The Valachi Papers Read Online Free

cracking jokes about him.
    There was, however, really very little to laugh at. Organized crime is America's biggest business. According to the best estimates of the Department of Justice, admittedly an educated guess, it grosses better than $40 billion a year. Even if such a staggering statistic was off by as much as half, it would still dwarf anything else in sight. Organized crime, of course, pays no taxes, but it does pay to corrupt countless public officials at all levels, and besides its lucrative illicit rackets, it has increasingly infiltrated and taken over legitimate businesses and labor unions—applying, naturally, its own ethical standards. While the Cosa Nostra does not embrace all organized crime, it is its dominant force, virtually a state within a state—a "second government" as Valachi puts it—painstakingly structured, an intricate web of criminal activity stretching across the nation, bound together in a mystic ritual that sounds like a satire on college fraternity initiations and at the same time caught up in a continual swirl of brutality, savage intrigue, kangaroo courts and sudden death.
    Valachi lived in this world for more than thirty years without breaking its blood oath of allegiance—and silence. The circumstances that eventually caused him to do so began in Atlanta.
    For weeks he had led a terror-filled existence. He was marked for death, and he knew it. Another prisoner, also a member of the Cosa Nostra, had accused him of "ratting" to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. All at once Valachi found himself the target of the same sort of underworld execution that he had so often and so efficiently carried out in the past. While he had supplied narcotics agents with some fragmentary information about illegal drug traffic, in a not unusual bid for a lighter prison sentence, he ironically had never mentioned anything about the Cosa Nostra itself. Just what caused him to be fingered has yet to be entirely resolved. One dieory is that the Bureau of Narcotics, convinced that he had a lot more to say about die movement of heroin across U.S. borders, deliberately spread the word to bring enough pressure on Valachi to break him down completely. A second theory, which Valachi, among others, subscribes to, is that his accuser, a codefendant in the same narcotics case, did it to divert suspicion from himself.
    In June 1962, time was running out fast for Valachi. He had already survived three classic attempts to murder him in prison. One was to offer him poisoned food. Another was to corner him alone and defenseless in a shower room. Still a third was to goad him into a fight in the penitentiary yard, so that in the confusion of the rubbernecking crowd which would automatically gather around, he could be knifed.
    Worse yet, he had no avenue of appeal. The Cosa Nostra is divided into major units, each of which is called a Family. Valachi belonged to one such Family in New York City ruled by Vito
    Genovese, the most feared capo, or boss, in the Cosa Nostra. And it was Genovese, also in Atlanta serving a narcotics conviction of his own, who had decreed Valachi's death. At first everything seemed cozy between the two convicts, and Valachi could not believe that Genovese, who not only had invited him to become a cellmate and then arranged the move, but had been the best man at his wedding years before, would turn against him now. But all the warnings from friendly sources along the prison grapevine, as well as die hostile behavior toward him of other inmates currying Genovese's favor, were confirmed for Valachi in an eerie confrontation with Genovese. This is his account of what took place:
     
    One night in our cell Vito starts saying to me, "You know, we take a barrel of apples, and in this barrel of apples there might be a bad apple. Well, this apple has to be removed, and if it ain't removed, it would hurt the rest of the apples."
    I tried to interrupt him when he was saying this, but he waved at me to keep quiet.