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Maas sued the government, and after months of legal wrangling, a federal judge ruled that while the Justice Department could prevent Valachi from publishing his memoirs, it couldn’t prohibit Maas from writing a book based on his interviews.
The Valachi Papers
was published in 1968 and became a national best-seller.

After several months in Michigan, Shur arranged for Valachi to be moved to a medium-security prison in La Tuna, Texas, where he was put into two cells that had been converted into a single one on the second floor of the prison hospital. This arrangement gave him a bedroom and living room area. A third cell was made into an exercise room and contained a hot plate, microwave, and refrigerator. “We couldn’t risk having him in a cell block with other inmates because they’d have killed him,” recalled J. D. Williams, who was Valachi’s case manager at the prison. “Sometimes at night, we’d take him up on the hospital roof so he could be outdoors.” The guards called his cell “the Valachi Suite”—an ironic description for his bitterly lonely quarters. “I felt sorry for him,” said Williams. “He had once lived high on the hog and now he was all alone.” Then a prison doctor discovered Valachi had developed testicular cancer. “That bothered him, but not as much as when his girlfriend stopped coming to see him,” said Williams. She had been visiting him once a month, but the trip had become too expensive for her. The government turned down Valachi’s request for parole. Shur tried to visit Valachi whenever he could, but he was too busy with his career to do this often. “For the rest of us, life continued to move on. Joe’s didn’t.” The last time Shur saw him was in 1971. Valachi, who had spent eight years in prison by then, was now sixty-eight. “I knew something was wrong because his copies of the New York
Daily News
were stacked unopened in a corner of
his cell and he didn’t pay any attention to the cheeses I brought him.” As Shur was leaving, Valachi touched his arm. “I did the right thing, didn’t I, Gerry?” he asked.

“You did a great thing,” Shur replied.

“You’ll tell Hundley, won’t you?”

Two months later Valachi died of cancer. A woman who had been writing him for several years arranged to have him buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery near Niagara Falls. She didn’t put a headstone on the grave because she was afraid the mob would destroy it.

“Valachi was a tragic figure,” Shur said. “To me, he personified both good and evil, and he gave me my first inkling that a cold-blooded killer could also have a warm heart. There would be others in years to come who would give us better information, but he was the first to open the door.”

P
resident Lyndon Johnson had his own priorities, and in early 1964 fighting organized crime wasn’t at the top of his list. The nation was being torn apart by racial unrest, and he was determined to pass a civil rights bill. Even though it was against the law for federal employees to lobby Congress, Shur and a few of his colleagues were dispatched to the Capitol to give “advice” when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was ready to be put to a vote. After it squeaked through, Johnson took the unusual step of sending Justice Department attorneys into the South to make certain the new law was followed. Shur stayed behind, continuing to work on the department’s now deemphasized fight against organized crime. With the Kennedys gone, federal agencies began feuding again, and several disgruntled U.S. attorneys urged the White House to reel in Shur and his irritating Organized Crime and Racketeering Section comrades. The discovery that the FBI and other federal agencies routinely used illegal wiretaps to eavesdrop on suspected mobsters irked Congress. Morale in OCRS plunged. Within a year, one-fourth of Kennedy’s handpicked staff resigned.

In the midst of this turmoil, Shur urged his bosses to start two new programs. “I began writing memos telling people we needed to set up a program to protect
government witnesses. I wasn’t just thinking about criminals. I was thinking about honest citizens, too, people like the Long Island trucking company owner whom I’d asked to testify against Sonny Franzese. I thought we needed to establish a safe house somewhere—a place where we could hide witnesses so the mob couldn’t find them before a trial. Unfortunately, the general feeling was that there simply wasn’t much need for a witness protection program because there weren’t a lot of mobsters out there willing to testify against the Mafia.”

