Feature 1

November 2024 issue contents

Growing up Valachi

East Harlem boy becomes Mafia soldier

As the newborn “Giuseppe Vilacio” took his first breath in autumn 1903, his East Harlem community was home to an already substantial and still growing population of first- and second-generation Italian Americans...

18 magazine pages / 34 book pages.
Includes sidebar articles on New York Catholic Protectory; Anthony Valachi; John Valachi; Filomena, Maddalena, Antonetta Valachi.
Map, documents, images, endnotes.

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Feature 2

November 2024 issue contents

The Murder Stables

By Jon Black

A menacing maze of run-down structures played a significant role in the East Harlem childhood of Joseph Valachi. The structures, built and rebuilt over time from discarded building debris, packing crates and old sheet iron, stood at the corner of First Avenue and East 108th Street. They included junk and rag collection shops, wagon storage and other business uses. At the heart of the ramshackle complex was a boarding stable infamous for criminal activity. Due to its presence, the cluster of shacks acquired an evil reputation and became collectively known as the “Murder Stables”...

10 magazine pages / 17 book pages.
Map, images, endnotes.

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Feature 3

November 2024 issue contents

Mafia minor leaguers

East Harlem gangsters became 'mobbed up'

By Thibaut Maïquès

Pushed by poverty and peers, by about 1920 young Joseph Valachi was engaged in gang crime. He was excluded as many of his contemporaries graduated into regional racketeering. The pressure of the underworld conflict known as the Castellammarese War caused a Mafia organization to induct Valachi late in 1930...

5 magazine pages / 10 book pages.
Images, sources.

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Feature 4

November 2024 issue contents

Mystery victims

Two killed due to underworld deal were not identified by Valachi

Consiglio

Two rebel groups in the New York area joined forces against the reigning Mafia boss of bosses in 1930. But before they did so, they needed to prove commitment to their shared cause by murdering two men. Valachi described the arrangement in his autobiography but did not identify the victims...

4 magazine pages / 7 book pages.
Image, endnotes.

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Feature 5

November 2024 issue contents

How a mafioso is 'made'

Comparing underworld induction ceremonies of different times and places

By J. Michael Niotta, PhD

By the time Joe Valachi bared all in front of television cameras for Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan and his subcommittee in October of 1963, the agencies working “Italian crimes” in America already had a fair amount of intel on the Mafia, including versions of the criminal society’s induction ceremony...

5 magazine pages / 10 book pages.
Images, sources.

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Feature 6

November 2024 issue contents

'Little Apples'; big lie

We weren't told the truth about Valachi's early Mafia murder contract

By Patrick Downey

Reggione

Having survived both the Castellammarese War and the purge of Salvatore Maranzano’s faithful that followed, by the fall of 1932, Joe Valachi was settling into Mafia life. As a new member of a crew run by Anthony Strollo, aka Tony Bender, he became safely entrenched in the Mafia organization headed by Charlie “Lucky” Luciano (Salvatore Lucania) and his underboss Vito Genovese. Through The Valachi Papers, we learn that Joe received his first Luciano Crime Family murder contract via Bender that autumn. The victim was twenty-one-year-old hoodlum Michael Reggione, nicknamed Little Apples, who hung around a coffee shop on East 109th Street...

4 magazine pages / 7 book pages.
Images, documents, sources.

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Feature 7

November 2024 issue contents

Killing of off-dury officer linked to Valachi kin

By Thomas Hunt with Ellen Poulsen

Officer Loreto

The killing of off-duty New York Police Officer Alfred Loreto in the summer of 1950 occurred in a Bronx neighborhood familiar to Joseph Valachi and may have resulted from the criminal ventures of Valachi’s brother-in-law Giacomo “Jack” Reina...

6 magazine pages / 12 book pages.
Images, sources.

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Feature 8

November 2024 issue contents

Valachi and women

Through his teen years and early adulthood, Valachi avoided serious romantic entanglements, feeling shame over his poor living conditions and the crimes he was committing in an effort to remedy them. Around his mid-twenties, he began to more highly value his bonds with women. While fidelity was never his strong suit, he formed a series of meaningful connections with women...

5 magazine pages / 10 book pages.
Images, endnotes. 

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Feature 10

November 2024 issue contents

Murder by mistake

Saupp was fatally beaten because he physically resembled a mobster

Though reportedly involved in thirty-three homicides, Valachi generally denied committing killings with his own hands. The one murder he admitted to performing himself, the vicious beating death of prison inmate John Joseph Saupp, was said to be the result of a mistake...

11 magazine pages / 16 book pages.
Images, endnotes.

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Feature 9

November 2024 issue contents

Valachi and 'the French Connection'

By Fabien Rossat

Frank Caruso, Vincent Mauro, Salvatore Maneri

On December 27, 1961, Joseph Valachi, a member of the Genovese Crime Family, and ten codefendants were convicted of importing into the United States $150 million worth of heroin. Sentenced to twenty years for this affair, it was the end of Valachi’s long racketeering career. A few months later, he would become the first penitent to publicly testify to the existence of Cosa Nostra in the U.S. While Valachi had been an important link in the drug operation, that link was near one end of a vast chain – a multinational trafficking network that the general public would later know (thanks to Director William Friedkin's 1971 film) as The French Connection...

11 magazine pages / 18 book pages.
Images, map, endnotes.

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Feature 11

November 2024 issue contents

Was Valachi insane?

