The Valachi Papers (6 page)

Valachi had free run, such as it was, of die deadi house at the D.C. Jail. A corridor led past a guard's cubicle to a row of three cells for condemned prisoners and a shower room, where he had set up the one tangible reward accorded him for talking—a hot plate on which he could turn out a meal of his own. His foodstuffs, stored in a small refrigerator, were furnished by a couple of his special guards, an occasional visitor from die Organized Crime and Racketeering

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"A "contract" is a common underworld term for an assignment to murder a designated victim. The murder itself is often called a "hit."

Section, or an FBI agent who wanted more information about a particular racketeer. Valachi was such a good cook that his guards asked him to write Ins recipes for their wives. Fie entitled his most popular creation "Joe's Special Recipe for Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs." All his recipes were full of helpful hints. He noted, on the subject of chopped meat, "If you buy a pound of beef and grind it yourself, that's better yet, as you will know it is fresh." He was also careful to advise die novice cook that in making meatballs, "As you roll die meat on die palms of your hands, you keep putting a little olive oil on your palms, to prevent the meat from sticking." Like any good teacher, he went out of his way not to stifle die creative impulses of his pupils. "Make the meatballs," he exhorted, "any size you want."

Valachi spent most of his time in a narrow room at the other end of the death house corridor, and it was here that I would interview him. The room had an army cot, two chairs, a writing table, a radio, and a television set. Valachi's feet suffer in cold weather, and he had crudely Scotch-taped the louvers of the door opening on the corridor in an effort to ward off drafts. He also had affixed a large piece of muslin to the wall over his cot with Scotch tape. Curious about this, I peeled part of it back one day when I was alone for a moment. Valachi had put it up for understandable reasons. The muslin masked a rectangular viewing glass; on the other side was an electric chair. The room had been formerly used to witness executions. The only time he ever directly acknowledged the chair's existence was when I was photographing him and asked him to pose alongside it. "No," he said emphatically, "not me. It's bad luck."

Valachi's normal routine day after day at die D.C. Jail was exercise in the morning, a nap after lunch followed by small talk or a card game with one of the guards who rotated on duty in the deadi house with him, and writing letters or watching television at night. Federal prisoners on good behavior are given television privileges; Valachi had his own set simply because of his isolated confinement, and on it he had seen his appearances before the McClellan subcommittee. The show that offended him the most was
The Untouchables.
"It's all wrong," he told me. "How can they put on something like that?"

Valachi always maintained a certain pride. While I was an obvious source for some of die delicacies he fancied, he never asked me to bring him anything until I suggested it. Finally he agreed that I, as a New Yorker, might be able to get him some items not readily available in Washington. One was
capicole,
a spiced Neopolitan ham. Anodier was a cream pastry called
cannoli.
When he mentioned the
cannoli,
I told him that only a few nights before I had been to a first-rate Italian pastry shop on Manhattan's Grand Street, but I couldn't recall its name. As soon as he heard Grand Street, Valachi grinned and said, "That's Ferrara's. You're right. It's the best. Ah, you can't beat New York."

The same pride asserted itself once when Valachi flared at me. Throughout our talks the word "respect" had cropped up regularly. It symbolized the whole code of courtesy with all its subtle variations that exists in the Cosa Nostra regulating the behavior of Family to Family or member to member. One afternoon I arrived at the D.C. Jail to work with Valachi without having given him advance warning. Flis displeasure was quickly evident. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, "I didn't know you were coming. I would have shaved." I told him that it didn't make any difference to me. "Well," he said, "I want to show some respect."

Like almost everyone who spent any time with Valachi— guards, Justice Department lawyers, FBI agents—I grew quite fond of him. Indeed, after always greeting me with solicitous inquiries about my health, the well-being of my family, and my comfort during the flight down from New York, Valachi would sit opposite me, hands folded over his stomach, a pair of reading spectacles perched haphazardly on the end of his nose, and take on a positively benign appearance. All that was really needed to complete the picture was a circle of grandchildren around him waiting to hear an amusing story, and I never ceased to be starded at hearing myself say something like, "Joe, the last time you were telling me how Steve Franse was strangled in your kitchen. Could we go over that again?"

Rather than return him to prison, plans were in the works to transfer Valachi out of the country, most probably to the Turk Islands in die western Pacific, once held by the Japanese and now under U.S. control. This satisfied the requirement that he be both confined and protected and yet would reward his cooperation. The Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, anxious for more Cosa Nostra informers, was especially high on the idea since one of die critical elements in die intelligence Valachi supplied was a list of diose among his former colleagues who might be persuaded to talk.

Everything went by the boards, of course, when the White House, bowing to Italian-American pressure groups, determined to suppress publication of Valachi's story. And on March 22 he was suddenly yanked out of die relative comfort of die D.C. Jail and put back into the federal prison system at Milan, Michigan, forty miles southwest of Detroit. He was placed in a cell just big enough to pace eighteen feet in each direction. Its concrete walls were painted light blue. Three barred windows afforded a view of some of the Milan Prison's dingy red-brick buildings. A partition extending out about eight feet divided the cell in half. On one side there was an open toilet, a washbasin, and a shower stall. On the other side was an iron cot, a table with a radio on it, a television set, two chairs, a small wooden cabinet, and, draped over the rathator, his exerciser.

Here he was to have spent the rest of his life in solitary confinement.* When a member of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section first heard the news, he slammed his fist in furious frustration against the wall. "That is a great way to develop informers," he said. "I can just see myself now telling some guy we're trying to get to talk that he doesn't have to worry—that we'll take care of him."

