Joseph Valachi spent more than three decades inside a New York organized-crime family and then became the first made member of the American underworld to describe it in public. In September and October 1963 he sat before a Senate subcommittee in Washington and told the senators, and a national audience, that the organization existed, what its members called it, how it was arranged and what an inductee swore. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called the disclosures the "biggest single intelligence breakthrough yet in combating organized crime and racketeering in the United States."
The path to that witness table ran through a federal prison in Atlanta. Valachi was serving concurrent terms of 15 to 20 years for narcotics violations when, on June 22, 1962, he killed a fellow inmate, Joseph Saupp. He believed the man was an assassin sent to kill him. He pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree and received a life sentence and remained in custody until his death in Texas on April 3, 1971.
His legal record is narrower than his reputation. The Justice Department put the number of killings in which he had taken part at 32, and he told the subcommittee that killing was what he had done for the organization. The only killing that led to a conviction is the one in Atlanta in 1962.
Joseph Michael Valachi was born in New York City on September 22, 1903. He grew up in East Harlem.
He was a burglar and getaway driver with a street gang called the Minutemen, and by the age of 18 he had a name as a skilled driver. He also joined an Irish gang, a connection that angered the Italian underworld. By 1928 he had served two jail terms, and he was released that year and began to rebuild his ties to the Italian organization.
Valachi was recruited in 1930, in the middle of a war between two New York factions led by Tom Gagliano and Joseph Masseria, a conflict usually called the Castellammarese War. He took his oaths before Salvatore Maranzano, in the back room of a New York restaurant, as a young ex-convict. He survived the war, which ran from 1930 to 1931, and remained a made member for about three decades. For roughly that long he kept the organization's rule of silence.
His rank was that of a soldier, comparable to a sergeant. He began as a bodyguard and chauffeur. By the 1940s he was earning from several rackets. He shared a slot-machine business with a partner that took in about $2,500 a week, ran a numbers game, kept a horse room in White Plains, made loans at interest and owned racehorses. During the Second World War he made about $200,000 in three years in the black market for gasoline, and after the war he moved into jukeboxes.
Narcotics came last. He bought a kilogram in France for about $2,500 and sold it in the United States for $11,000. The trade was profitable enough to draw the attention of both the organization and the federal Bureau of Narcotics.
In 1959 Valachi was convicted of narcotics violations and received concurrent terms of 15 to 20 years. He entered the federal prison in Atlanta in 1960. Vito Genovese, a leading figure in the New York underworld, had been convicted of narcotics trafficking in 1959 and sentenced to 15 years; he was held in Atlanta too.
Valachi later said that Genovese arranged for the two of them to share quarters and greeted him with a kiss. Valachi understood the kiss as a sentence of death, delivered because Genovese suspected him of becoming an informer. The suspicion was mistaken. Valachi was afraid for his life, asked to be kept apart from the other inmates and, after that separation ended, avoided the crowds in the yard.
On June 22, 1962, Valachi killed another prisoner. He believed the man had been sent by Genovese to kill him. The dead man was Joseph Saupp, who looked like the man Valachi had in mind. A prison official told Valachi soon afterward that he had killed the wrong person. Valachi's own recollection of his reaction was brief: he said he told the officials to lock him up.
While he awaited trial for the killing, Valachi told the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York that he was willing to talk. In return, "the Government accepted a plea of guilty to murder in the second degree." The sentence was life, and after it Valachi decided to cooperate with the government.
An agent in the New York office of the FBI had been handling Valachi since September 1962. Toward the end of that year Director J. Edgar Hoover asked that everything the Bureau knew about the Italian criminal organization be brought together in a single report prepared in New York, and the agent handling Valachi was given responsibility for it. All field offices were told to send in what they had.
Valachi began to disclose what he knew of the organization to which he belonged and indicated that he might be willing to testify in public. He told his story to the Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI, the Justice Department and, in the end, the Senate. In an early session with FBI agent James P. Flynn, he said that "Mafia" was an outsider's word: "It's not Mafia," he told Flynn. When Flynn mentioned the first words Valachi had overheard as an initiate, Valachi confirmed that members called the organization Cosa Nostra, a phrase usually translated as "this thing of ours."