Joseph Valachi’s rationality and emotional stability were questioned by a number of sources on a number of occasions. Some issues were raised by Valachi’s history, actions and comments; some by the underworld colleagues he publicly betrayed; some by a critical press...

7 magazine pages / 13 book pages.
Sidebar articles on Counting up the 'crazies,' Lipton's troubles.
Images, document, endnotes.

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Feature 12

November 2024 issue contents

Valachi and the FBI

rechristened the Mafia

J. Edgar Hoover

The Federal Bureau of Investigation hesitated to join U.S. law enforcement’s battle against the Mafia underworld network. The Bureau refused even to recognize the existence of the secret criminal society until circumstances left it no option. FBI did not fully engage organized crime until, with Joseph Valachi’s televised assistance, it had rebranded the syndicate...

7 magazine pages / 13 book pages.
Images, endnotes.

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Feature 13

November 2024 issue contents

DOJ vs FBI

Government agencies squabbled over the release of Valachi's information

Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent Department of Justice had very different ideas of what to do with informant Joseph Valachi and the organized-crime data he provided. In a feud that lasted a year, each agency worked to block and undermine the other and eventually made its own secret publicity arrangements...

8 magazine pages / 14 book pages.
Sidebar articles on Courtney Allen Evans, Miriam Ottenberg
Images, documents, endnotes.

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Feature 14

November 2024 issue contents

Testimony was 'a mixed bag'

Valachi's televised appearances amounted to something less than a law enforcement triumph

The televised testimony of Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi in the early autumn of 1963 certainly was a media spectacle. However, it was not universally regarded as a turning point in law enforcement’s war against organized crime...

12 magazine pages / 22 book pages.
Sidebar article on Early slot machine opposition.
Images, endnotes. 

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Feature 15

November 2024 issue contents

Getting the story printed

Deemed dangerous, Valachi's autobiography was suppressed by the White House

Peter Maas

Though the Lyndon Johnson Administration initially endorsed a plan to publish Joseph Valachi’s autobiography, political pressures caused the administration to quickly reverse course and block publication. When journalist Peter Maas attempted to publicize the details of Valachi’s life story, the government sued to stop him...

6 magazine pages / 13 book pages.
Sidebar articles on Peter Maas, Notes to Maas.
Images, endnotes.

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Feature 16

November 2024 issue contents

Valachi's exit

Much was omitted from official reports

The New York newspapers of April 4, 1971, reported that Joseph Valachi had died of a “heart attack” the previous day. The New York Daily News suggested, “It was an incongruously peaceful end for a professional killer who had run with the mobs since he was 15…” While the final narcotic-dulled seconds of Valachi’s troubled life must have been tranquil, his last moments of full consciousness were tortured...

3 magazine pages / 6 book pages.
Image, document, endnotes. 

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Feature 17

November 2024 issue contents

Last will and testament

of Joseph Valachi

Joseph Valachi composed his last will and testament in the spring of 1967, while he was in the Federal Correctional Institution at Milan, Michigan. In contrast with the extraordinarily lengthy autobiography he wrote in 1964-1965, the will was just a page and a half. It was penned about a year after Valachi – desperately unhappy over his transfer to Milan and the government’s withdrawal of permission to publish his book – tried to take his own life. The bruises he suffered in the attemped hanging had healed, and author Peter Maas was moving ahead with plans to publish Valachi’s story, but the famous informant still had death on his mind...

3 magazine pages / 5 book pages.
Document, endnotes.

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Feature 19

November 2024 issue contents

Valachi's life: the motion picture

Benefited from Godfather movie coattails but suffered in comparison with it

The movie, The Valachi Papers, was a financially successful business venture, earning substantial sums for its investors, for Valachi biographer Peter Maas and for the estate of Joseph Valachi, as it brought Valachi’s story to millions around the world. However, it is generally regarded as an entertainment failure and as a missed opportunity to present factual organized crime history in a movie format...

6 magazine pages / 10 book pages.
Images, endnotes.

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Early gang

October 2023 issue contents - Features

End of the Whyos

Irish-American gang terrorized the Lower East Side

By Thomas Hunt

Soon after Captain John McCullagh took command of police in the busy Manhattan ward historically known as “the Bloody Sixth,” he supposedly stated, “Either the Whyos or I must go from this precinct.”

Dan Driscoll

The remark reportedly occurred early in 1884, but McCullagh probably said no such thing

then or ever. The words were first noted in print some years after they were allegedly spoken. A syndicated article included them late in 1891, and the New York Daily Tribune revived the statement in 1896. By then, the Whyos gang already had gone, and McCullagh still was leading the police of the precinct.

Whether McCullagh made the statement or not, he certainly made the breakup of the Whyos a priority...

Book page count: twenty five.
Magazine page count: fourteen.
Images: twelve.
Timeline.
Endnotes.

Learn more about Informer's October 2023 issue. 

Profiting from despair

October 2023 issue contents - Features

John H. McGurk and Bowery's ‘Suicide Hall’

By Thomas Hunt

An early Paul Kelly hangout and the place where bouncer Thomas McManus earned his “Eat­-’Em-­Up-Jack” nickname, “Suicide Hall” was an infamous Bowery dive operated between 1895 and 1902 by John H. McGurk...

Book page count: fourteen.
Magazine page count: seven.
Images: three.
Sidebar articles: one.
Endnotes.

Learn more about Informer's October 2023 issue.