The Everything Mafia Book (33 page)

John Gotti’s funeral procession

Courtesy of AP Images/Robert Spencer

Cars with floral arrangements lead the funeral procession of reputed mob boss John Gotti as it winds its way through the Queens borough of New York, Saturday, June 15, 2002. Gotti died in prison of cancer. He was sixty-one.

Death of a Don

John Gotti succumbed to cancer on June 10, 2002, at the age of sixty-one. The Associated Press eulogized him as follows: “John Gotti, who swaggered, schemed, and murdered his way to the pinnacle of organized crime in America only to be toppled by secret FBI tapes and a turncoat mobster’s testimony, died at a prison hospital Monday while serving a life sentence.”

Sammy the Bull has made it back into the news in recent years. Living in Arizona as “Jimmy Moran,” he became involved in trafficking the popular drug known as ecstasy. He was arrested along with his wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law. A real family affair.

John Gotti delivered his own obituary right before he was sent to jail. It is naturally more colorful and more hubris-laden than the press reports that covered his death. The Dapper Don was nothing if not full of himself. “I’ll always be one of kind. You’ll never see another guy like me if you live to be 5,000.” And as his hearse wound its way through Queens, thousands of people were there to witness his last drive through town.

CHAPTER 16
The Rats

Despite the code of Omerta, the vow of silence every “made” Mafioso makes, there have been many “rats” in the mob’s violent history. Turning on fellow gangsters has become commonplace, though there have always been snitches and informers who used the police to take out enemies and competitors. If found out, the informers were marked for death. But on the flipside, the turncoats gave the public a firsthand account of what life was like in the underworld. This chapter introduces you to some of the more famous, or infamous, Mafia informants.

The Valachi Papers

Joseph Valachi was the first informant to get national attention. Press from around the country covered his testimony. The events that transpired to land Valachi on the witness stand were of soap opera caliber and could rival anything a writer could dream up.

Joe Valachi became a member of Salvatore Maranzano’s organized crime family in the 1920s. He was officially “made” in 1930. After Maranza-no’s murder, Valachi was moved into a crew led by Vito Genovese.

Valachi was a gangsters’ gangster. He was a numbers runner, leg breaker, ruthless murderer, and in later years a drug trafficker before he was finally locked up. He was in prison on a fifteen- to twenty-year sentence for a drug charge when he decided to re-evaluate the oath he took when he was made.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s war on organized crime turned up the heat and made turncoats of many Mafiosi. He called the Mafia “the enemy within,” a hostile force within our borders out to undermine the American way.

Two’s Company

Joe Valachi was in a federal prison in Atlanta, sharing a cell with his former skipper, Vito Genovese. Vito was now the boss of the former Luciano family. He enjoyed the trappings of success, including a home in Atlantic Highlands, overlooking Raritan Bay in New Jersey. But Genovese’s forays into drug trafficking netted him a prison sentence.

While in prison with Valachi, Genovese began to suspect that his loyal soldier was a traitor. Vito suspected Valachi was giving information to the authorities in exchange for a lighter sentence. He got the word out that Joe had to go.

Kiss Me, Guido

Vito Genovese publicly gave Joe Valachi the “kiss of death,” meaning that he was now a marked man. His days were numbered. There were three attempts on his life while behind bars. Even in prison, the Mafia could conduct business and have men killed. Valachi knew he would soon be whacked.

He got wind of who the hit man was, a fellow mobster also serving time. However, Joe mistakenly killed the wrong man after he thought he was being ambushed. The stone-cold killer who had seen so much violence in his life perhaps felt his first pangs of conscience when he learned that the man he clubbed to death with an iron pipe was not the man he thought he was. His sentence was amended from fifteen to twenty years to life imprisonment. It was then that Valachi fulfilled Vito Genovese’s prophecy and become an informant.

There is much braggadocio and one-upmanship among low-level Mafiosi. It is therefore necessary to take much of Joe Valachi’s testimony with the proverbial grain of salt. A man in his position would not be told much about his superior’s plans, and his fellow soldiers tended to lie about their exploits to feed their egos and enhance their reputations.

Sing, Sing a Song

Valachi was placed under witness protection and guarded by 200 United States marshals. They were not going to let the Mafia get their hands on their prize songbird. The mob offered a $100,000 reward for Valachi’s head on a platter. Valachi appeared before the McClellan Committee in 1963. He fingered 317 organized crime members and brought the name
La Cosa Nostra
into the vernacular. The testimony was enlightening but produced no quantifiable results. Not one Mafioso was jailed based solely on Valachi’s testimony, but the one lasting vestige was that the five New York families were given the names of the bosses who were leading them at the time: Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese.

Valachi had no real view into the inner workings of the Commission, but his vast experiences gave the McClellan Commission and the general public an idea of how pervasive the Mafia’s influence was, as well as a look at some of the stranger customs of the gangsters, including the lack of work on

Mother’s Day. There was probably much braggadocio in his testimony, and plenty of unreliable hearsay. Nevertheless, his pronouncements painted the picture of a brutal, nasty, and ruthless world: speaking of honor and codes while double-crossing and backstabbing, going to church on Sunday and

Joseph Valachi’s Senate hearing

Courtesy of AP Images

New York City gangster Joseph M. Valachi sits at the witness table, right, facing members of the Senate Investigation subcommittee as he reveals more of the inner workings of a major crime syndicate in Washington, DC, on Oct. 8, 1963. In the background are four charts of crime families with names and pictures of mobsters indentified by Valachi. From left are Giuseppe Magliocco family, top; Joseph Bonanno family, bottom; Carlo Gambino family; Gaetano Lucchese family; and the Vito Genovese family. beating a man to death on Monday, sexually distancing themselves from their wives when they became the mothers of their children while keeping girlfriends on the side.

Spin City

The Mafia orchestrated something akin to a publicity campaign against Valachi’s testimony. Not everyone on the side of the law bought a lot of Vala-chi’s claims either.