Read Online The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas - Free Book Online Page B

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    I did the best I could to keep myself clean, but with all the dust from the coal we had stored in the house, it wasn't easy. There was a public bath at 109th Street and Second Avenue. To get into the bath sometimes, the line would be a block and a half long. Then when you were in the baths, they would give you only so much time, and you had to get out of there. Believe me, it wasn't much time.
    I was supposed to go to school, but to be honest about it, lots of times I didn't. I got picked up once by the truant officer; all I got was a warning. Then, when I was eleven, I hit a teacher in the eye with a rock. I didn't mean to do it; I was just trying to scare her. Anyway, I was sent to the New York Catholic Protectory, which is where the court sent you for being in trouble like I was, or if you were an orphan. It was in the Bronx, and it was pretty rough. As far as the brothers were concerned, some of them were okay and some were real bad. You wouldn't believe what some of them were like, fooling around with the young kids, but I don't want to go into that.
    The roughest one was Brother Abel. He was in charge of the tailor-shop, and he would lay into us with his tape stick something awful. It didn't matter whether we did anything wrong or not. The best thing to do was stay out of his way unless you were looking for a beating. Then one day Brother Abel died. They put his body on display in the chapel. I'll never forget it. All the kids from the five yards of the protectory had to line up to view him and pay their last respects. All told, I'd say there were about 300 of us. I was near the end of the line, and when it was my turn to view the body, I almost fainted. Brother Abel's chest was all covered with spit, so what could I do? I spit on him, too.
    I got out of the protectory when I was fourteen and went back to school for a little while. But when I was the age of fifteen, I got my working papers and went to work with my father at the garbage dump. At the end of the week my father would take my pay, too, and at night there would be war at home. This wasn't any good for me, so with one or two other fellows on the block, naturally I started to steal to have a little money of my own.
     
    By the time he was eighteen, Valachi's petty thievery had led to full-fledged membership in a burglary gang, working out of East I Iarlem's 107th Street, called the Minute Men because of the speed of their operations. Valachi always had a great interest in cars, and his primary responsibility in the gang was to be the "wheelman,'' or driver. This gang pulled off literally hundreds of thefts between 1919 and 1923. Their methods were simple enough. A garbage can would be used to smash a store window, and whatever was inside, usually furs or jewelry, was taken out and sold to a fence. With police car radios not yet commonplace, the gang could count on several minutes before die law arrived from the nearest precinct house. Some merchants relied on a private alarm system provided by the Holmes Electric Protective Company to guard against thefts, but this did not appreciably close the time gap. Although Valachi's record shows that he was picked up five times on suspicion of burglary or larceny charges, he escaped a jail sentence until the spring of 1923:
     
    The Minute Men were the talk of the underworld, even if it sounds like I'm exaggerating. We were real cowboys, meaning that we were riding high, and when we met other mobs in the cabarets around town, I must say everybody wanted to know who the wheelman was. The boys would point at me, and the other guys would always buy me a drink and say, "Well, good luck, kid." I must say it made me feel real good, as I was only nineteen at the time. It was the same when we went by Sadie Chink's place on Manhattan Avenue. She always had five or six girls in the house, and it was safe there because Sadie was paying off the cops. Boy, when one of the girls said, "Gee, I've heard about you," it made you