The Strength of the Wolf (51 page)

Although increasingly apprehensive, Valachi still feigned innocence. But a few days later he heard through the prison grapevine that Joey DiPalermo had accepted a contract to kill him, and that's when he cracked. Valachi wrote a plaintive letter to Gaffney, promising to tell all in exchange for protection. But his probation officer sat on the letter and on 22 June 1962, thinking that DiPalermo was about to attack him in the prison yard, Valachi clubbed to death an ill-fated check forger in a sad case of mistaken identity. Later that day a US marshal at the prison notified Gaffney about the murder, and Gaffney immediately sent Frank Selvaggi to Atlanta. Valachi told Selvaggi that he was afraid for his life, and wanted to make a deal. Informed of the situation, Morgenthau in mid-July had Selvaggi escort Valachi to the Westchester County jail, where he was admitted under an alias. “This action,” Gaffney emphasizes, “tipped the scales and assured Valachi's cooperation.”

At the Westchester County jail, Selvaggi, Gaffney, and Pat Ward began a slow and steady interrogation of Valachi. “I asked him when he joined the Mafia,” Gaffney recalls. “ ‘Right after the war,' he said. ‘Which war?' I replied: ‘World War One or World War Two?'

“ ‘You don't understand,' he said. ‘Right after the war with Chicago.' ”

Intelligence of a more significant nature would soon start flowing from Valachi's pliable memory banks, including a flowchart of the Mafia's organizational structure, details of unsolved murders and ongoing dope deals, and the names of public officials on the Mafia's payroll. “He offered to make up names,” Selvaggi says with contempt. “With Valachi, the mob lost its honor.”

While Joe Valachi was revealing the Mafia's innermost secrets, political developments were negating what should have been a major coup for the FBN. The problem began when George Gaffney became the FBN's enforcement assistant in August 1962 – at the same time Giordano was appointed Commissioner and Siragusa became his deputy. The promotion was based on Gaffney's substantial achievements in New York, but it was also a result of his friendship with NYPD narcotic detective Tommy O'Brien, who had served as an investigator for Bobby Kennedy at the McClellan Committee. “Tommy and I worked as a team for six years,” Gaffney recalls, “and when Bobby wanted information on the mob Tommy would tell him to check with me.”

At Gaffney's invitation, Bobby went along on an FBN drug bust. Ethel Kennedy in turn invited Gaffney and his wife to dinner, and it wasn't long before the two Irish American pit bulls formed a friendship. Thus, Gaffney says, he had “no choice” but to take the job when Kennedy arranged his promotion. And once he had accepted the job, he felt obligated to present the FBN in the very best light, so he voluntarily briefed Bobby about Valachi's potential. Unfortunately for the FBN, Bobby told Organized Crime chief William Hundley. Eager to reap the political profits that would come from putting Valachi on the witness stand in public during televised congressional hearings, Hundley went to FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano and asked for written reports of Valachi's interrogations at the Westchester County jail. And that's when Valachi began to slip out of George Gaffney's hands.

As Frank Selvaggi recalls, “Gaffney called me at home and said, ‘Giordano wants it on paper.' ” Selvaggi cringes. “So I did it. I sat there while Valachi rambled on, and I typed up a bunch of bullshit, including the possibility that he could make some more cases, including one against Harry Tantillo, who worked with Frank Borelli and Carmine Locascio.”

Here it's only fair to acknowledge that Gaffney had landed in Washington just as the Cuban Missile Crisis took America to the brink of
nuclear war. The nation's survival was thought to be at stake, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy were scrambling to prevent Armageddon. When the crisis passed, Bobby sought revenge against Castro through Operation Mongoose, the covert action program under General Edward Lansdale, with its CIA assassination component under William Harvey, and the “criminal elements” it used to murder and maim Cuban intelligence officials.
¹

Corrupted by power and vengeance, Bobby lost his effectiveness as the country's chief law enforcement official. He even sacrificed his personal integrity, succumbing to the charms of actress Marilyn Monroe, whose suspicious death by a drug overdose shocked the nation in August 1962.
²