By August 1963 the underworld was said to have put a price of $100,000 on his life, and the Justice Department was preparing about a score of indictments. He remained in protective custody.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas, had been given authority to look into syndicated and organized crime in 1961. It held a series of hearings on organized crime and the illicit traffic in narcotics that began on September 25, 1963, with Attorney General Kennedy as the first witness. Kennedy told the senators that "a knowledgeable member of the racketeering hierarchy" had come forward, which was rare, and that the information added "essential detail" and brought the picture "into sharper focus."
Valachi testified on September 27 and again on October 1, 2, 8 and 9. McClellan questioned him, at one point asking why he had not simply left the organization. A member of the subcommittee staff, LaVern J. Duffy, took the senators through the events of the 1930 to 1931 war. Valachi described the organization's five New York families, their structure and leaders, and the ceremony of induction. His testimony drew a large national audience.
Asked what he had done for the organization, he answered that he had killed for it. The statement was his own and is not the finding of any court. Valachi was also the Attorney General's main witness for two proposals before the subcommittee: the relaxation of strict wiretapping regulations and authority to grant immunity to informers.
In January 1966 Valachi was held in special quarters in a District of Columbia jail, and the District was paying $3,000 a month for his keep. He had dyed his hair for the Senate appearances and by then it was walnut brown; he read movie magazines, did exercises and cooked. He said, "I put a big dent in Cosa Nostra." The organization was said to have offered $100,000 for his death.
He also wrote. The 1,180-page manuscript of his autobiography, titled "The Real Thing," was offered by the Justice Department to a dozen publishers in the United States and Europe in January 1966, after federal officials waived the rule against prisoners writing about their crimes. Officials had hoped the work might bring back details he had forgotten, and it did not. Over thirteen months he produced about 300,000 words. The writer Peter Maas worked with the material, and "The Valachi Papers" appeared in 1968; a feature film followed in 1972. Maas donated the original manuscript to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in 1980.
Valachi died in Texas on April 3, 1971, while serving his life sentence for murder. He was about 67 years old.
The 1963 hearings belonged to a longer effort in Congress. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had received jurisdiction over organized crime in 1961. McClellan had earlier chaired a special committee on labor racketeering that had Robert Kennedy on its staff, and Kennedy, now Attorney General, drew on the subcommittee's work. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later found that Valachi's Senate testimony in 1963 was the catalyst for a renewed effort to strengthen the federal criminal laws that could be used against organized crime.
The subcommittee issued a bipartisan report in 1965 recommending immunity for testimony, reform of wiretap law and laws against witness intimidation. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 enabled wiretap warrants. The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 created the RICO statute, which reaches patterns of racketeering by an enterprise, and established the Witness Security Program under the U.S. Marshals Service. Kennedy had also created the first Organized Crime Strike Force field office and expanded the use of wiretaps and immunity.
The number of killings attributed to him rests on estimates. The Justice Department's figure is 32; another estimate has him suspected in more than twenty. The only conviction for a killing is the 1962 plea. His statements about other people's crimes were never tested in a trial of his own.
His value as a witness was questioned at the time. A commentary published a few weeks after the hearings called his memory "notoriously bad" and described much of the testimony as a rehash of what was already known. In January 1966 federal officials had made no major arrests on the basis of his statements, though they still called his evidence invaluable. The subcommittee and the Justice Department regarded the testimony as significant and trustworthy in its account of the organization's structure, and the later House committee consultant Ralph Salerno said Valachi "was able to fill in the gaps and connect one incident to another."
September 22, 1903: Born in New York City.
1928: Released after his second jail term.
1930: Recruited during the Castellammarese War and takes his oaths.
1959: Convicted of narcotics violations; concurrent terms of 15 to 20 years.
1960: Enters the federal prison in Atlanta.
June 22, 1962: Kills a fellow inmate, Joseph Saupp, in Atlanta.
September 1962: An FBI agent in New York begins handling him.
After June 1962: Pleads guilty to murder in the second degree and receives a life sentence.
August 1963: The underworld is said to put a $100,000 price on his life.
September 25, 1963: Hearings open with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as first witness.
September 27, 1963: Valachi's first day of testimony.
October 1, 2, 8 and 9, 1963: Further days of testimony.
January 1966: Held in a District of Columbia jail; the Justice Department offers his manuscript to publishers.
1968: "The Valachi Papers" by Peter Maas is published.
1970: The Organized Crime Control Act creates RICO and the Witness Security Program.
April 3, 1971: Dies in Texas.