The Valachi Papers (31 page)

Strapped for money, Valachi followed the fashion of other Cosa Nostra soldiers in the same fix. He went back into narcotics for a quick buck. This time, however, he did not accept any partners. He knew a number of members who were still in heroin, took a percentage of their shipments, and made his own distribution deals with a "couple of colored fellows." To deliver the heroin, he used a "kid" named Ralph Wagner. "He came from somewhere around Fort Lee, New Jersey, I think," Valachi says. "I forget who sent him to me. Anyway this guy said he's a good kid, and I liked him. He was handy to have around; he helped me paint the house. Ralph was dying to get into junk, so I put him to work. He wanted to get in the mob too, but of course, he can't, as he was a mixbrccd, meaning he was part Italian and part German."

Valachi is reluctant to talk about his narcotics period. He says he only dealt in "small amounts to get back on my feet." But one of the "colored fellows" he supplied was John Freeman, Sr., who, according to the Bureau of Narcotics, was an important Negro heroin retailer in Harlem. And Valachi was soon able to resume his shylocking and also to devote himself to building up what showed every sign of becoming a lucrative jukebox operation, or route, as it is called.

At the time Joseph Gallo, a soldier in the Profaci Family in Brooklyn, who would later lead a bloody insurrection against his boss, was attempting to strong-arm his way into control of the jukebox and vending-machine racket in New York. Gallo's methods were primitive. You joined his "union" and took him as a business partner, or else. The alternative, at best, was a brutal beating. This, of course, did not apply to anyone in the Cosa Nostra. When Valachi joined, he did so at his own volition. His dues were minimal — $79 every three months. In return he was given new "locations," which the union guaranteed, in addition to the ones he already had. The advantage to Gallo was that Valachi's membership would be influential in organizing independent operators in East Harlem and the Bronx.

Valachi himself used his shylocking to install jukeboxes in various bars and restaurants. "I lend the guy money, and I don't try to collect the loan," he told me. "In other words, die machine stays in the place, or I get my money back. Joe Gallo was nuts using that rough stuff. That's why they started calling him Crazy Joe. Look what it got him."

(On December 21, 1961, Gallo was sentenced to serve from seven to fourteen years in a state penitentiary for attempted extortion.)

Valachi was so preoccupied with recouping his finances that he barely acknowledged the narcotics arrest and conviction of Vito Genovese. He heard about it before die indictment was announced from Thomas (Tommy Ryan) Eboli, who was rising fast as a Genovese favorite. "There's some Spanish guy testifying against the old man," Eboli said, "and we got to find him. His name is Cantaloupes, you know, like the melon. If you hear anything, give me a ring."

"Naturally I told Tommy okay," he says, "but I ain't going to run around looking for this guy. I felt like telling Tommy I didn't see nobody crying over me when I was arrested, so I forgot about it. Let Vito take care of his own worries. I had enough without him."

(Eboli was slightly off on the name of the "Spanish guy," a key witness against Genovese. He was actually Nelson Cantellops. After a long spell of protective custody, he was released at his own request and in 1965 was mysteriously slain in a bar brawl.)

Valachi was, however, greatly saddened by the murder of his old friend John (Johnny Roberts) Robilotto on September 7, 1958. He says that it was a result of Carlo Gambino's power grab in the Anastasia Family:

When I heard the news, I wasn't surprised. I was just hoping it wouldn't happen, but Johnny was close to Albert. After all, Albert put him into the mob. When Albert was hit, I went over to Brooklyn one night to see Johnny. Some kid took me to the place where he was hanging out. It was some club where he had his office, and
I
talked privately with him. Naturally I don't come right out with it, but what I'm trying to tell Johnny is I hope he ain't thinking about making no comeback or something because of Albert.

He said, "No, don't worry about it. Tony and Vito already spoke to me," and I said, "Good!" and then I talked about my own affairs, which didn't amount to much, just that the jukebox route was coming along, and that was the end of it. I heard later it was true, him and
some other boys—fifteen or twenty—were going to pounce on Carlo, but he beat them to it. Well, no matter what, everyone mourned Johnny Roberts.