Bobby knew that he was playing with fire, but what he hadn't been told by his mortal foe, J. Edgar Hoover, was that Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante were plotting bloody treason. In late summer 1962, Marcello told Edward Becker, a businessman from California, that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated, and that a ‘nut' was going to be hired to handle the job.
³
Two weeks later in Miami, Trafficante told Jose Aleman, a wealthy Cuban exile and underworld financier, that JFK was “going to be hit” before the 1964 elections.
⁴
Though Becker and Aleman informed the FBI of their allegations, Hoover found no reason to alert the Attorney General, or the president, or to take any preventative action.
⁵

Kennedy's aides were, however, aware that Jimmy Hoffa was boasting about his plans to kill Bobby. In September 1962 they had been told that a Louisiana Teamster official, Edward Partin, had overheard Hoffa discuss “two separate murder plans aimed at Robert Kennedy.”
⁶
Partin's claims were taken seriously after he passed a polygraph test, but Bobby may have dismissed Hoffa's threats as the ranting of a wild man who'd been backed into a corner.
⁷

Gaffney, of course, had no knowledge of the deadly intrigues swirling around the Kennedys, nor could he have anticipated the consequences of suggesting that Valachi might make cases against more hoods – perhaps even some million-dollar men working for the FBI and CIA.

“Bobby asked if the Justice Department could build an all-encompassing conspiracy case out of Valachi's testimony,” Gaffney recalls, “and I said, ‘Yes.' But I added that Valachi was seeking a presidential pardon, and that we couldn't actually convict anyone on his testimony.” Gaffney pauses. “Bobby was satisfied, and was content to let the FBN handle it. But Hundley went straight to the FBI, and they asked him for Valachi. Hundley asked Bobby's permission to do so and,” Gaffney says forlornly, “Bobby asked me if they could have a chat with him.”

On 10 September 1962, FBI Agent James Flynn was introduced to Joe Valachi at the Westchester County jail. “The next thing we knew,” Gaffney complains, “the FBI was saying that Valachi's knowledge of the Mafia transcended narcotics, and they began to petition the Justice Department to have him taken away from Selvaggi, into their safekeeping.”

“The next thing
I
know,” Selvaggi recalls, “Flynn is telling Valachi not to tell
me
anything.” He shrugs. “Valachi knew the FBI could do more for him, so he started bad-mouthing me and the FBN, and backing off the cases he promised to make. Finally I came back one day and found that he'd been moved to a prison at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Flynn never even told me.”

After February 1963, the FBN was no longer allowed to see Valachi. “Anything we wanted after that,” Gaffney explains, “we had to get through the FBI. Then Flynn and Agent Moynihan start debriefing Valachi – two Irish guys who didn't speak Italian and couldn't possibly understand, the way Frank understood, the subtle meanings of what he said.” Chuckling, Gaffney says, “We used to say you had to take the handcuffs off an Italian before you could interrogate him.

“So Flynn and Moynihan come up with La Causa Nostra, ‘The Our Cause,' which they later switched to La Cosa Nostra, ‘The Our Thing.' What Valachi was referring to was an activity that his faction was engaged in at the time: drug dealing was ‘our thing' at the time. But the FBI felt they needed a different name, because we'd been calling it the Mafia for years, and they didn't want to appear to be stealing our thunder. Which they were.”

“First they nullified me,” Selvaggi says, “then they handed my reports to [author] Peter Maas [who wrote the FBI-approved biography of Joe Valachi].” Very seriously he says, “Valachi was not the guy Maas describes in his book. Valachi was a treacherous opportunist who killed two dozen people. Then the Senate wines and dines him, and he tells them, ‘Selagusa hung me.' ”

The FBN agent who did more damage to the Mafia than anyone else stares off into the distance. “Valachi tells the senators I'm connected to the Bronx mob.”

In June 1963, Joe Valachi began his nationally televised testimony to Congress, on behalf of William Hundley, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI,
about the existence of a second underworld government, “The Our Thing,” run by the usual Italian suspects.

“The Valachi Hearings were beginning,” Frank Selvaggi says, “and Gaffney calls me down to DC. As I step off the plane, I'm met by two New York detectives who are working for the McClellan Committee. They act like they're going to put the cuffs on me. I ask them what's going on. Well, it's a big joke, and they won't say, but a few hours later I see Pat O'Carroll at the Treasury Department's training school. Pat says, ‘I hear you're in trouble.' ”

As Selvaggi soon discovered, Joe Valachi had told Senator John McClellan that he was a made member of the Bronx mob. And McClellan believed him.

