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

a bar of Fairy Soap to his most recent drug-dealing activities. From what appeared to be a photographic memory, he named names and provided details of Mafia operations, businesses and murders. He confirmed that there were five crime families in New York and one in New Jersey. He described other families in Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Tampa, Boston and Providence, naming bosses and identifying senior men. He confirmed that there were at least 2,000 ‘made’ men – family members – in New York, and identified 289 of the 383 gangsters that had been profiled by investigators. When asked by Senator Edmund Muskie if the Mafia was the same as Cosa Nostra, he told him he never used the term ‘Mafia’. ‘Senator,’ he said, ‘as long as I belong, they never express it as Mafia.’
    William Hindley, the man in charge of the Justice Department’s onslaught on organised crime said of Valachi’s testimony: ‘What Valachi did is beyond measure. Before he came along, we had no concrete evidence that anything like this existed . . . But Valachi named names. He revealed what the structure was and how it operates. In a word, he showed us the face of the enemy.’
    Valachi’s memoirs appeared in book form, ghostwritten by Peter Maas, as The Valachi Papers in 1968 and Charles Bronson played Valachi in the film of the book.
    On 11 April 1966, Joe Valachi tried to hang himself after trouble over his book and the removal from his cell of a small hot plate and grill. He was then transferred to a prison in Texas where he remained for the rest of his life in a cell near the prison hospital that had its own bathroom, rug, television, stove and several electric heaters. Joe was forever cold, even in the heat of the south.
    On 3 April 1971 he died following a gall bladder attack. For years, he had corresponded with a woman from Buffalo and she claimed his body and buried him in an unmarked grave in a cemetery near Niagara Falls. She left it unmarked because she feared that it would be desecrated by the Mafia if they knew where it was. He had survived Vito Genevese by two years and two months.

Peter Chiodo
     
     
     
     
    Who says being overweight is bad for your health? On 8 May 1991, forty-year-old Peter Chiodo, a capo in the Lucchese crime family had stopped at a Staten Island service station, close to the Verranzano Narrows Bridge, because he had a problem with his car. He had just lifted the bonnet and begun to have a look at the engine when a black saloon car pulled up beside him. Three shooters inside the car opened fire on him and he immediately pulled his gun and returned some shots. But, within moments, he slumped to the ground beside his car having received twelve bullet wounds to the arms, legs and body, five of the bullets passing right through and out the other side. But, after being rushed in a serious condition to St. Vincent’s hospital, he survived, none of the bullets having damaged a vital organ. His huge bulk – his weight was anything between 450 and 500 pounds and he stood six feet five inches tall – had cushioned a number of the bullets. Not for nothing did they did call him ‘Fat Pete’.
    Mafia crime syndicate, the Lucchese Family controlled the window installation business in New York. Smaller than either the Gambinos or the Genovese families, with just 125 members, the Luccheses had been headed by Vittorio ‘Little Vic’ Amuso since 1986. Although described by friends as a ‘regular guy’ who enjoyed sport and working out, he was probably responsible for nine murders. He listed his occupations over the years as security guard, a window-installation company salesman and a trucking company executive. Not many window salesmen order their men to ‘hit Jersey’, however, meaning that they should kill the entire Lucchese Family in Jersey, thirty men. They had made the mistake of cutting him out of their profits after the imprisonment of Anthony ‘Tony Ducks’ Corallo who had been sentenced to 100 years for