Witsec by Pete Earley Read Free Book Online

the FBI wasn’t going to trust the IRS to protect an FBI witness, and neither of them was going to trust the Bureau of Narcotics.”

CHAPTER
THREE
    G erald Shur was called into a deputy chief’s office in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section at the Justice Department in March 1963 and given a stunning assignment. A member of the Vito Genovese crime family had been secretly talking to the FBI for nearly a year about his life inside the Mafia, Shur was told. Robert Kennedy wanted to give the president a summary of those private interviews, and Shur had been chosen to write it. “Stop whatever you’re doing,” he was ordered. “Read the FBI interviews and have a report ready by nine A.M . tomorrow for the attorney general and President Kennedy.”
    “What’s the informant’s name?” Shur asked.
    “Valachi—Joe Valachi.”
    Shur had never heard of him. “Because of all the books written about organized crime and the popularity of movies like
The Godfather
and television shows like
The Sopranos
, most people today know how the Mafia operates,” Shur recalled. “But Valachi was the first real mafioso to break
omertà
, and before him organized crime in America was very secretive and mysterious. There were still people who didn’t believe there really was an American Mafia, and none of us in law enforcement knew how it was structured or understood its rules and rituals. I was handed this huge stackof FBI interviews—more than two feet high—and for the next five hours, I sat at a desk reading what Valachi had said. It was incredible stuff! He was giving up everything he knew.”
    The fifty-four-year-old Valachi had been a criminal for thirty years, having joined the New York mob in 1930. He’d served as a hit man, robber, numbers operator, enforcer, and drug pusher. Although he was a low-ranking “soldier” or, in mob parlance, a “button man,” Valachi was well versed in Mafia gossip. Best of all, he loved to talk. But his interviews with the FBI were difficult to follow because he jumped back and forth between people and events. Valachi would be talking about mobsters in Las Vegas at one moment and the mob’s Chicago operations the next. There was no index, no directory that would have helped Shur understand the relationship between the 317 mob members identified by Valachi or why they were important. As he waded through the reams of FBI reports, he realized he’d been given an arduous task. When he read the final interview, he grabbed a blank legal pad and hustled across the street to a pub popular with Justice Department lawyers. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and a roast beef sandwich. “My mind was spinning. How was I going to digest all of this information and turn it into a cohesive summary—for the president of the United States, no less?” Shur would later joke that it was the shot of Jack Daniel’s that cleared his mind. As soon as he drank it, he began scribbling furiously on the legal pad. Back in his office, he typed nonstop, finishing his summary shortly before dawn. Nearly four decades later, Shur would take a fresh look at the yellowed, thirteen-page, single-spaced memorandum that he prepared that night for President Kennedy and be struck by how rudimentary much of the information in it nowseemed. Yet at the time, Valachi’s disclosures were considered to be staggering revelations.
    “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