Animal by Casey Sherman Page A

the FBI was that a gangster named Salvatore Iacone had gone to Raymond Patriarca the day before the shooting to complain about Angiulo. Iacone and Angiulo had recently gone in on the Indian Meadow Country Club in Worcester, Massachusetts. The two men had been arguing about proprietorship of the club when the short-tempered Angiulo launched into an obscenity-laced tirade against his business partner. Iacone wanted to kill Angiulo on the spot, but chose not to act out of respect for Patriarca. When Iacone described the incident to the Man, Patriarca just scoffed.
    “You shoulda killed him,” Patriarca told Iacone. He also gave Iacone the green light to whack Angiulo on the spot with no questions asked ifthe underboss disrespected him in the future. As stated by the Boston office in a confidential memo to a top FBI official in Washington, “We have had recent indications of a growing coolness in attitude by Patriarca toward Angiulo.” These “indications” were exactly what the bureau had been waiting for. It suggested a soft spot in Patriarca’s impenetrable armor and gave agents hope that the growing divide between the boss and underboss would spread to the rest of the New England mob family.
    In the early 1960s, the nation’s most infamous gangster was not Raymond Patriarca, Sam Giancana, or any of their counterparts. Instead, America’s most celebrated mobster was a low-level, square-headed drug smuggler named Joseph Valachi. Valachi had been in prison since his conviction on federal narcotics charges in 1959. Agents from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics ( FBN ) approached Valachi while he was behind bars at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. The drug smuggler had just killed a man in the prison yard he believed had been sent by New York Mafia boss Vito Genovese to assassinate him. Valachi crushed the man’s skull with a two-foot section of iron pipe. It had been the desperate act of a desperate man. Valachi had already survived three attempts on his life. He believed that he had been marked for death after another mobster began spreading erroneous rumors that Valachi had turned informer. Valachi told authorities that Genovese had planted his lips on Valachi’s cheeks, giving him the “kiss of death” while the two shared a cell shortly before the deadly jail-yard confrontation. By the time Valachi smashed the pipe against his victim’s head, he was weak and delusional, having been on a self-imposed hunger strike for several days out of fear that his prison food was poisoned. The sad truth was that Valachi’s “assassin” had not been trying to kill him at all. The victim, John Joseph Saupp, was serving time for mail robbery and forgery and had no mob ties. Valachi had mistaken Saupp for a dangerous mobster named Joseph “Joe Beck” DiPalermo. FBN agents informed the paranoid Valachi that he had in fact killed the wrong man and then threatened to return him to the prison’s general population unless he cooperated.
    Valachi made up his mind quickly. In an attempt to save his own neck, he agreed to flip on old friends as well as total strangers, and in doing so broke the Mafia’s cardinal rule of Omerta (Silence). Valachi was transferred to New York’s Westchester County Jail in late June 1962 under thealias Joseph DeMarco. Initial questioning had been done by the FBN , but once Attorney General Bobby Kennedy learned about the underworld defection, he pressed J. Edgar Hoover to insert one of his own agents into the interrogation.
    Despite Valachi’s low-level status within the mob, he was able to provide a wealth of information both real and imagined about the syndicate’s organizational structure and its most influential and ruthless members. This information was not gleaned easily, however. At first, Valachi tried to say as little as possible. The FBI assigned Special Agent James Flynn to the case with an order to break down the mobster’s stone wall of silence.