackets; bootlegging and gambling, for instance, enjoyed wide public acceptance or, at worst, indifference, while heroin not only was giving organized crime a relative black eye, but also was spurring law enforcement efforts against it in other areas.

Much more important, however, was the dogged harassment of the Bureau of Narcotics. The Cosa Nostra despised—and feared— it, and for the bureau's part, the first feeling was mutual.

Valachi's plaint against the bureau was that it did not play fair, and it is doubtless true that, quite aside from him, some of the bureau's tactics from time to time may have been questionable. A good deal of this is because no other agency has dealt with the Cosa Nostra at such close quarters, known its nature so well or seen so much that it often could do so little about. The Narcotics Bureau, unlike the FBI, which tends to look down its nose at it, does not depend on the informant system for much of its intelligence but regularly engages its agents in dangerous undercover work; they are, as a result, a necessarily somewhat more raffish lot, highly motivated, less disciplined, generally more daring and innovational, occasionally corruptible. Above all else, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was the first to recognize the existence of an organization like the Cosa Nostra, and no other arm of the law has put more of a crimp in its operations.

Costello's stand produced a varying response in the Cosa Nostra. The Lucchese Family, heavily involved in narcotics, simply ignored it. Others, like the Stefano Magaddino Family in Buffalo, gave it lip service, but privately continued to bring in heroin. The Chicago Cosa Nostra, then led by Tony Accardo, went a step farther than Costello; it is Valachi's understanding that each member who was in dope received $200 a week out of Family funds to help make up for the loss of income.

Even in the Accardo Family, however, the command to get out of narcotics triggered a serious breakdown in Cosa Nostra discipline. The temptation for quick profits was too much, and individual members, particularly those short on cash, persisted in handling heroin secretly. And while Vito Genovese, when he finally displaced Costello, went along with the narcotics ban, it turned out that he had a double standard; if he was given a cut of

the take off the top, he always managed to look the other way.

(In diose Families, including Genovese's, where heroin was officially "outlawed," a member was on his own if arrested. Cosa Nostra soldiers pay a head tax —during Valachi's day in the Genovese Family it was $25 a month—which is theoretically reserved for such expenses as hiring defense lawyers and supporting wives and children if the upshot is imprisonment. In the 450-member Genovese Family this came to a tidy sum over the course of the year. While a boss in actuality could do whatever he wanted with the money, and often did, a soldier arrested on a narcotics charge knew in advance that he would get no financial help.)

The Bureau of Narcotics had kept an interested eye on Valachi since the mid-1940s, booking him on suspicion in 1944 and again in 1948. "Everyone thought I was in junk," he protests, "but I wasn't. It was because of all them guys that hung around with me. I never made a penny in the junk business at the time."

Then, in early 1956, Valachi was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in a narcotics conspiracy trial that included his wife's brother, Giacomo (Jack) Reina. Ironically it was the same heroin deal that Eugenio Giannini was arranging when he was murdered. For Valachi it was die first time he had been behind bars since Sing Sing in the 1920s. He did not stay jailed long, however; released on bail pending an appeal, his conviction was reversed on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out on the part he allegedly played in the conspiracy. It was an extremely complicated case, and admittedly, Valachi's role in it, as charged, was tangential. He says flatly that it was a "bum rap."

If it was guilt by association, as Valachi claims, there was considerable basis for it. As he confessed both to the FBI and in the interviews for this book, two of his codefendants in this case, Pat

Pagano and Pat Moccio, were involved with him in still another heroin deal that apparently escaped detection by the Narcotics Bureau. It took place "around 1952" and was, he says, his first venture in dope. It is also an excellent example of the ethics the Cosa Nostra observes even with its own membership. As Valachi says, "It was a mess. I'm sorry I ever got mixed up in it, and I want the boys who are in it today to know how the greed of the bosses is ruining this thing of ours."

Valachi got the name and address of a French source for heroin from Salvatore (Sally Shields) Shillitani, who had been initiated into the Cosa Nostra at the same time he was. Heroin then could be purchased in France for $2,500 a kilo and sold on the wholesale market in the United States for $11,000. The price, he finally decided, was too attractive to pass up, and with an introduction from Shillitani, he sent Pat Pagano to Marseilles to make contact with the source. Valachi can recall only the source's first name— Dominique/'' The method of making contact was a torn dollar bill; Shillitani had already mailed half of it to Dominique, and Pagano went over with the other half. Pagano was successful and returned to inform Valachi that they would be receiving news of a heroin shipment. It was not long in coming:

Pat calls me and says this Dominique's wife is here, and he is going to meet her. He went to meet her at some hotel, I don't know what hotel as it was downtown someplace, and when he finally came back to me, he told me she wants $8,000 for a down payment. I forget if he

*Probably Dominique Reissent, a Corsican residing in Marseilles, who, according to the Bureau of Narcotics, imports morphine base into France for conversion into heroin for eventual U.S. distribution.

said how much stuff would be coming. Anyway it was fifteen kilos. If you don't know what a kilo is, it's thirty-five ounces of junk.

Now before I get any deeper, I got to think hard. There is the law about not fooling around with junk, and I got to be careful.
I
figure the best way to protect myself is to let Tony Bender in on the deal. If Tony goes along, I got nothing to worry about, as he will have to stand by me if I get jammed up. I heard he was in junk. I ain't sure, but I got my suspicions. I figured I would take a chance and talk to Tony. I get heartsick every time I think about it. All I can say is it looked like a good idea. So I spoke to Tony, and I explained to him that I had this proposition. I was a little coy with him, as I was testing him out.

Well, he seemed to be interested, and I told him the rest of it. To make it short, he gave me the $8,000 and another $1,000 expenses for Pat to entertain this Dominique's wife which I asked him for.

I give it to Pat the next day, and now I got problems with him. Pat starts telling me how she seems to like him. I said, "Pat, do me a favor, don't fool around with the man's wife. Do what you have to do, and stick with business." He said, "She is getting bold with me," and I said, "Avoid it."

About four weeks after that we get word that the boat is coming in with the stuff. I'm pretty sure the boat was the
United States,
but don't hold me to it. Now, in the meantime, Sally Shields has got arrested in another case and gets fifteen years, and he's out of it. I tell Tony about the shipment, and he says that he will have Patty Moccio handle everything. It will cost $1,000 a kilo to pay the seaman to get the stuff off the boat, which naturally comes to $15,000. I think it was only one seaman. It don't make no difference. If anybody helps him, he must take care of that out of his end. I don't know how he did it. I'm just happy I don't have to worry about it.