As George Gaffney recalls, “I was summoned to Senator McClellan's office early in the afternoon. Senators Mundt and Brewster were there too, and McClellan told me about Valachi's accusation. I don't recall if he'd made the accusation directly to the Committee, or if they'd been told by one of Valachi's FBI handlers. In any case, I responded by elaborating on Frank's background, with every detail I could recall. I made them aware, for the first time, that Valachi had been Frank's informant since 1958. I told them that Frank had initiated the case that resulted in Valachi's conviction, that he had captured Valachi after he jumped bail, and that Valachi, in typical Italian fashion, was trying to get even with his long-time adversary.

“When I left the Senator's office I found Charlie Siragusa seated in a chair in the outer office. I briefed him on what had transpired. He was mad as hell, and directed his anger at an individual in the Organized Crime group.

“Later that afternoon, I received a telephone call from Senator McClellan. He told me that he had contacted the appropriate Justice Department official [William Hundley], and had told him that his Committee attached no credence to Valachi's attack on Frank's integrity. The Senator expressed his appreciation for the insights into Valachi, and said that Frank should be commended. As Giordano was out of town, Siragusa and I agreed that the incident should not be made a matter of record in Frank's file. We also agreed not to tell him.”

Selvaggi's curt laugh reflects his surprise and exasperation when told of Gaffney's account. “I stayed with Charlie while I was in Washington,” Selvaggi says, with a trace of indignation, “and he told me that Valachi had said I was with the Bronx mob. Charlie said to me, ‘Frank, they're coming after you.' And that's when he asked me to go with him to the Illinois
Crime Commission as his chief investigator. But my wife didn't want to leave her family in New York, and I loved my job.”

It's hard to believe that a man of George Gaffney's ambition and drive did not want to go to Washington to become the FBN's enforcement assistant. But the only reason he took the job, he says, was because Jim Reed, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for law enforcement, told him that Bobby Kennedy insisted. “So I went,” he says dejectedly, “but all the love I had for the job evaporated when I moved my family to Washington. The challenges were all behind. It was just shuffling papers and calming down congressmen, and I almost resigned.”

Likewise, it's hard to believe that a man of Gaffney's extraordinary willpower couldn't say no to Bobby Kennedy, or anybody else for that matter. One gets the feeling that his regrets might have arisen afterwards, upon reflection – for it is a fact that his decision to go to Washington was a big mistake, in several ways. To begin with, his transfer left a temporary leadership void in New York, where the FBN's ability to conduct narcotics investigations was further impaired by the formation of the notorious Gambling Squad.

As Gaffney recalls: “The Justice Department wasn't happy with the way IRS was investigating gambling, numbers, and off-track betting, so new federal laws were enacted that gave Justice control over interstate gambling and racketeering. Then Morgenthau came up with the idea of a Gambling Squad, and he asked us to contribute a squad of agents in New York. I opposed it on the grounds that we'd alienate the IRS Intelligence Unit, and I was also concerned about problems with the NYPD vice squad people, who would certainly resent us for intruding on their turf. But again I was overruled, and a special squad was set up in New York under Pat Ward.”

“The underlying idea for the Gambling Squad,” Frank Selvaggi explains, “is that there's a connection between gambling and junk. Gambling's an addiction, and some gamblers deal drugs so they can lose money in crap games, or at the racetrack, or betting on the numbers. And some gamblers – whether they deal narcotics or not – make good informants. I had one,” Selvaggi says. “He's sitting in a room, hedging bets. He's an illegal alien and doesn't know anything about junk, but he knows who the dealers are, because they're in the same room. He hears things.”

In order to exploit this connection between drug dealing and gambling, especially the bookmaking industry in New York, US Attorney Robert Morgenthau authorized the formation of the Gambling Squad in the autumn of 1962. He asked Bill Tendy, the US Attorney in charge of the “Junk Squad,” to put it together. Tendy in turn picked his friend, Pat Ward, to run the Gambling Squad, and he gave Ward the job of selecting the ten best FBN agents to flesh it out.