The Valachi Papers (27 page)

"What do you mean?" Valachi recalls saying.

"I don't know. It's hard to explain. I feel like I'm going to be killed."

"What are you talking about?" Valachi quickly said. "Why do you say a thing like that?" "It's just the way I feel."

To break the mood, Valachi called over a girl in the bar who had once worked for him in the Lido, introduced Giannini to her as "my old pal," and bought another round of drinks. Then he drew Giannini aside and said, "Listen, you got to cheer up. Why don't you go out with her and have a good time?"

"Joe, I'm a little short. That's why I ain't paid you. I got a deal working, but I'm broke right now."

Valachi promptly handed Giannini $100. "Go ahead and enjoy yourself."

He stayed for another drink before telling Pagano, "Let's go." Giannini remained with the girl when they left. As diey walked to Valachi's car, Pagano said, "I can't get over it, die way he was saying he was going to get hit. Well, it must be true he's talking. Twice you call him, and twice he has a tail."

After making certain that he was not being followed, Valachi dropped Pagano off in East Harlem. The next afternoon he contacted die girl he had left widi Giannini and learned from her that the condemned man had mentioned something about a "game" in Harlem. Valachi passed this intelligence on to the Paganos and Siano. A few days later one of them —he thinks it was Joseph Pagano — reported back that Giannini was working "at a drop" on Second Avenue for a dice game around the corner on East
1
12th Street. "I'll explain what working 'at a drop' means," Valachi notes. "The crapshooters got to this place, which is the drop, before diey go to the game. In other words, the game was about half a block away. The fellow who is working the drop looks over the players, and if he sees they are okay, he escorts them to the

game at such-and-such address or such-and-such room in a hotel."

Upon receiving this information, Valachi immethately asked, "What about the agents?"

"We didn't see any. He must have beefed about it or something."

"Okay, that's what we have to know."

There was, however, a further complication when Valachi discovered that it was a Cosa Nostra dice game run by a member of the Lucchese Family, Paul (Paulie Ham) Correale. He had previously sent Pagano to Greenwich Village to pick up the guns for the killing from Tony Bender. Now he had to resolve the matter of the site. He found his lieutenant at an after-hours place, the Gold Key Club in midtown Manhattan, which, according to Valachi, was owned by Bender. Since the Gold Key Club was often under police surveillance, Valachi took his usual precautions in going there, parking his car some distance away and switching to a cab to avoid having his license number noted.

Before he could speak, Bender snapped, "What the hell's the holdup? Let's get this thing over with. I hope you're not trying to save your money."

"Tony, listen to me," Valachi protested, "there have been junk agents all over this guy." Then he brought up the problem of the drop. "The game belongs to Paulie Ham," he said. "Is it okay to get Gene there?"

"Well, you're right about this. I'll have to talk to the old man. I will make sure. Call me up here tomorrow night. You don't have to come down. Just call me up, and I will have an answer for you."

Valachi telephoned as directed, and Bender said, "It's okay."

For Giannini now, despite all of Valachi's machinations, time was running out. He would get one small reprieve. Valachi's plan for the assassination was to have one man stationed in a getaway car on 111 th Street, a block south of the game. The other two, after completing their mission, were to cut through one tenement on 112th Street, exit out of another building facing 111th Street and into the car. On the night of September 18, 1952, Valachi rode with the Pagano brothers and Siano to inspect the area. Everything seemed set. Giannini was standing on the sidewalk in front of the drop, and no agents could be found in the immethate area. Then, just as he was about to leave them, Valachi recalls asking Pat Pagano if he had made certain that there were no locked doors barring the escape route. "No,I-"

"That's it,* Valachi broke in angrily. "Go home and sleep. Check those halls tomorrow. What's the matter with you kids? Are you crazy? You ain't doing a thing until you're sure. I'm responsible for this."

The next afternoon, assured that this final safety measure had been taken, Valachi gave the go-ahead. He told Siano that he would be waiting for news of what happened at a restaurant on 114th Street and Second Avenue. In telephoning him, he added, Giannini was to be referred to as a girl. Then he reminded Siano that as soon as the shooting was finished, the pistols were to be dropped into the East River off the Third Avenue Bridge.

Valachi, to fix his own alibi, arranged to have dinner with three friends in the restaurant. Around midnight, Siano telephoned and said, "The girl hasn't shown up yet."

"Okay, I'm going up to my place."

Valachi then asked his dinner companions to drive him to the Lido. There, around 4 A.M., as he remembers, he received another call. It was all over. "We saw her," Siano said. "We're going on a trip for a couple of days."

"Fine," Valachi replied and went home to bed.

(New York City police records show that at 6
A.M.
on September 20, 1952, the body of Eugenio Giannini, age forty-two, of 282 West 234th Street, was found in the gutter in front of 221 East 107th Street. The cause of death was gunshot wounds in the head by persons unknown. Further investigation indicated that the shooting actually took place on Second Avenue near East 112th Street. The deceased had narcotics arrests both for violation of state and federal laws, and it was learned through confidential sources that he had been an informant for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.)

At the time the Narcotics Bureau believed that Giannini had been slain not because he was an informant, but because he had tried to bilk his associates out of most of their share of the heroin he was then engaged in smuggling into the country. There was some justification for this. According to the bureau's information, ten kilos were involved in the transaction. Undercover agents discovered, during the course of their investigation, that Giannini had quietly dispatched his brother-in-law to Italy to bring in six kilos on his own. This led to the brother-in-law's arrest in Salerno with the heroin in hand about a month before Giannini was murdered.

Once it had been established that the victim had been taken to 107th Street after being shot, there also was conjecture in the Bureau of Narcotics that this was simply a neat symbolic gesture since, until Valachi pieced together the organization of the Cosa Nostra, what would become known as the Lucchese Family was called the East 107th Street Mob.

Valachi was as curious about the body being removed. The first he heard about it was over the radio when he woke up that morning. The reason for it was not quite so esoteric, and for a

while it appeared to an outraged Valachi that he was headed for another table as a result.

"The guys running the game," Genovese told him a few days later, "claim they had to move the body to save it. They are pretty mad. They say it cost ten grand to pay off the cops."

For a moment Valachi thought that Bender had not cleared the site of the killing, but Genovese confirmed that he had given his approval. "I just want to find out what this is all about," he said. "So find out."

Valachi reported back to Genovese full of righteous indignation. "You know those guys that said they took Gene out of the neighborhood to throw the heat off the game? Well, they're lying."

"What do you mean?"

"There were a couple of boys working at the drop with Gene. When they found him, they thought he still had a chance. They were rushing him to the hospital!"

"Is that the way to the hospital?"

"Of course it is," Valachi said. "You don't know the neighborhood like I do. They are going to Fifth Avenue Hospital.
¹
They have to drive down Second Avenue, and naturally they turn at 107th, as it's a westbound street and it takes them right to the hospital. On the way they realize Gene is dead, and they dump him off. Now they want to play heroes. They want everyone to think they knew Gene was dead and they took a chance being caught just to get his body away from the crap game. I won't go for it. Everytimc I'm told to do something, its a mess, and I'm in the middle."

"Where did you get this from?" "From the kids, Fiore and the Paganos." "Well, don't worry, I'll take care of it."

With all of his old mistrust of Genovese flaring up again, Valachi decided to take no chance. He buttonholed Thomas Lucchese, Giannini's Family boss, at "somebody's wake" soon afterward and said, "Tommy, a lot of your boys are acting cold to me about this. I don't care how diey feel, but you and me go back a long way. I want to know how you feel. Do you think I went crazy and did it myself without orders?"

"Forget about it," Lucchese said. "Everything is fine. It wasn't your fault. The guy got what he deserved."

