Witsec (6 page)

“We have achieved what we believe to be a major breakthrough,” Shur declared in his opening sentence. “We can now state that a national criminal organization does, in fact, exist. Of this, there can no longer be any doubt.” This sentence was aimed directly at J. Edgar Hoover’s long-standing claim that there was no organized crime in America. (In one of the slickest public relations moves ever, Hoover would later insist that reporters had misunderstood what he had been saying for thirty years, and he would use Valachi’s disclosures as a way to save face. One of Valachi’s revelations was that the actual name of organized crime was not the Mafia but La Cosa Nostra [LCN]—meaning “our thing”—and Hoover used this difference in terminology in his defense. He had always known there was a national syndicate, he declared, but it wasn’t named the
Mafia
. To this day, FBI agents are taught to call organized crime the LCN, not the Mafia. It is part of Hoover’s save-face legacy.)

Continuing with his summary, Shur explained that only Italians could be inducted into the mob.

Shur listed thirteen rules that Valachi said members were required to follow, including six punishable by death if violated.

Shur went on to outline the organizational structure of the LCN and to identify the crime bosses on the mob’s “national commission.” He was exhausted when he finished, but he was pleased with himself. Only later would he realize that he had misspelled the name of the mob throughout his entire report, writing it as La
Causa
Nostra. His bosses never mentioned it.

Rumors swirled through Washington and New York during the summer of 1963 that a mobster had betrayed
omertà
. When Miriam Ottenberg, a reporter for
the
Washington Star
, identified Valachi in a front-page story, the Justice Department moved the mobster from a county jail outside Manhattan to Washington for safekeeping. He was the only inmate on the top floor of the downtown District of Columbia jail. The city’s electric chair was located right next to his cell, and Valachi would sit in it as a joke whenever he had a visitor. There weren’t many. No one was permitted to talk to the mobster without the permission of William Hundley, who had returned to oversee the OCRS when Edwyn Silberling resigned after spending a year in the job. “Valachi called me his
goombata
,” Hundley recalled in an interview. “I’ve never told anyone about this before, but Jim McShane, the chief marshal in charge of the jail, and I used to sneak Valachi out of his cell at night and take him to Italian restaurants in town to eat. Can you imagine that? The mob has a price on this guy’s head and we were taking him out for linguine.”

Like most Mafia witnesses who would follow him, Valachi claimed he had not betrayed the mob until it first betrayed him. Valachi’s break with the LCN had come on June 22, 1962, when he grabbed a piece of iron pipe in the prison yard at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, and beat another convict to death with it. Fifteen minutes later he discovered he had murdered the wrong man. He had been trying to kill Joseph DiPalermo, a mob hit man. Instead, he murdered Joseph Saupp, a forger with no mob ties who happened to resemble DiPalermo. Valachi was convinced DiPalermo was out to kill him on orders from New York crime boss Vito Genovese, who suspected Valachi of being a police informant. When prosecutors said they were going to seek the death penalty for Saupp’s
murder, Valachi offered to talk. In return, he was given a life sentence.

“Bobby Kennedy had a special relationship with the McClellan Committee, and Senator McClellan began pressuring him to have Valachi testify before his committee,” Hundley recalled. “This was going to be the first time Valachi had ever appeared in public. I opposed having him testify because I was still hopeful we might be able to make some criminal cases based on what Valachi had told the FBI, but frankly we weren’t having much luck. A lot of what Valachi said was hearsay, or we were barred by the statute of limitations from going after people he named.”

Kennedy and Hundley met privately with Valachi, and he agreed to testify before the committee. “Kennedy and I cut a deal with Valachi that the press was never told. It was a handshake agreement. Kennedy told Valachi that if he testified before Congress, the government would put him and his girlfriend on a Pacific Island after we were done with him.” Kennedy had already picked out an island in the western Pacific that had once been held by the Japanese but was now under U.S. control. “Valachi would be safe there and be able to serve his life sentence.”