By early 1959 Valachi says he was ready to get out of heroin completely. His jukeboxes were then bringing in $500 a week; he had developed a contact in a linen supply company who gave him advance notice on new restaurants, and he expected shortly to double his income. Better yet, the worth of a jukebox route had jumped enormously. Its market value previously had been determined by taking the average revenue for a week, multiplying it by twenty, and adding the depreciated cost of the machines; now the multiple was fifty. Besides his loan shark activity, he also joined with another Cosa Nostra soldier in a neat numbers racket scheme. Valachi limited himself to single-action play—bets on one of the three winning digits each day. This meant that there were ten possible winning numbers, from 0 to 9. Everything over $100 placed on each of these numbers was laid off on another numbers bank. Thus he was only responsible for bets totaling $1,000. Since the odds on the winning single-action number were 7 to 1, Valachi and his partner were assured of a daily profit of $300. Working a six-day week, after deducting the salaries of their runners and
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ice" to the police, they still split $1,200. As Valachi notes, Td say that was pretty good pay, seeing as we ain't taking no chances."

Valachi's bullish feelings did not last long. One May night in 1959 around eight o'clock—"I was just lucky to be at home"—the phone rang. On the other end was the wife of John Freeman, his heroin retailer, frantically whispering an agreed-on code in case the Narcotics Bureau closed in: "I can't meet you. They've seized all our cars."

Valachi drove away from his house moments before the agents arrived. He then went into hiding in a Bronx apartment he maintained for a girlfriend. He had been aware for some time that he was under periodic surveillance and taken extreme care in visiting her. Operating out of there, he did his best to salvage his shylock loans and turned over the supervision of his jukeboxes to Joseph Pagano. When he realized that Pagano was taking a bit too much income for himself, he canceled the arrangement and placed a "kid named Sally," who had been servicing the machines for him, in charge. "Who would have thought Joey would do a thing like that?" Valachi sadly recalls. "Well, this Sally ain't too smart, but he was honest."

After three months he had a falling out with the girl and headed upstate, stopping in the village of Wingdale, near the Connecticut border. He remained there for another month, then bought a trailer and went into Connecticut. Valachi vaguely considered contacting Girolamo (Bobby Doyle) Santucci, who had moved to Hartford years before. He thought better of it, however, bypassed Hartford, and stopped in a trailer camp in Thomp-sonville.

All things considered, Valachi looks back fondly on his sojourn diere. He liked the people — "They ain't like in New York, they say hello; to tell the truth it caught me off-balance until I got used to it" —and he met a local girl shortly after he arrived. He dated her two or three times a week, attending stock-car races, going to the movies, and drinking occasionally in a roadhousc. "Sometimes," he says, "we would just stay in the trailer and I would cook dinner, as I am a pretty good cook if I must say so." One such evening in September the news came over the radio that Little Augie Pisano had been murdered. "Eh," he remembers thinking, "Vito don't never forget. Little Augie didn't come to the meeting after the business with Frank Costello, and now he has got his."

The girl knew Valachi as Charles Charbano. Initially he told her that he was living in the trailer camp because of domestic trouble with his wife. Eventually he had to admit it was more serious than that, and he said that he was in hiding because he had entered the country illegally years ago and there was a deportation order against him. As they sat listening to a description of the Pisano murder, the radio report added that a onetime beauty queen who was with him had also been killed. The girl said to Valachi, "Only animals would do something like that. I hope you don't know those kind of people."

"Of course," he says, "I told her that I don't, and besides, I had to agree with her. They could have passed Little Augie up and taken care of him another time when he was alone."

Valachi's jukebox caretaker, Sally, visited him regularly while he was a fugitive. In the middle of November he told Valachi that Ralph Wagner, who had been indicted in the same case, was becoming increasingly adamant about seeing him. Valachi gave Sally the phone number of a pay station near the camp and said to have Wagner call him at eleven o'clock the following Friday night. "As I'm waiting for the call," he says, "these agents came out of the dark and stuck me up. They walked me back to the trailer and searched it, and then they took me to Hartford."