(One of the three men Valachi says he used in the Giannini murder, his nephew, Fiore Siano, suddenly vanished about nine months after it became known that he was talking. According to intelligence gathered by the New York City police, "Siano disappeared about the end of April or the beginning of May 1964. He has not been seen since three unknown males took him out of Patsy's Pizzeria, 2287 First Avenue, during the aforementioned period. Siano is believed dead. The rumor is that his body was disposed of in such a maimer as to prevent it from being discovered." Siano liked to shoot pool, and I spoke to one of the players in the last game he was known to have been in. In what is certainly the understatement of the year, the player recalls, "Fiore seemed moody, like he had something on his mind." Of the Pagano brothers, Joseph was sentenced to five years in 1965 for his part in what was described as a classic case of Cosa Nostra infiltration of a legitimate business; Pasquale Pagano, characterized by the Bureau of Narcotics as an "up-and-coming" underworld figure, has been in and out of prison and is currently at liberty. Valachi's testimony against them, without corroboration, is legally insufficient. Indeed, the Giannini murder illustrates the near impossibility of the successful prosecution of a gangland slaying. The police were called immethately after the shooting, but nobody saw anything. An elderly janitor was found cleaning the sidewalk. When a bloodstain still on the pavement was pointed out to him, he said, "Blood?")

Widim a year Valachi would be involved in another murder contract with Pat Pagano and Fiore Siano, this one on behalf of Vito Genovese himself. Genovese's climb to power had suffered an embarrassing interruption in December 1952, when his wife, Anna, left their home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and sued for divorce on the grounds that his cruelty "endangered her health and made her life extremely wretched." Mrs. Genovese, to say the least, was not the typical gangster's wife. In asking for separate maintenance, she wasted few words in court portraying her husband as a savage mob leader with a huge underworld income. Not only did she pinpoint the location of various safe-deposit boxes he kept full of cash both in the United States and Europe, but she detailed, among other items, his vast gambling interests, nightclubs, loanshark activities, and labor union kickbacks. From one racket alone—the so-called Italian lottery, based on a popular numerical game of chance in Italy—she testified that Genovese took in between $20,000 and $30,000 a week. "I know specifically about the Italian lottery," she said, "because I myself ran the Italian lottery."

As previously noted, the Cosa Nostra to a man was goggle-eyed that Genovese would let her get away with it. But while his love for her apparently stayed his hand, it did not "go so good" for one Steve Franse, who had been a partner first with Genovese in some of his nightclubs and then with Mrs. Genovese in running some others she personally had in the Greenwich Village area which were not, in her words "part of the Syndicate."

Genovese felt that his wife had fallen away from him during his long absence and blamed Franse for not keeping a closer eye on her. Thus early in June over a plate of veal parmigiana Bender informed Valachi that Franse was to
be
killed. Bender did not use Genovese's domestic problems as the reason for it; instead, he presented the usual catchall charge that Franse was a "rat." While Valachi had known Franse since the
1930s,
he had never been to the Lido, and this would
be
the pretext to take him unawares. "Stay at the restaurant every night after you
close,"
Bender told Valachi, "until you hear from
me.
If I say
go
home,
go
home. If I say wait, wait."

Frame
's
murder, according to Valachi, was brutal:

Every night, I'd say for sixteen nights, I get a call from Tony and he says, "Go home." Then I get this call, and he says, "Wait!"

So I lock up everything tight and pull the curtains and just sit there. A little after four o'clock there is this knock on the door. I open it, and in comes Pat Pagano and Fiore. They got Steve Franse with them. "Hey, Joe," Pat says, "we want Steve to see your joint."

Well, I fix drinks, and we talk about how the Lido is doing, and we walk around the front, and then we go into the kitchen. That's when it happens. Steve is a little guy, and Pat is pretty big. Pat grabs him from behind—he has got him in an armlock—and the other guy, Fiore, raps him in the mouth and belly. He gives it to him good. It's what we call "buckwheats," meaning spite-work.

I'm standing guard by the kitchen door when Pat lets go and Steve drops to the floor. He is on his back, and he is out. They wrap this chain around his neck. He starts to move once, so Pat puts his foot on his neck to keep him there. It only took a few minutes.