THE VALACHI PAPERS
I was living at 35 East 35th Street in the late 1960s, a prime Manhattan address. That’s Park Avenue & 35th Street, two blocks from the Empire State Building & six blocks from Madison Square Garden. A building with an awning & obsequious doormen.
Took that a picture last year and it looks the same as it did fifty years ago.
I was rooming with one of my best friends & a former classmate from the U.S. Naval Academy Prep School in Bainbridge, Maryland. He was a buyer for a men’s clothing company & got comp tickets for the Jets, Mets, Giants, Yankees, & Knicks games. Plus Broadway shows & fashion shows at the Waldorf.
One day in 1969, as if by instantaneous combustion, a book started popping up everywhere. On subways & buses & under the arms of almost every pedestrian walking the streets. A big black book. A fiction novel. THE GODFATHER by Mario Puzo.
It became an overnight best seller and would eventually become one of the best motion pictures ever produced in Hollywood.
That’s also when I started reading books for pleasure for the first time in my life and got the notion of becoming an author one day. So I bought the book and read it.
Not long after finishing the book, I discovered another book about the Mafia. But this one was a true crime and had been published a year before THE GODFATHER came out. The book I’m talking about is THE VALACHI PAPERS by Peter Maas. I also bought that book & read it.
Anyway, Joe Valachi was a low-ranking member of the New York-based Genovese crime family and the first Mafioso to flip & become a government witness.
Fifteen years earlier, in 1963, he testified before Senator John L. McClellan’s congressional committee on organized crime.
The Department of Justice urged him to write down a personal history of his 30-year underworld career and Joe Valachi complied with a rambling 1,180-page manuscript titled THE REAL THING. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach authorized the public release of Valachi’s manuscript and commissioned Peter Maas to write it. Maas mercifully chopped it down to 285 pages.
Curiously, Dino DeLaurentis produced THE VALACHI PAPERS movie in 1972 – nine years after that congressional hearing and almost twenty years before the publication of both books.
Even more curiously, I never heard about the movie until today, a movie that stars Charles Bronson as Joe Valachi. He’s one of my favorite actors and, yes, I have a vignette about Charley. But later.
In a touch of irony, Charley’s real life wife Jill Ireland plays Joe Valachi’s wife in the movie.
I’ll be trying to get my hands on the movie.
I’m America’s Best Crime Writer – Barry Bowe – & I approve this message.
My first book – BORN TO BE WILD – Published in 1992 – Still selling on Amazon & Kindle. A true story about certain members of the Warlocks motorcycle gang. The story took 21 years to play out – many twists & turns – an amalgam of SONS OF ANARCHY & BREAKING BAD – but these outlaw bikers make the SONS look like Cub Scouts.
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