The Valachi Papers Read Online Free Page B

"Three-finger" Brown because of a missing digit.
    fantasizing like an angry child, "Vito must live" to stand exposed before the rest of the Cosa Nostra as someone who sentenced his men to death without any sort of a hearing and then dismissed it by calling them "rats."
    Everything came to a head on the morning of June 22. Half out of his mind under this grinding pressure, and having eaten practically nothing for days for fear of being poisoned, Valachi finally exploded against a man he diought was DiPalermo:
     
    I was out in the yard down by the baseball diamond. All of a sudden I saw three guys behind the grandstand looking at me. They were about fifty yards away. Then they started towards me. I had my back against the wall. There was some construction work going on, and I saw a piece of pipe lying on the ground. Just as I picked it up, figuring that if I'm going to go, they're all going to go, a guy walked by and said, "Hello, Joe." I looked up as he had passed me. He looked just like Joe Beck, so I said to myself, I might as well take him, too. I took the pipe, and I let him have it over the head. He fell. Then I ran after those three guys. One of them had a knife. I went about ten yards, when they turned and started to run away, so I ran back to the guy on the ground. With all the blood, who could tell who the hell he was now? I gave him two more shots with the pipe.
    The three of them from the grandstand started running back towards me. They were about twenty yards away when a guard ran up and told me he wanted the pipe. I said I wouldn't give it to him.* He kept after me. I said, "Leave me alone or I'll use the pipe on you." He said, "There's a guy
     
    "Guards within physical reach of prisoners do not carry weapons lest they be overpowered and the weapons seized. Guards on the wall, however, are armed.
     
    dying." I said, "Good. Let him die," thinking all the time it was Joe Beck.
    Now there were about twenty inmates around us. The guard said, "Let's go to the associate warden's office." I said, "Okay, but I'm keeping the pipe."
    It was in the associate warden's office that I found out I got the wrong guy. I was there about fifteen minutes when he went out of his office for a second and came back in and threw a picture at me. "Do you know him?" he said. I said, "No," and he said, "Well, that's the man you just hit."
    I didn't know what to think. I was in a fog.
     
    The object of Valachi's raging attack was named John Joseph Saupp, in Atlanta for mail robbery and forgery, a man with no organized crime connections, whom Valachi did not even know, but a man who bore a remarkable, and fatal, physical resemblance to his intended victim, DiPalermo. This, in the opinion of a special agent of the FBI who would later spend more time with Valachi than anyone else, was the turning point. "Valachi," he says, "has no real remorse for anything he has done in his life, except this. Nodiing crushed him more than die fact that he got the wrong man. It really plagues him. Getting a guy who was going to get him was die one satisfaction he was willing to setde for. If he had been successful, he probably never would have talked."
    Saupp, despite multiple skull fractures, lingered on without regaining consciousness for almost forty-eight hours before he died. Even though Valachi was now facing a murder charge, he still insisted that "I just went crazy" to prison officials who questioned him. As one of them unprophetically noted at the time, "I get the feeling that Valachi. .. will never come out with a full account of the whole story."
    In view of his later decision to talk, however, the report of the neuropsychiatric examination he underwent before trial makes fascinating reading. While "amiable in manner," it says in part, Valachi "appeared under much tension and his mood was characterized by moderate anxiety and depression. Speech was relevant and coherent; there was hesitancy and emotional blocking of speech in discussing his present