In the unlikely event that Valachi is ever considered for parole, the earliest it could happen is in 1980, when he would be seventy-six. As a federal prisoner, he is limited to $15 a month spending money. Since, because of his isolation, he cannot earn this money as other convicts do in the prison workshops, he has been dependent on contributions from various people who started corresponding with him after his defection from the Cosa Nostra; they are, in die main, women who hail him for his "courage" or his decision "to make up for his past." The only other financial worry that has concerned him is his fear of receiving a pauper's burial.

One factor at the Milan prison remained the same as it had been at the D.C. Jail. He was surrounded by extraordinary security measures to guard his life. An almost endless series of locked doors cut him off not only from die outside world, but the rest of the

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"Two Michigan winters, however, proved too much for Valachi's health, and in July 1968, he was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at La Tuna, Texas, near the New Mexico border.

prison. His food tray, instead of being specially prepared for him was selected at random from die mess hall. Besides the normal bars, his windows were also covered with heavy wire mesh.

There was, however, another threat to his life that nobody had counted on—from Valachi himself. And early on the morning of April 11,1966, he ripped out the electric cord of his radio, stepped into his shower stall ostensibly to bathe, knotted one end of the cord to the shower head, and tried to hang himself.

That he failed was pure chance. A badly finished metal disk on the shower head had an edge just sharp enough at the right spot to slice through the cord under the dead weight of Valachi's dangling body. Then a guard on duty outside his cell door, solid steel save for a peephole, began to wonder why the shower had been turned on for so long, finally rushed in to investigate, and discovered the most celebrated prisoner in federal custody crumpled, barely conscious, on the floor of the stall.

I had been denied further access to Valachi once he was in Milan, but an exception was now made in the hope that I might help dissuade him from trying to take his life again. When I saw him, he still had a deep, ugly red line running three-quarters of the way around his neck where the cord had left its mark. His left ankle was still quite swollen after catching the force of his fall. Both knees and his left shoulder were black and blue from slamming into the sides and floor of the stall.

Why would such a prize catch of the federal government, guarded night and day for his own protection, want to kill himself? The reason was as ugly as die red line on his neck. Valachi's entire adult life had been conditioned by the belief that the Cosa Nostra was invincible. Having openly defied it, however, the idea that his story would be published was final proof to him that he might have been wrong—that there were forces in this country immune to its power and influence. Now suddenly, from this point of view at least, none of this seemed to be so. On April 6, two weeks following his transfer from Washington to Milan, Valachi was told that the whole thing was off. For good measure he was also deprived of his precious hot plate, a small matter perhaps, but a perfect symbol for him of his abrupt fall from grace. Five days later he made his suicide try.

During my visit widi him afterward— it was the last time I was allowed to see him—I found a bewildered man. "I don't understand," he said. "From doing right, all of a sudden I'm doing wrong."

The fact of Valachi's
nearly total recall is undeniable. Except for minor memory lapses, his FBI interrogations checked out on every verifiable point. I can attest to this because I read die reports on these interrogations at the Westchester County Jail and Fort Monmouth exactly as they came into Washington before they were documented. And beyond the areas of interest to law enforcement officers, it is virtually impossible to fault Valachi on even the most obscure details in his story — die name of a policeman who arrested him in die 1920s, a tabloid headline in the early 1930s, the price on a race one of his horses won in the 1940s.

In this regard, I got my own comeuppance. During one of my interviews with Valachi, he launched into a brief account of a power struggle over the control of jukeboxes in Westchester County. As a result of tins, a boyhood pal of Valachi's named Charles Lichtman, who was not in die Cosa Nostt'a, was forced out of die action. But for old time's sake, he decided to see what he could do for Lichtman—without success as it turned out. Since the episode did not seem terribly important, I was in the middle of changing the subject when Valachi tossed in a cryptic remark that his friend Lichtman had told Senator McClellan "all about me."

That evening I searched all through the McClellan subcommittee hearings on Valachi, but I could not find any mention of a "Lichtman." I was sure that at last I had caught Valachi in a flight of fancy, however inconsequential. Then, a few days later, I recalled that there had been another McClellan subcommittee investigation—into underworld influences in the labor-management field — which had taken place several years earlier. And there indeed, lost and forgotten in literally hundreds of thousands of words of testimony, was an appearance by one Charles Lichtman. He was questioned by none other than Robert Kennedy, at the time chief counsel for the subcommittee, on December 4, 1958 — long before anyone ever heard of Valachi in his present role. It follows here in part:

Kennedy:

LlCI ITMAN:

Kennedy
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man
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Lichtman Kennedy:

Now you still decided you wanted to get your jukebox union back, and did you go back up there? I went back there a number of times, but I found out that Mr. Getlan had a pretty good hold on it because he had brought some mobsters into the picture.

You talked to a man named Valachi? Yes, sir.

Who is Valachi?

I happened to know Valachi from around Harlem. He thought he could straighten it up for me. He is an associate of Anthony Strollo, alias "Tony Bender" and an associate of Vincent Mauro. He was convicted of violation of the Federal narcotics laws in

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy:
LlCHTMAN:

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy

LlCHTMAN

Kennedy:

1956 and sentenced to five years. He has 17 arrests and 5 convictions. He told you he could straighten it out? Yes, sir.

What happened then?

So he had me go up to a bar on 180th Street and Southern Boulevard. I sat out front at the bar. Who met at the bar?

Well, I met Getlan there and I saw this Blackie.

Then Mr. Valachi came and they went into the backroom and they had a meeting.

Who was in the backroom?

I don't know who else was there.

Did you know Jimmy "Blue Eyes" Alo was in the