Joseph "Joe Cago" Valachi

Joseph Valachi spent thirty years as an unremarkable soldier. He drove getaway cars, ran numbers, held a piece of a dress factory and a restaurant, and never rose above the bottom rung of the organisation he belonged to. He matters because of what he said in 1963.

He was born in East Harlem in 1904, joined a burglary crew in his twenties, and was brought into the Maranzano faction during the Castellammarese War. He stayed in the family through its passage from Luciano to Costello to Genovese.

Atlanta

In 1959 Valachi and Vito Genovese were both serving narcotics sentences in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Valachi became convinced that Genovese had marked him as an informer and had ordered his death. In June 1962, believing an inmate approaching him was the assigned killer, Valachi beat the man to death with an iron pipe. He had misidentified him. Facing a murder charge, he agreed to talk to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The hearings

In late September and October 1963 Valachi testified in open session before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with the cameras running. He was the first member to publicly confirm that the organisation existed at all, and he gave it the name its members used: Cosa Nostra. He described initiation, the rank structure from soldier to boss, and the Commission.

Much of what he said was second-hand and some of it was wrong. It was still the first map investigators had. He died of a heart attack in federal custody in Texas in April 1971.