The Valachi Papers Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficulty."
    The report goes on:
     
    Regarding the subject's present predicament, he said ... he had gone to the associate warden the Saturday before and got himself "locked up" because of rumors all over that he had "squealed." He was so afraid that he had been skipping meals and had stopped bathing. He stated that when he went into solitary he was in "bad shape" and that it would be hard for anyone to understand how it felt to be so accused. He was in great torment because of having been "branded a rat and marked bad."
     
    As for Valachi himself, the report concludes:
     
    No hallucinatory experience or suicidal tendencies could be elicited. Comprehension and memory showed no gross defects. Whether his ideas in reference to having been "called and branded a rat" were delusions or had an actual basis in fact, this examiner could not determine. ... At the present time he is considered not psychotic. He understands the proceedings against him; he is able to intelligently advise counsel, assist in his own defense and stand trial.
     
    For approximately three weeks no one in the Justice Department either in Washington or New York, where Valachi had been prosecuted for dealing in narcotics, knew what had happened. Meanwhile, the local U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, who had jurisdiction over the case, was preparing to ask the death penalty for Valachi because of the "brutality and senselessness" of the killing. At this critical juncture Valachi himself finally managed to get word of his plight to Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, via a go-between whose name, for obvious reasons, is still being kept under wraps by the Justice Department. A phone call to Morgenthau on July 13 briefly sketched the situation and advised him that Valachi "now wants to cooperate with the federal government." Morgenthau, after a hurried conference with the New York office of the Bureau of Narcotics, immediately contacted his counterpart in Atlanta and informed him of Valachi's potential value. The upshot was that on the morning of July 17, Valachi, represented by two court-appointed lawyers, was permitted to plead guilty to a lesser charge of murder in the second degree and received a life sentence. That same day he was taken in tow by narcotics agent Frank Selvagi and flown to the Westchester County Jail, a few miles north of New York City. There he was given the cover of "Joseph DeMarco" and installed apart from other prisoners in the jail's hospital wing.
    But die hope that he would promptly spill everything he knew soon vanished. At the time he murdered the wrong man in prison, Valachi was serving concurrent terms of fifteen and twenty years for peddling dope. While he freely admits to a number of specific crimes, including complicity in several previously unsolved gangland killings, he still maintains that on the second of diese convictions, which led to his being labeled an informer, he was framed. So, once out of the reach of Vito Genovese, he took out all his hostility on agent Selvagi. "You were the cause of me getting into trouble," he jeered. "Where were you when I needed you?"
    Valachi nonetheless was careful to hint at just enough to keep Selvagi interested. And the Bureau of Narcotics, angling at best for inside information on heroin traffic, got a peek at considerably more than it bargained for. Gradually the shadowy outlines of a national crime cartel involving a vast array of rackets began to emerge out of the give-and-take between Selvagi and Valachi. Toward die end of August, as a result, Henry L. Giordano, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, called a key Justice Department figure, William Hundley, who headed a special section set up by Attorney General Kennedy to pull together the previously uncoordinated efforts of various government investigative agencies against organized crime and racketeering. "We're talking to a guy," Giordano told Hundley. "It could be important. I'll send you copies