Valachi’s testimony in September and October 1963 was so riveting that crowds gathered on sidewalks outside store windows where merchants put television sets so people who didn’t own them could watch the proceedings. A big, hulking figure, Valachi chilled viewers as he matter-of-factly described in his raspy voice cold-blooded murders he had participated in. Hundley believed Valachi had killed at least forty other gangsters. “If Genovese wanted someone knocked off in another crime family, he used Valachi,” Hundley said, “but Valachi would never admit it to me
because he knew there was no statute of limitations on murder. Instead, he always took the position that he was driving the car and someone else did the actual killing.” One morning Hundley took him aside and urged him to confess that he had been a “hitter.”

“Joe, under the law, the guy who drives the getaway car is just as guilty as the hit man,” Hundley told him, “so why don’t you cut out this nonsense about being the driver and tell the public the truth?”

Later that morning, a senator asked Valachi if he was sugarcoating his testimony about the murders he had witnessed. “Senator, it is my understanding that the person driving the car is just as guilty as the one who pulls the trigger,” Valachi replied, “so if I were a hit man, there would be no reason for me to hide it. But Senator, I’m telling you, I was only a driver.”

Hundley, who was sitting near Valachi, was struck by how convincing he sounded. “This guy had no formal education. But in those few minutes, he had twisted the information I had given him and used it to his advantage to make his claim even stronger. He was incredibly street-smart.”

The LCN was not nearly as impressed. When a tabloid reporter asked a known Brooklyn gangster for his opinion of Valachi, the mobster pointed out that Valachi’s nickname was “Joe Cago.” Valachi claimed he had been given the nickname as a kid because he used to build scooters out of cargo crates. “They called me ‘Joe Cargo,’ ” he said, and when he later joined the mob, Cargo was corrupted to Cago. But the Brooklyn gangster said the word
cago
in Italian meant “shit,” and “this is exactly what Joe Valachi is.”

A month after Valachi testified, Hundley, Shur, and other OCRS attorneys were briefing Robert Kennedy in his office about ongoing LCN cases when
the attorney general excused himself for a lunch meeting. A few minutes later, Shur got a frantic call in his office from Miriam.

“President Kennedy has been shot!” she told him.

A stunned Shur turned on his radio and heard newscasters confirm that John F. Kennedy was dead. “There were rumors the LCN was behind the assassination because Bobby Kennedy was being so tough on the mob,” he recalled. “We were ordered to comb through our files right away and look for any possible link. We couldn’t find any.” When Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was gunned down by Jack Ruby two days later, Shur was sent to check the records again. “We found evidence that Ruby had been on the fringes of organized crime, but there was nothing in any of our files of consequence.”

Robert Kennedy continued as attorney general through the summer of 1964, but he had lost his zest. Hundley also realized his days were numbered. “Lyndon Johnson’s people knew how close I was to Bobby Kennedy, and they wanted me out as soon as Kennedy left. They were going to put their own people in.” Hundley asked Shur to take charge of Valachi.

“Hundley didn’t want him abandoned,” Shur recalled. “Valachi had gotten tremendous public exposure, but Hundley understood all that was coming to an end. He wanted me to hold Valachi’s hand, so to speak.” But no one warned Valachi that Shur was coming to visit him. “When I introduced myself, he read right away that he was being shuffled off, and he started screaming at me about how much he had done for America. He was flipping out, and then he suddenly stares at me and says, ‘You know, if it wasn’t for the Jews, there wouldn’t be any organized crime because the Jews finance organized crime. The Italians do what
the Jews tell them.’ I wondered if he knew somehow I was Jewish, if this was a test. I didn’t reply, and he changed the subject. I asked if I could come back and see him, and he told me that he wanted to see Hundley, not me.” But Shur returned a few days later, bringing several exotic Italian cheeses with him. “Valachi says to me: ‘Where’s Hundley?’ I told him Hundley was tied up but he had sent me over. I gave him the cheeses and said Hundley had sent them. That seemed to mean a lot to him.” In return, Valachi gave Shur a recipe for spaghetti sauce. “Everyone in my office wanted a copy.” Shur ordered Valachi a subscription to the New York
Daily News
so he could follow the horse races, and Hundley used his own money to buy him a television set.

