Animal by Casey Sherman Page B

“I could see there was a definite hatred on Joe’s part against anybody in law enforcement at that point,” Flynn recalled years later in a documentary for A&E television. 22 “He would talk and not talk. He would recognize the fact that you were in the room and stop talking altogether.” Flynn worked on Valachi for two months, plying the overweight prisoner with Italian specialties including Genoa sausage, pasta, and cheese. But the key to Valachi’s heart turned out not to be his stomach after all. It was information. Special Agent Flynn sat Valachi down for a talk that would either make or break his case.
    “Joe, I’m gonna tell you one word and I want you to give me the other. If you don’t give it to me, we’re finished,” Flynn told Valachi. “ Cosa ,” the special agent whispered. 23
    “ Cosa Nostra ,” Valachi replied, nodding his head. “You know about it?”
    Flynn nodded back. He had heard the words Cosa Nostra mentioned several times on wiretaps but was not fully aware of its meaning. Valachi would have to fill in the rest. Valachi informed Flynn that those inside the mob never referred to themselves as members of the Mafia. “That’s the expression the outside uses,” Valachi told him. The mobster explained that Cosa Nostra was a Sicilian phrase that meant Our Thing. La Cosa Nostra (the FBI added the La ) quickly replaced words like “syndicate” and “hoodlum” in the bureau’s lexicon. Valachi then broke down LCN’S business model, which was a combination of best practices from both the corporate world and the military. Valachi described himself and others as soldiers, criminal infantry working in tightly knit crews called regimas who were led by capo regimes (lieutenants) that reported to twelve capos (heads) in select geographical areas.
    Contrary to popular belief, Valachi had not been the first man to expose the inner workings of the mob. That information had been provided decades before, in 1940, by a Jewish contract killer named Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Kid Twist, a vicious killer for the notorious hit squad Murder Inc., came under indictment for a string of gangland slayings in which he had applied a number of different killing methods from pistols to his personal favorite—the ice pick. With threats of the electric chair, prosecutors realized they could twist Kid Twist into giving up his Murder Inc. boss, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles implicated Buchalter in the murder of a Brooklyn candystore owner for which he was later convicted and sent to the electric chair. Reles also turned in five other mobsters who were all found guilty and later executed for their crimes. The Murder Inc. turncoat was not done yet, however. Prosecutors had set their sights on Albert Anastasia, a high-ranking member of Cosa Nostra . Reles had given investigators key information to tie Anastasia to the murder of a longshoreman and union activist named Pete Panto, who had led an unsuccessful revolt against International Longshoremen’s Association leader Joseph P. Ryan, a close ally of the New York mob. Pete Panto disappeared in July 1939, and his remains were not discovered until nearly three years later, when they turned up in a lime pit in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
    Panto’s story was later used as an inspiration for the Oscar-winning 1954 film On the Waterfront , starring Marlon Brando. While Panto was still missing and feared dead, Reles told investigators that the union activist had been killed by fellow Murder Inc. hitman Mendy Weiss on orders from Albert Anastasia. Before Reles could testify, however, he took flight from a sixth-floor window at the Half Moon Hotel on New York’s Coney Island while guarded by six detectives. Investigators claimed Reles was killed while trying to escape, but popular theory suggests that the guards had been paid $100,000 to push Kid Twist out the window to his death. With his early and mysterious demise, Reles was immortalized by one New