Witsec

by Pete Earley

  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?’ ”

  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.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  President 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 Ke
nnedy 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.