R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

Visceglia would shake his head and exhale. There was something about the way he did it that sounded like he would empty out and vanish.

‘The Genovese family was where Joseph Valachi came from, and he threw everyone a left-handed curve when he testified at the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee in September and October of 1963. Valachi was the one who used the term “Cosa Nostra”, “This Thing of Ours”, and the things he told the Committee freaked the living shit out of everyone who heard him. Bottom line was that what he had to say didn’t directly incriminate anyone enough to charge them, but it did turn things around for the families.’

‘I’ve read about that stuff,’ Hartmann said. ‘The whole code of silence thing-’

‘Omerta,’ Visceglia said. ‘Valachi violated omerta… one of the few family members ever to do so, and he opened up a can of worms that gave more insight into the power struggles and rank-and-file operations of the Mafia than any other man.’

‘You know why he did that?’ Hartmann asked.

Visceglia shook his head. ‘I know something of it, yes.’

Hartmann raised his eyebrows expectantly. It was late, he should have been on his way home, but there was something about the subject that both intrigued and appalled him.

Visceglia shrugged his shoulders. ‘Valachi had joined Salvatore Maranzano’s organization in the late ’20s, and he served beneath Maranzano until Maranzano was assassinated in ’31. Thereafter Valachi served beneath Vito Genovese within the Luciano family. He was nothing more than a button man, a soldier. He was a hit man, an enforcer, a numbers operator and a drug pusher, and he did whatever he was told to do. They got him in ’59 and he went down on a fifteen to twenty for trafficking. Sent him to Atlanta Penitentiary in Georgia, and there he kind of lost his mind – maybe the lock-up, maybe the loneliness, but he got it into his head that Vito Genovese had named him as an informer and ordered his death. He mistook another prisoner called Joe Saupp for a hitman called Joe Beck. Valachi killed Saupp with an iron pipe and was given a life sentence. It was only at that point that he decided to turn informer. He wanted federal protection and that was the only way he could buy it. The only thing he had of any value at all was what was inside his head.’

Visceglia smiled, again that expression of philosophical resignation. ‘Ironic,’ he said, ‘but by the time Valachi reached the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee hearings he was guarded by no less than two hundred US marshals. More bodyguards than the fucking president. The Mafia put a $100,000 tap on his head. Regardless, Valachi went on to name more than three hundred Mafia family members and present a more detailed and concise history and structure of the Mafia than had been available before. Valachi named Lucky Luciano as the most important voice within the Mafia. He told them about the Havana conference and how, even in exile, Luciano had still controlled the business relentlessly. He gave up Meyer Lansky as Luciano’s second-in-command. The family started to call Valachi Joe Cargo. That was bastardized to Cago, the Italian dialect expression for shit.’

Visceglia laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘Valachi wasn’t no fucking Einstein. He was just muscle, and most of what came out of his mouth during those hearings was later discredited. Seems that members of Valachi’s crew knew Valachi well enough. They told him a whole heap of bullshit, things that Valachi actually thought were the truth. Nevertheless the words of Joseph Valachi and the subsequent Valachi Papers proved devastating to the Mafia. That was the point at which it all started to come apart at the seams. If Valachi hadn’t gone down and sung like a fucking canary who knows what the fuck might have happened.’

Visceglia paused and shook his head. ‘Truth was that after Valachi’s testimony the New York City Police Department released a very significant statistic. More family members in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area had been jailed in the subsequent three years than in the previous thirty. The guy did what he did, right or wrong, as far as the federal people were concerned, and though not one word actually served to finger anyone directly it still raised public and political awareness of what was really going on and what these people were capable of.’

‘And now?’ Hartmann asked.

‘Now? Well it ain’t what it used to be,’ Visceglia said. ‘Things ain’t never the same as they was in the old country… whaddya know, huh? Give it a name, forgeddaboudit, right?’

Hartmann had laughed. Visceglia, despite everything, despite the pictures, the stories, the lives lost, the deaths witnessed, despite everything he carried on his shoulders, somehow managed to retain an element of dry humor. Visceglia wasn’t married, and one time Hartmann had asked him why.

‘Married? Someone like me? Wouldn’t be fair to drag someone into this who hadn’t asked to be part of it.’

Hartmann had appreciated the sentiment, and believed – perhaps – that he possessed sufficient strength of character to maintain an air of separation and objectivity. He believed he could live two lives, one at work and one at home, and it would only be in time that he would see how insidiously one could silently invade and unsettle the other.

Complex and almost indecipherable, incestuous and nepotistic, the Mafia was a many-headed Hydra that had survived all attempts to wipe it out. It was not something that existed in any real or tangible sense. It was a spectre, a series of interconnecting and yet separate shadows. Grasp for one facet and another would slip irretrievably out of reach. It was This Thing of Ours , and those whose thing it was were perhaps more loyal than any officially recognized body that faced them.

And Hartmann, despite the hours of reading files and transcripts, despite the tapes he’d listened to, the court reports he’d fallen asleep over, had never really managed to grasp the true meaning of this ‘family’. These people did indeed seem to be the worst the world could offer, and many were the times he’d asked himself if he shouldn’t just step away from the edge, take three paces back and turn the other way. And yet even in his darkest times, even when he understood that carrying the weight of this was a major contributory factor to his drinking, and understood also that drinking would be the thing that could irretrievably take his wife and his child away from him, he nevertheless found himself unable to avert his eyes. Morbid interest became fascination became obsession became addiction.

And so he lay there on his hotel bed, the echo of the conversation he’d held earlier that evening still echoing in his mind, and the thoughts that came with it, the thoughts that such a thing would carry , were shadowed and oppressive and almost too heavy to bear.

‘You’re here for the duration, my friend,’ Schaeffer had told him with a simple matter-of-factness that allowed for no rebuttal. ‘You are an employee of the federal government whichever way this comes, and as such you are now working within our jurisdiction. What we say goes, and that is the only way it can be. We are dealing with a girl’s life, not just a girl, but the daughter of one of the country’s most significant politicians. Charles Ducane has been a personal friend of the vice-president since they attended college together, and there is no way in the world any of us would say No to the vice-president. You understand this, Mr Hartmann?’

Ray Hartmann had nodded. Yes, he understood, understood that he had no choice in the matter. He watched Schaeffer’s face as he talked, as the words issued from his lips, and yet all he could see were the faces of his wife and child when they appeared at Tompkins Square Park the following Saturday and he was not there. That was all he could see. He could hear something as well, and what he heard was Jess’s voice as she asked Where’s daddy gone? Why isn’t he here? He said he’d be here, didn’t he, Mommy ?