Witsec by Pete Earley Read Free Book Online Page A

revelations was that the actual name of organized crime was not the Mafia but La Cosa Nostra [LCN]—meaning “our thing”—and Hoover used this difference in terminology in his defense. He had always known there was a national syndicate, he declared, but it wasn’t named the
Mafia
. To this day, FBI agents are taught to call organized crime the LCN, not the Mafia. It is part of Hoover’s save-face legacy.)
    Continuing with his summary, Shur explained that only Italians could be inducted into the mob.
    During a secret ceremony, a boss pricks the new member’s trigger finger with a needle, drawing drops of blood, and then has him repeat an oath. A piece of paper, oftentimes a picture of a saint, is placed in the hand of the new member and set on fire … as the new member recites, in Italian, the following words: “With this oath I swear that if I ever violate this oath may I burn as this paper is burning.” The inductee is then introduced by the boss as a “new friend of ours” and thereafter, if he is ever introduced to someone and told he is a“friend of ours” that means the stranger also is an LCN member.
    Shur listed thirteen rules that Valachi said members were required to follow, including six punishable by death if violated.
    Executable offenses include:
    1. Furnishing information about this organization to any outside person, especially the police.
    2. Handling narcotics or deriving a profit from their sale. (Valachi says this rule is most often violated. As long as the boss receives a portion of the money made, there may not be any enforcement.)
    3. Engaging in an affair with the wife of another member.
    4. Engaging in an affair with the sister or daughter of another member.
    5. Stealing from another member.
    6. Committing any acts of violence against another member unless approved by the boss.
    Shur went on to outline the organizational structure of the LCN and to identify the crime bosses on the mob’s “national commission.” He was exhausted when he finished, but he was pleased with himself. Only later would he realize that he had misspelled the name of the mob throughout his entire report, writing it as La
Causa
Nostra. His bosses never mentioned it.
    Rumors swirled through Washington and New York during the summer of 1963 that a mobster had betrayed
omertà
. When Miriam Ottenberg, a reporter forthe
Washington Star
, identified Valachi in a front-page story, the Justice Department moved the mobster from a county jail outside Manhattan to Washington for safekeeping. He was the only inmate on the top floor of the downtown District of Columbia jail. The city’s electric chair was located right next to his cell, and Valachi would sit in it as a joke whenever he had a visitor. There weren’t many. No one was permitted to talk to the mobster without the permission of William Hundley, who had returned to oversee the OCRS when Edwyn Silberling resigned after spending a year in the job. “Valachi called me his
goombata
,” Hundley recalled in an interview. “I’ve never told anyone about this before, but Jim McShane, the chief marshal in charge of the jail, and I used to sneak Valachi out of his cell at night and take him to Italian restaurants in town to eat. Can you imagine that? The mob has a price on this guy’s head and we were taking him out for linguine.”
    Like most Mafia witnesses who would follow him, Valachi claimed he had not betrayed the mob until it first betrayed him. Valachi’s break with the LCN had come on June 22, 1962, when he grabbed a piece of iron pipe in the prison yard at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, and beat another convict to death with it. Fifteen minutes later he discovered he had murdered the wrong man. He had been trying to kill Joseph DiPalermo, a mob hit man. Instead, he murdered Joseph Saupp, a forger with no mob ties who happened to resemble DiPalermo. Valachi was convinced DiPalermo was out to kill him on orders from New York crime boss Vito