The Treacherous World of Joseph Valachi: Informer: The History of American Crime and Law Enforcement, November 2024
About this ebook
Noteworthy as a rare primary source into Mafia events of the Castellammarese War-era (1930-1931), Valachi's documented memories also provide a window into the early gangland of East Harlem, Manhattan and the Bronx. Through his recollections, historians gain a unique soldier-level view of New York-area organized crime families between Prohibition and the Mafia convention at Apalachin, New York.
As an early Mafia turncoat and a celebrated informant for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, Valachi became the focus of a best-selling book, a popular motion picture, many hours of televised Senate testimony and a detailed but never published autobiography (The Real Thing) of more than a thousand pages.
Despite all that attention, a great deal of the true Valachi story has remained untold for decades. And some of the information provided by Valachi and repeated through many years has been inaccurate. Much of his life and many of his associates have been largely ignored by crime historians. Neglected subjects have included the impact of Valachi on the FBI, the government stresses related to the Kennedy Justice Department's desire to publicize the Valachi story and the painful birthing of The Valachi Papers in book and movie forms.
Now, sixty years after Valachi put pen to paper to compose his memoirs, a team of historians has assembled a collection of carefully researched articles in an effort to correct Valachi's flawed recollections, to reveal long hidden aspects of his life and to identify and flesh out the individuals who influenced him.
This Informer issue features standalone articles on various phases of Valachi's existence in and out of the Mafia society he called "cosa nostra." It includes dozens of separate biographies of Valachi contacts on both sides of the law, and background information on his time and place. The issue is illustrated with photos, documents and maps.
In addition to this EPUB ebook format, the issue is available in Kindle ebook, hardcover, paperback, magazine and emagazine formats.
Contributors to the issue: Thomas Hunt (U.S.), Steve Turner (U.K.), Fabien Rossat (France), Jon Black (U.K.), Thibaut Maïquès (France), J. Michael Niotta PhD (U.S.), Thom L. Jones (New Zealand), Patrick Downey (U.S.), Ellen Poulsen (U.S.), Justin Cascio (U.S.), Scott Deitche (U.S.).
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About the author
Thomas Hunt has been editor/publisher of Informer since 2008 and publisher of The American Mafia history website, MafiaHistory.us, since 2002. A Vermont resident, he is the author of Wrongly Executed? The Long-Forgotten Context of Charles Sberna's 1939 Electrocution, coauthor (with Martha Macheca Sheldon) of Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia, coauthor (with Michael A. Tona) of DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, contributor to Mafia: The Necessary Reference to Organized Crime.
Steve Turner is a retired construction manager, living in London, England, who has been interested in the history of organized crime since reading The Valachi Papers in the early 1970s. He has worked with author David Critchley on Mafia-related research, and he has been a frequent contributor to Informer. Turner, David Critchley and Lennert van't Riet collaborated on the "Gunmen of the Castellammarese War" series of articles published in Informer in 2012 and 2013. The same team authored Informer feature articles on Vito Genovese (January 2014) and Albert Anastasia (June 2015). Turner contributed to several articles in Informer's October 2020 special issue on Nicola Gentile.
Fabien Rossat publishes on online blog, entitled Une Histoire de Crime Organisé (A Story of Organized Crime) and he moderates “The Early History of the American Mafia” and “The Canadian Mafia Archives” groups on Facebook. This is his first article in Informer.
Jon Black has thirty years’ experience in graphic design. He spent ten years working with independent artists and record labels such as Goldie’s “Metalheadz” imprint, and later worked as a senior designer at the award-winning London agency Stylorouge. Jon has worked with major record labels and corporates including Virgin, British Telecom, ITV, Sony Music and EMI. Jon founded gangrule.com in 2002 to study and present the emergence of organized crime in New York through 1900–1920, leading up to the well documented Prohibition Era. In 2020, he authored Secret Societies.
Thibaut Maïquès, who often uses the pen name of “Harry Horowitz,” studies early Mafia history of the U.S. and Sicily. He publishes a blog on Mafia history entitled, “La Fratellanza” (the Brotherhood), and is active on social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. This is his first article in Informer.
The great-grandson of late Los Angeles crime boss Jack Dragna, Dr. J. Michael Niotta writes and lectures about southern California organized crime history. He is the author of The Los Angeles Sugar Ring (2017), The Fight Abroad and the Fear Back Home (2019), and Los Angeles Underworld (2021). His fourth book, a look at the history of southern California's gambling ships, is expected in 2022. He is an Iraqi Freedom veteran with twenty years of military service.
A retired businessman, Thom L. Jones has had a long interest in organized crime, in particular the Sicilian and American Mafia. The interest was triggered by a book he read while studying at university, God Protect Me From My Friends - a biography of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. That launched a hobby of amassing a database of books, articles, reports and internet sources relating to the people and events that have changed the face of international crime over the past eighty years. A resident of New Zealand, he has traveled the world extensively. He has contributed articles to CrimeLibrary.com, BostonMafia.com and Mafia-International.com. For more than a decade, he has built a collection of crime-related non-fiction articles and short stories in the Mob Corner section of GangstersInc.org. This is his second article for Informer.
Patrick Downey is a crime historian who specializes in the stories of Prohibition Era and Depression Era gangsters. He produces the Vintage Crime Wave video series on YouTube. Downey has authored Hollywood on the Spot, Legs Diamond: Gangster, Gangster City, Bad Seeds in the Big Apple and other books. In addition to posting on his own long-running blog, Dead Guys in Suits, he has written for the Writers of Wrongs blog. He has contributed several articles to Informer.
Ellen Poulsen is a researcher in the field of 1930s crime history. Don’t Call Us Molls: Women of the John Dillinger Gang, and The Case Against Lucky Luciano: New York’s Most Sensational Vice Trial were her first two titles. They reflect years of research and a life-long interest in the Depression-Era Public Enemy. In 2008, The Case Against Lucky Luciano won the Silver Independent Publisher Book Awards, the IPPY Medal for True Crime. Chasing Dillinger: Police Captain Matt Leach, J. Edgar Hoover and the Rivalry to Capture Public Enemy No. 1, won Ellen her second IPPY award, this time the Bronze Medal for True Crime 2019.
