His Life and Crimes

THE VALACHI PAPERS by Peter Maas. 285 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Joseph Michael Valachi looks a bit like a Damon Runyon gangster--the tough guy who really is all heart. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and bandy-legged, he could pass as one of those middle-aged truck drivers who spend their days oiT lifting weights at the local gym, then go home and cook up a dinner for the wife and kids--"Joe's Special Recipe for Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs."

In Joe Valachi's case, appearances are deceptive; gourmet skills plainly take second place to adeptness as an all-round hood. A "soldier" in the Cosa Nostra for more than 30 years, Valachi has, by Justice Department count, a murder to show for every year. Most recently, on a June morning in 1962, he beat a fellow convict to death with a two-foot length of iron pipe at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. By then, Valachi was fighting for his own life. He had received the "kiss of death" from his capo (boss) and cellmate Vito Genovese. In the end, Valachi did what the Cosa Nostra presumed he had done already. He became the first man to confess his membership in the shadowy organization and spilled his story to the Bureau of Narcotics and the FBI.

Subjects and Predicates. Over the course of 13 months, Valachi outlined his life and crimes in 300,000 words. The Justice Department gave Maas permission to edit the Valachi papers, then reneged, the author claims, under pressure from Italian-American groups that were anxious to avoid perpetuating the ethnic stereotype of the Italian hood. As an alternative, Maas smoothed down Valachi's story into a somewhat conventional piece of journalism.

The subject is less conventional: the Cosa Nostra ("this thing of ours"). Quite a thing it is, too. The Justice Department estimates that organized crime in the U.S. grosses better than $40 billion a year. "If the Cosa Nostra's illegal profits were reported," Maas says, the U.S. could afford "a 10% tax reduction instead of a 10% surcharge."

According to Valachi the Cosa Nostra is ruled by a board made up of nine to twelve capi. The group became big business as far back as Prohibition. Though there have been ambitious capi since the time of Salvatore Maranzano, who in the 1920s filled a room with books about Julius Caesar, no single boss has ever really taken over--with the possible exception of Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. The Cosa Nostra now operates through 25 to 30 "families," totaling about 5,000 members. Five families and about one-third of the total troops are based in New York City, where Valachi grew up as the son of a hard-drinking pushcart peddler in East Harlem.

Valachi's career coincides with the rise of the Cosa Nostra itself and reads like a kind of how-to-succeed manual for middle-echelon mobsters. At 18, Valachi was already a veteran "wheelman" (getaway driver), but he made the mistake of joining an "Irish gang." That move so displeased the Italian underworld that while Valachi was serving time for theft, he received as chastisement a knife wound that ran under his heart and around to his back, requiring 38 stitches.

Blood Oath. When he came out of Sing Sing in 1928 (it was his second jail term), he promptly began to repair bridges with the Cosa Nostra. In 1930, after passing his initiation--successful participation in a gangland assassination --Valachi went before Capo Maranzano ("Gee, he looked just like a banker"). Joe took his oaths with blood from his trigger finger and with flaming paper ("This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra").

Starting out as a bodyguard and chauffeur, Valachi survived shifts in power as tricky as ups and downs under the Borgias. He and a partner made $2,500 a week from the slot-machine business. Valachi also ran a numbers racket, a "classy horse room" in White Plains, N.Y., and a loan-shark operation. He bought his own race horses. During World War II, Valachi worked the gasoline black market, earning about $200,000 in three years from finagling with ration stamps. Even at that, he says, "I wasn't so big." After the war, he muscled into jukeboxes but also went respectable by sending his son to a private school and moving to suburban Yonkers. Then Valachi slipped up.

Second Government. A number of Cosa Nostra families, including Valachi's, outlawed drug trafficking because it brought too many federal agents around. Still, Joe found the profits irresistible. When he began importing heroin from France (purchase price--$2,500 per kilo, U.S. selling price--$11,-000), he brought down on his head both the Cosa Nostra and the Bureau of Narcotics.

The Valachi Papers does not always rise above its detail. But for those who still dismiss the Cosa Nostra as the fanciful creation of ambitious D.A.s and over-imaginative hoodlums, the detail serves a purpose. Out of all the dates and curiously businesslike statistics, there finally emerges the dark outline of a state within a state--"a second government," as Valachi calls it. In the words of a member of the Justice Department: "He showed us the face of the enemy."

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