Shur’s second idea got an equally tepid response. He wanted the OCRS to automate the old-fashioned index card system it used to keep track of mobsters. For years, Winifred “Win” Willse, a no-nonsense ex–New York City cop who had read every report submitted to OCRS, had had her staff pull out whatever details she thought were important and record them on five-by-eight-inch cards. “If Joe Racketeer owned a funeral home and was visited by Sam Racketeer, Willse’s clerks would fill out one index card for Joe, one for Sam, and one for the funeral home; then the cards were cross-referenced,” Shur recalled. By 1964, Willse had compiled four hundred thousand cards divided into fifty categories. They contained three hundred thousand names, but much of the information was impossible to access because the index cards were so cumbersome. “It was a database that screamed out for automation,” Shur recalled, “but computers were not part of most people’s daily lives back then.” He had been interested in computers since his college days, and he prodded his bosses to computerize the information. “No one else in the entire federal government is collecting the LCN information we now collect,” he
explained in a memo, “but this information is useless unless we can process and understand it.”

While his bosses at the OCRS were sympathetic, they told Shur there wasn’t enough money in their budget to computerize the information. They did toss him a scrap, however. If he could find a way to finance his idea, they would be happy to back it. Shur turned to the FBI for help, but it and the other investigative agencies whose doors he knocked on turned him down. “Most of them didn’t want to share the information they had collected about organized crime with us in the first place, and the last thing they wanted us to develop was a centralized, computerized system,” he explained. “That would give the OCRS way too much power.” Undeterred, Shur switched tactics. The Justice Department’s mainframe computer was being used only by its payroll office, so he suggested the OCRS borrow a programmer from payroll for ninety days. “I thought: ‘If I can get at least one programmer interested and some of the information on the cards processed by the mainframe computer, then I can prove just how useful an automated intelligence system can be.’ ” The department’s bean counters said no.

During the next two years, Shur would write countless memos and repeatedly push to get the outdated index card system modernized. It became a personal crusade. Meanwhile, his boss, Henry Petersen, who succeeded Hundley as chief of the OCRS, and another OCRS attorney, Robert Peloquin, came up with a new plan in 1964 to rejuvenate the section’s pursuit of the mob. One way to stop the bickering between federal agencies, they decided, was by putting an investigator from each agency onto a special team, called a strike force, and assigning that team to attack a specific target. While this had not been done before, several
years earlier Robert Kennedy created a Justice Department task force of which Peloquin was a member; its only assignment was to indict Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. It had taken the “Hoffa Unit” four years, but it had finally gotten its man. Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and fraud after he was caught collecting kickbacks from Las Vegas casino owners in return for union loans.

Petersen and Peloquin recruited investigators for the first strike force from six agencies: the Bureau of Narcotics, the Customs Service, the Labor Department, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Hoover’s FBI refused to join. Peloquin, who was put in charge, added five OCRS attorneys to the roster. He also decided New York City was too big a target. “We wanted a city small enough so we could tell whether or not the strike force was doing any good,” recalled Thomas Kennelly, the OCRS attorney whom Peloquin selected as his second-in-command. “Someone suggested Buffalo, New York, and it seemed perfect.” The LCN there was controlled by Stefano Magaddino, who was serving as the boss of bosses while Vito Genovese was in prison. The Magaddino crime family had around 150 members. “That made it a small enough target to be manageable,” Kennelly said. There was another reason Buffalo was appealing: Only two mobsters had been prosecuted there in the previous decade. “Anything we did was bound to be an improvement,” he pointed out.

Although Magaddino was seventy-five years old in November 1966, when the strike force hit town, he still held a steel grip on the city’s throat. He had begun his nearly fifty-year reign during Prohibition, when he
used guns and muscle to become Buffalo’s biggest bootlegger. Since then, he had murdered several would-be successors and survived two assassination attempts—his sister had been blown to pieces by a bomb in a package delivered by mistake to her house, which was next door to his, and a hand grenade tossed into his kitchen through a window had failed to explode.

