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

drug-trafficking investigation when he fled to Sicily in 1939. In the 1950s, a Justice Department investigation team interviewed him there and he told the team his life story, including names and dates, but the information was filed away and never acted upon.
    In 1940, Murder Inc’s Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles stuck his head above the Mafia parapet and informed on former associates. Reles explained how the national crime syndicate was formed in the early 1930s, providing dates and names. Once again, none of the law enforcement agencies made a concerted effort to follow up on his assertions. In the meantime, he paid with his life by ‘falling’ from a window while in police custody.
    There had been several investigations – the Chicago Crime Commission in 1922, the Wickershaw Commission in 1929 and the Kefauver Committee in 1950. Each found suggestions, but not conclusive proof that such a body as the Mafia actually existed.
    It took Joe Valachi to finally confirm that it did.
    Joseph Michael Valachi had been in the Mafia for decades, almost from the moment that it became the dominant criminal force in the United States. He was born in 1904, in East Harlem, to parents Marie and Dominick who had emigrated from Naples to New York. They had merely exchanged poverty in one continent for poverty in another. Of seventeen children to whom Marie gave birth, only six survived and they had it rough. Joe’s younger brother, Johnny was found dead in the road and it was never proved whether he had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident, or had been beaten to death by the police. Anthony, his older brother, was committed to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Danemora. Insanity ran in the family – two of his three sisters and his grandmother suffered the same fate as Anthony.
    Aged just seven, Joe had his first brush with the law when he threw a rock at a teacher and was sent to a reform school. By fifteen, he had left school behind and was working alongside his father at a New York City garbage dump.
    The Minute Men were a gang of teenage burglars and hooligans who took their name from the speed with which they worked. Joe joined them when he was eighteen and in 1923, experienced his second brush with the law when he was shot in the arm by a police officer while fleeing from a robbery. He was arrested and sentenced to nine months in Ossining Prison in Upper New York State. Ossining was better known as Sing Sing, the most notorious prison in America.
    On his release, Joe took up where he left off, but this time forming his own gang. He was unlucky yet again, however, when he was shot by a passing patrolman while breaking into a Bronx warehouse filled with fur coats. This time he was wounded in the head, but escaped and recovered. In 1925, however, he paid another visit to Sing Sing – for three years this time – after a car used in a robbery was traced back to him.
    Before entering prison, Joe had been blamed by some gangsters for driving a car in an incident in which the neighbourhood was shot up. They tried to punish him for this in prison and he was seriously wounded in an attack by another prisoner, Pete LaTampa. He received thirty-eight stitches and recovered once again. During this stint, he managed to complete his seventh grade education and learned to read and write, but almost more importantly, he was given an education in the ways of the underworld by an old-timer called Alessandro Bollero with whom he became friends. Bollero had been a leading mobster since the early years of the 20th century and had been locked up for the 1918 murder of Vincenzo Terranova, brother of vicious Mafioso, Ciro Terranova, known as ‘the Artichoke King’. Ciro made a fortune by threatening vegetable sellers into buying his artichokes.
    When Valachi emerged from Sing Sing in 1928, he resolved to iron out his problems with Terranova and was helped in this by a friend, Dominick ‘The Gap’ Petrilli. He then returned to business