Made Men by Greg B. Smith Page A

claustrophobic world, everyone knew he was a human target from then on. At the time, Valachi portrayed his decision to turn informant as a kind of business maneuver, a matter of pure pragmatism. His boss, Vito Genovese, had given him a theatrical “kiss of death” inside the federal prison in Atlanta, labeling him to the rest of gangland as an informant. This, of course, meant he should be killed as soon as possible. At the moment this occurred, Valachi was actually not an informant. A few months later, after pondering the fact that his own boss had publicly
turned on him, he decided, “If the shoe fits . . .” As a result, he rejected his oath of omerta, knowing there was a $100,000 contract out on him, and talked. And talked and talked and talked.
    In his talks, Valachi portrayed some members of his Mafia (the ones he still admired) as “men of honor.” He never talked about his own family, and he was acutely aware that what he was doing ran contrary to everything he’d believed for most of six decades. He seemed almost to find acceptable the fact that anyone even loosely affiliated with any family from Bayonne to Berkeley would try to kill him if they could. In those days, the vow of omerta was serious business.
    Nevertheless, Valachi did something that was a little ahead of its time. Despite the constant threat of sudden death, he decided to write a book, or more specifically have Peter Maas write it for him. The result was The Valachi Papers in 1969. It was a huge success and even became a Charles Bronson movie. It was the first of its kind, but far from the last.
    Who could have known what this thug from East Harlem would inspire?
Thirty-one years after Valachi made his TV debut and wrote all about it, becoming an informant in La Cosa Nostra was old news. It started off slow. A low-level associate turned informant here, a slightly higher-up soldier decided to blab there. Then capos—midlevel bureaucrats in the mob hierarchy—jumped on the government bandwagon and agreed to tell all. There was Joe (Fish) Cafaro and Joe Cantalupo and Jimmy (the Weasel) Fratianno. The stakes grew. Phil Leonetti, the underboss of a Philadelphia crime family, flipped in 1986. Five years later, on September 21, 1991, Little Al D’Arco, acting boss of the Luchese crime family in New York, called up the FBI even before he was arrested and offered to help out. Forty-eight days later, on November 16, 1991, Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, the underboss of what was then the nation’s most powerful crime family, the Gambino clan, decided that he, too, had had enough of “the life” and agreed to cooperate. Gravano boasted openly during his court testimony that when he got out of prison, he would go back into the construction business and live a normal life. That pretty much made it official—the notion of a feared code of silence in which talk meant death had pretty much become a national joke. The secret society was no longer such a secret.
In fact, it was now a commodity. There was money to be made in all this chatter.
Some of the informants—including Gravano and Leonetti—showed up as the central characters of books. Criminals who hadn’t even informed decided to get in on the action. The brother and godson of Sam Giancana wrote a book about the infamous Chicago crime boss. The boss of New York’s Bonanno crime family, Joseph Bonanno, wrote his own self-serving book, making sure to declare that “Informers don’t deserve to be called omu (men).” Sammy the Bull read both Giancana’s and Bonanno’s book.
The negative image of the “rat” was altered forever. Thirty-three years after Joe Valachi, you now had one Lawrence Mazza, known to his friends as Legitimate Larry.
Here was a young associate rising through the ranks of the Brooklyn-based Colombo crime family, jailed in a murder-racketeering indictment that could keep him in prison for twenty years. Not surprisingly, he decided to become a witness for the