Wagner, trying for a lighcr prison sentence, had turned him in. Although Valachi suspected this at the time, he decided not to do anything about it. "If I do," he says, "I'm in more trouble." He was then taken for his arraignment in Brooklyn, where John Freeman's son had been nabbed for selling three kilos of heroin to an undercover agent of the Narcotics Bureau. Valachi told the court that he had only learned that he was wanted a few days before and, as a matter of fact, was about to make a phone call to find out why when he was arrested. He was, as a result, released on $25,000 bail. Valachi had already notified a bondsman to be on hand and gave him as security a savings-account bankbook with $3,000 in it.

With both the numbers and the shylocking down the drain because of his absence, he immethately set to work rejuvenating his jukebox route while awaiting trial. In the meantime, he had his lawyer start dickering about the kind of sentence he could expect if he pleaded guilty. The lawyer reported back that it looked like seven years, but after a subsequent conference, according to Valachi, this was changed to twelve years. It was at that point he began to think about jumping bail. "If it's seven years," he told me, "I stay. If it's twelve, I run."

His first impulse was to flee to Brazil. To finance his escape, he counted on selling his jukebox operation, then worth around $50,000, plus using whatever cash he had, $20,000 or so. This plan promptly ran into a snag. No one in the Cosa Nostra wanted to purchase the route for fear of offending the Narcotics Bureau. Attempts to sell it to legitimate interests in the jukebox field were equally futile. "These guys on the outside are scared to buy a route from a mob guy," he explains. "They think the mob guy will sell them the route and wait six months and take all his locations back. Of course, that happens. I tried to tell them that I am in trouble, and there ain't no chance of it happening with mc, but it was no good."

After one postponement, Valachi's trial was set for February 1960, with every indication, as he puts it, that he would receive a "lot of time." He had discarded the idea, never really formulated, of going to Brazil. Instead, he would cross the border into Canada.

But with the trial only a few days off, he needed time to work out the details. He tried for a second postponement. When he failed, he agreed to plead guilty if he was given a month to "adjust his affairs." This was granted. Then he went to see Vincent Mauro and Frank (Frank the Bug) Caruso, another soldier in the Genovese Family. "I told them," he says, "I was going to jump bail, and they said they had a friend who will help me. So that's how I meet this Albert Agueci. I met him in Maggie's Bar on Lexington Avenue in the Fifties."' Vinnie Mauro was there, and he introduces me. Now Albert Agueci lives in Toronto, but he is with Steve Magaddino as Steve's Family takes in Toronto and Montreal, and he gives me a certain date to check into the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Buffalo."

Next Valachi took a step that still weighs heavily on his conscience. Afraid that the bail bondsman would seize his Yonkers home after he had gone, he sold it at a loss in a quick cash deal. "I wasn't thinking clear," he told me. "I tried to keep my family, my real family, out of all this, and now I was hurting them." With the money he bought another house for his wife in the Bronx, but he says it could not compare with the one he had relinquished.

That done, he gave his faithful hired hand Sally $1,000, reminded him to keep changing the records in the jukeboxes, and hopped a train for Buffalo. He stayed put in his hotel room for a day and a half until Agueci came for him. Agueci told Valachi that arrangements had been made for him to ride with some "local people" who crossed the border frequently. He was also instructed to tell die border patrol, when asked, that he was born in Buffalo and was going to Canada to "have a good time."

Valachi entered Canada without incident and, after a few miles,

^::
"715 Lexington Avenue, near 57th Street. It has since closed down.

transferred to a following car driven by Agueci. They stopped overnight at a motel and reached Toronto the next day. Agueci first took him to his own home, introduced him to his wife and children and his brother Vito, also a Cosa Nostra soldier. He then brought him to the house of an Italian family where he was going to live; Valachi's quarters had a separate entrance and consisted of a kitchen and a "parlor" with a collapsible bed. In the afternoon he went shopping in the neighborhood and bought food and cooking utensils. That evening, having forgotten to get a television set, he decided to look over downtown Toronto, found to his delight that it was reminiscent of Broadway, took in a burlesque show, and returned to the house quite late.

Agueci was waiting for him. Telephone calls from New York had been coming in all night at his home for Valachi. The next one was due at 2
A.M.
The caller was Tony Bender himself. "Get back here," Bender said. "The fix is in. You're only going to get five years."