Free Mafia Men - Hoodwinkers, suckers and scams (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr

A few days later, his old friend was gunned down in a bar in the Bronx. Joe was distraught. ‘I wouldn’t have done nothing to him,’ he said. ‘…how could I forget he took me to Brooklyn and kept me out of the way when Maranzano got his?… Gee, I felt bad, it wasn’t much of a Christmas.’
    The Narcotics Bureau finally got Valachi in 1955 on charges associated with drugs and he was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released on appeal, but arrested the next year. Again he won on appeal and walked.
    The year 1957 was not a good one for the Mafia. Frank Costello decided to spend more time with his family after being wounded by a would-be assassin. Frank Salice, Albert Anastasia’s underboss was gunned down in a fruit shop and Anastasia himself was famously shot dead in the barbershop at the Park-Sheraton Hotel. Things had started to come apart at the seams for Valachi. He lost the licence to sell alcohol at his restaurant and discovered that his partner in the garment business had been embezzling. He got back into drug-dealing, opened a linen supply company and became a partner in a lucrative juke-box business.
    But the FBI was homing in on him and when they raided his home he was forced to go on the run. They picked him up on 19 November and he was charged and then released on $25,000 bail. He fled to Canada, however, to hide out with a man called Alfredo Agueci, a drug-dealing Buffalo mafioso.
    Tony Bender ordered him back to New York, telling him that it had been fixed so that he would only be sentenced to five years and after another month moving from place to place in the Bronx, he realised it was pointless and handed himself in. Bender had misled him, however, and the judge actually sent him to prison for fifteen years and fined him $10,000. He was sent to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
    In 1961, he faced another trial on drugs charges. This time, he claimed he had been set up by Bender, the Agueci brothers and another gangster by the name of Vincent Mauro. It made no difference, however. He got another twenty years to run concurrently with his existing sentence.
    In prison, Valachi found himself becoming isolated from the other prisoners. Genovese was in the same prison and people were poisoning him with information that Joe Valachi was an informant. The fact that he had been allied to Tony Bender who Genovese had had eliminated by now, did not help. By June 1962 there had been three attempts on his life. One evening in the cell he shared with Vito Genovese and six other men, Genovese kissed him on the cheek. Joe feared it was the Mafia ‘kiss of death’.
    It was now rumoured that Genovese had offered $100,000 for the murder of Valachi and to get himself out of the way, Joe committed himself to solitary confinement, trying unsuccessfully while there, to contact a number of people, including the head of the Bureau of Narcotics. Released, he could not eat, for fear his food was poisoned. He was spiralling out of control and one night when he saw three men approaching him in the exercise yard, he cracked. He grabbed a piece of iron pipe that lay beside some building work that was being carried out and attacked a man that he believed to be the Genovese associate, Joe DiPalermo. The man was actually John Saupp, a man with no connection to the Mob, whatsoever. Saupp died from his injuries two days later.
    Valachi had never shown the slightest bit of remorse for anything he had done until the killing of Saupp. It was a turning point in his life and on 13 June 1962, he informed the authorities he was willing to cooperate.
    On 17 July he received a life sentence for the murder of Saupp and on the same day was flown to Westchester County Jail, close to New York City. He was held on an isolated ward in the prison hospital under the name of Joseph DiMarco. Then he spent a year in front of the McLellan Committee, talking about the thirty years of his Mafia life, from his first theft at the age of nine, when he stole