Shur spent hours questioning Valachi. “Those sessions were literally magical for me because of my lifelong interest in organized crime.” Shur never detected any trace of remorse. Valachi could discuss spaghetti sauce and the killing of a close friend with the same lack of emotion. One day Shur introduced him to a delegation of Italian judges who had a list of their countrymen who they suspected were mobsters. “Joe was very careful in picking out only people who he personally knew were in the Cosa Nostra. He didn’t want to accuse anyone falsely.”

Shur noted a trait when he talked with Valachi that he would see later in other mob witnesses. “Once these guys broke with the mob, they felt isolated and alone. They wanted to be accepted and appreciated for what they were doing, and they turned to the government to give them that support. Valachi had a need for Hundley and me to tell him that he was doing the right thing. One time, he asked me: ‘Gerry, what I did was right for America, wasn’t it? Didn’t I do a lot for
America?’ He wanted that confirmation because he knew he had betrayed his past.”

Valachi grew bored and lonely. “I was so fascinated by what he was telling me, I thought other people would want to learn about it, too. I talked to Hundley, and we decided to give Valachi an assignment. I took over a bunch of legal pads and ballpoint pens and told him that Hundley wanted him to write his life story.” Valachi began immediately. “The next time I visited him, I picked up what he had written and it was really interesting stuff. He had an incredible memory. I gave it to Hundley’s secretary to type, and every time Valachi saw me after that, he would say, ‘Did you show Bill what I had written? Did he think it was good?’ ”

Valachi labored over his autobiography for months, eventually writing 300,000 words that filled 1,180 typed pages. “Hundley and I both thought it was worth publishing, but the federal Bureau of Prisons had a rule that prohibited convicts from publishing books about their crimes.” Hundley got President Johnson’s new attorney general, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, to waive the rule, and then contacted New York writer Peter Maas, a friend of his and Robert Kennedy’s, and had Shur introduce Maas to Valachi. The two quickly struck a book deal. But when word leaked out that Valachi was going to publish an autobiography, the Italian American newspaper
II Progresso
printed a furious editorial denouncing the project. The newspaper claimed that Valachi’s revelations had smeared Italian Americans by making it appear as if all of them were criminals. Other Italian American groups joined the protest, and a delegation from Congress protested in person at the White House. “President Johnson caved in,” Hundley said. “He told us that Valachi wouldn’t be allowed to publish his book. I was horrified because we were doing a complete flip-flop.
For God’s sake, we had given him the idea and gotten him a writer.”

Peter Maas was barred from visiting Valachi, and the Justice Department filed a motion in federal court to prevent the two men from publishing any pages that they already had written. As further punishment, Valachi was moved out of his top-floor sanctuary at the D.C. jail and to a cell in the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, where he would be less accessible. “Kennedy and I had promised Valachi that he would be taken to an island with his girlfriend, but there was no way the Johnson administration was going to keep that promise,” Hundley said, “especially with a delegation of Italian Americans breathing down its neck. Bobby Kennedy tried to intervene, but Johnson wasn’t going to help him or Valachi.”

Valachi appealed to Shur. “I told Valachi to be patient. I would do my best to get him moved out of Milan as soon as all of this attention blew over.” But Valachi couldn’t wait. Utterly dejected, he tied the electrical cord from his radio around his neck and hanged himself in his cell’s shower stall, but the cord snapped under his weight and a guard found him unconscious but alive. By this point, Hundley had joined a private law firm, but he pulled strings and visited Valachi at the prison. “I apologized to him for what was happening,” Hundley said. “The government had double-crossed and betrayed him.” Valachi couldn’t believe it. He kept saying, “But Bobby Kennedy promised me …” Shur arranged his summer vacation trip so he too could visit Valachi. “He truly believed he had redeemed himself by becoming an informant, and he couldn’t understand why the government had turned on him. He told me, ‘I kept my word, my end of the deal; how can the Justice Department not keep its word?’ ”