Eight years after the death of Arnold Schuster in 1952, the lack of a witness security program cost the life of James V. Delmont, a member of the Stefano Magaddino Mafia Family of Buffalo, New York. After slipping from underworld grace, Delmont went on the run for his life.
On June 25, 1959, he appeared at the Miami field office of the FBI, offering a rare trade: Mafia secrets for any intelligence the Bureau had on his pursuers. But the FBI didn’t know what to do with its would-be informant. One agent advised Delmont to re-enter the Mafia as an FBI plant. Delmont angrily rejected that idea, and again took flight.
On May 25, 1960, he made a similar offer to agents of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. They wrote him off as a crank.
Ten days later, Delmont’s body, bearing the marks of a classic Mafia execution (several bullets fired directly into the back of the head), turned up in a field in East Los Angeles. The Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department conducted a vigorous probe into the slaying, but couldn’t positively identify Delmont’s killers.
Commenting on the significance of the Delmont case, LAPD Sergeant Peter N. Bagoye, an expert on organized crime, noted: “If any police officer still doubts the existence and power of the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, or whatever you want to call it, just let him read this case.
“This man Delmont spent a year and traveled thousands of miles to escape the vengeance of the Mafia. He left a trail of letters and conversations behind-the first known case in which there is any existing blueprint of how the Syndicate works.”
In 1961, after Robert F. Kennedy became Attorney General, the Justice Department mounted the first effective campaign in its history against organized crime. As part of this effort, the agency began wrestling for the first time with the complex difficulties of creating a protection program for organized crime witnesses.
Robert F. Kennedy
By September, 1963, Kennedy—appearing as a witness during Senate hearings on organized crime and narcotics trafficing—could cite a number of successes by federal lawmen in safeguarding witnesses.
“How long,” asked Maine Senator Edmund S. Muskie, “can the Justice Department protect people who agree to testify?”
“We have taken steps, Senator, to even move people out of the country,” answered Kennedy. “We have provided them with positions and work in other cities where nobody will really have any contact with them. We have arranged to move their families and have their names changed.
“I think we have procedures now where, if an important individual comes forward and is willing to testify, we can give him that kind of protection.”
Such an individual proved to be Joseph Valachi, an aging Cosa Nostra hitman and narcotics trafficker. In 1962, Valachi was an inmate at Atlanta Federal Prison, serving two concurrent sentences totaling thirty-five years for narcotics trafficking. His cellmate was Vito Genovese, then the most powerful Mafia boss in the country.
Vito Genovese
Genovese had been convicted of narcotics conspiracy in 1959 and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Now he began suspecting—wrongly—that Valachi was an informer. The reason: After Valachi’s second trial for narcotics trafficking, he had been repeatedly interviewed—against his will—by federal narcotics agents.
One night, in a scene right out of a B-grade Mafia movie, Genovese summoned Valachi to his cell for a private talk.
“You know,” said Genovese, “we take a barrel of apples. And in this barrel of apples, there might be a bad apple. Well, this apple has to be removed. And if it ain’t removed, it would hurt the rest of the apples.” Then he gave Valachi the fabled “kiss of death,” signifying that he was now marked for murder.
Valachi survived what he believed were attempts to poison his food and lure him alone into a shower where he could be stabbed to death. But he knew his luck could not last forever. He decided to take at least one of his enemies with him.
On June 22, 1963, he beat another inmate to death with an iron pipe. Only later did he learn that he had killed the wrong man: John Joseph Saupp, a forger without ties to the mob. It had been Saupp’s bad luck to bear a striking resemblance to another prisoner whom Valachi believed had the contract to kill him.
Valachi grew depressed over having killed the wrong man. He also knew he couldn’t spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement. Desperate, he offered himself as an informant to Robert Morgenthau, the New York U.S. Attorney. Morgenthau, in turn, put him in contact with agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
The agents quickly transferred Valachi from Atlanta Federal Prison to the first of a series of military bases. But the sessions between him and the agents went badly. He still blamed them for his imprisonment in 1960. And he believed they had deliberately created a rift between him and Geno
Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain
