Background
Joseph Valachi was born on September 22, 1904, in predominantly Italian East Harlem in New York City to Dominick Valachi and Marie Casale, immigrants from Naples, Italy. His father, a day laborer, often was unable to pay the rent.
Joseph Valachi was born on September 22, 1904, in predominantly Italian East Harlem in New York City to Dominick Valachi and Marie Casale, immigrants from Naples, Italy. His father, a day laborer, often was unable to pay the rent.
Valachi's income came primarily from slot machines, which he purchased with permission from Luciano's lieutenant, Vito Genovese. When police, under orders from reformist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, cracked down on the illegal machines in the mid 1930's, Valachi got Genovese's permission to start an illegal numbers lottery and later turned to Luciano for financing. He was arrested in 1936, but received a suspended sentence after his previous arrest record was withheld from the judge thanks to Mafia intervention, Valachi said.
A loanshark who dealt mostly with bookmakers, Valachi became a partner in a clothing company whose owner was unable to repay a loan. Although some mafiosi disdained drug trafficking, Valachi in 1959 received a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence on a narcotics conviction. He wound up in federal prison in Atlanta along with Genovese, who had become boss of the Luciano family and was also serving time for narcotics dealing. When a fellow prisoner with mob connections accused Valachi of being an informer for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Valachi feared for his life.
When he was confronted by an inmate he mistook for Joseph DiPalermo, a Genovese family assassin, Valachi attacked first, beating the man to death with a lead pipe. Valachi was convicted of second-degree murder with life imprisonment. He escaped the death penalty by agreeing to cooperate with investigators and testify before Senator John L. McClellan's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. When he began testifying in September 1963, Valachi became the first member of the Mafia ever to testify willingly in public about the nature of the organization.
No one had ever violated the Mafia's vow of silence so flagrantly, and certainly not on television. He described a secret criminal society with initiation rites, an oath of secrecy, and a leadership hierarchy. It consisted of "families, " he explained, each with its own boss, underboss, caporegimes ("lieutenants"), and soldiers. He named hundreds of these men, all of Italian descent. Orders passed down the chain of command; money passed up.
The most powerful bosses sat on a commission that regulated interfamily disputes. Ralph Salerno, a New York police detective who specialized in organized crime, later wrote that "Many of the incidents Valachi described had been known to police, but Valachi was able to fill in the gaps and connect one incident to another. Valachi drew a schematic picture of the organization, described it, and told how it worked.
The police, for example, had long realized that certain underworld figures were often seen with each other, but they did not realize that these were formal, not casual, associations, relationships of rank in a system governed by rules and regulations. The pattern that Valachi furnished made it possible for police intelligence men to begin to see the dimensions of syndicated crime and stop looking at it as a series of unconnected cases. " Valachi used the term "Cosa Nostra" ("Our Thing" in Italian) to describe what the rest of society commonly called the Mafia.
In fact, the term was merely one of many used by Italian-American gangsters. Joseph Bonanno, founder of one of New York's five Mafia families, later wrote: "The reason there is no formal term to describe it is that there never was a formal organization to describe. We're talking about a tradition, a way of life, a process. "
Indeed, Valachi was a street-level criminal who for the most part was simply recounting what had been told to him by other New York City mobsters, many of dubious credibility.
The FBI, whose director J. Edgar Hoover had denied the existence of a national Mafia conspiracy, began investigations, and so did local law enforcers. At the end of 1966 a survey showed that in the three years following Valachi's testimony more gangsters in metropolitan New York had been jailed than in the previous thirty years.
Valachi attempted suicide in prison in 1966. He died five years later of a heart attack at a federal prison in El Paso, Texas, embittered, lonely, and sick. His wife and son refused to claim his body; his remains were collected by Marie Jackson, a woman with whom he had corresponded but had never met. His body was shipped secretly to Niagara Falls, New York, and buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery nearby.
Barely literate, Valachi lacked perspective on organized crime and the world in general. When asked during the Senate hearings about organized crime in Omaha, Valachi appeared to think for a moment, then turned to a Justice Department official next to him and whispered, "Where the hell is Omaha?" Whatever its reliability, Valachi's televised testimony helped make the Mafia a priority for law enforcers.
Quotations:
“You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy. ”
“You live by the gun and knife, and die by the gun and knife. "
Valachi was five feet, four inches tall and weighed 145 pounds but gained another 50 pounds during his long imprisonment. He spoke with a thick, gravelly voice and chainsmoked cigarettes.
Valachi was married to Mildred Reina, daughter of a Mafia boss who was murdered in 1930. The couple had one child. In July 1932, Valachi married Carmela Reina, the eldest daughter of Gaetano Reina.