Even by the mob’s twisted standards, the illiterate Magaddino was considered vicious. The most shocking example the strike force uncovered was the 1961 killing of Albert Agueci, who along with his brother, Vito, was a drug trafficker. The two brothers had been paying Magaddino for protection from the police, but the crime boss turned his back on them when they were arrested for their drug activities. Albert Agueci threatened Magaddino, saying that if he didn’t use his connections to free them, Agueci would squeal to the FBI about the crime boss’s operations. Magaddino ordered him killed. Albert’s badly burned body was found a few days later in a barn. An estimated forty pounds of flesh had been carved from it. His arms and legs had been broken, his jaw shattered, and half of his teeth knocked out. All of this had apparently been done while he was still alive. He had then been strangled with a clothesline and his remains doused with gasoline and set on fire.

The strike force spent its first three months in Buffalo buttering up local agents who resented its intrusion into their jurisdiction. “The local Bureau of Narcotics agent wouldn’t even talk to me,” recalled Peloquin. The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo office was more belligerent. “He wrote letters criticizing our every move to Director Hoover, who then sent them to the attorney general, who then sent them to me,” said Peloquin. “I adopted a policy: If he wrote
ten pages complaining about us, our answer had to be eleven pages long. We always wanted our replies to be one more page than his letters.”

Unlike the local agents, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were eager to cooperate because the Magaddino crime family also operated over the border in Canada. It sent a Mountie to work with the strike force, and one day he volunteered to sweep its offices for electronic bugs. Sure enough, he found a microphone hidden in a conference room, but it hadn’t been planted by the Magaddino mob. “It belonged to the FBI,” recalled Donald Campbell, another strike force attorney.

With few local sources, the strike force’s investigation sputtered and stalled. Then it got a lucky break. Sam Giambrone, a Buffalo police sergeant, told the strike force that a Magaddino crime member might be willing to cooperate, but only if certain conditions were met. Pascal “Paddy” Calabrese, who was serving a five-year prison sentence for a daring daylight robbery in the city hall treasurer’s office, wanted out of prison. He also wanted his girlfriend and her children moved out of Buffalo and given new identities so Magaddino couldn’t find them. He was willing to deal only with Giambrone and federal agents because he knew Magaddino had several Buffalo cops on his payroll. Initially, Giambrone had taken Calabrese’s offer to the FBI, but its agents said their office wasn’t equipped to relocate a family. His next try had been the strike force, and Peloquin jumped at the chance.

Calabrese was angry at the mob, he said, because Magaddino had abandoned him as soon as he was arrested, just as he had the dope-dealing Agueci brothers. The difference was that Calabrese was a made LCN
member. “A basic tenet of the LCN was that if a member got into trouble, the crime family was supposed to take care of his family while he was doing time in prison,” said Peloquin, “but Magaddino was a cheap old man.” Sergeant Giambrone had given money from his own pocket to Calabrese’s destitute girlfriend, Rochelle, so she could buy food and presents for her children at Christmastime, and it was that generous act that had finally swayed Calabrese.

In a secret meeting on February 27, 1967, Calabrese identified every major criminal in the Magaddino family and told the strike force about numerous crimes the Buffalo LCN had committed. Although he couldn’t tie Magaddino directly to these crimes, he was able to implicate his top two underlings: Freddy Randaccio and Patsy Natarelli. Both were juicy targets. Randaccio was believed to be the murderer who had tortured and executed Agueci, and Natarelli was known for sticking an ice pick into the ears of borrowers who had gotten behind in their repayments to Magaddino’s loan sharks. Convicting them would deal a major blow to the Magaddino organization. Just as important, it would prove that the strike force concept worked. But first Calabrese’s girlfriend and children had to be spirited out of Buffalo.

The strike force moved fast. “We called Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and he got us permission from the Department of Defense to hide the family on a military base,” Thomas Kennelly recalled. Racing to Rochelle’s apartment, the team hustled her and her children into unmarked black cars and sped away. Their final destination was the tiny Strategic Air Command post outside Presque Isle, Maine, where Rochelle was given an alias and housed in a bungalow usually reserved for married naval officers. Her neighbors were
told that her husband was a marine pilot on a secret overseas mission. Even the base commander didn’t know the truth. Simultaneously, Calabrese was taken from his cell in the Elmira Reformatory under heavy guard and brought to the “Valachi Suite” inside the federal prison in La Tuna, Texas, for safekeeping. Only the warden knew his true identity.