Word: valachi
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Ethel Kennedy showed up for a front-row seat. So did James Meredith and Dowager Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who chirped: "I wanted to get the smell of it." Even Caroline Kennedy's White House kindergarten teacher was there. The Valachi hearings were plainly the place to go in Washington last week. But they were still a pretty shabby show, with Hoodlum Joseph Valachi, 60, being fawned over merely because he had turned squealer...
...Valachi seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Bronzed from a District of Columbia jail sun lamp and sucking a juice-filled plastic lemon to soothe his sore throat, he mumbled a litany of remembered violence on the sidewalks of New York in the '30s. He described the bloody revolution among rival Neapolitan and Sicilian Cosa Nostra families in the New York-New Jersey area that took 60-odd lives with stiletto and chopper, involved intricate double and triple crosses and led to the ascendancy of Vito Genovese as the Mafia's "boss of bosses...
...know you buy a barrel of apples, and one of them is touched. That apple has to be removed, or it'll touch the rest of the apples." Then Genovese kissed Valachi. It was the Mafia's "kiss of death," to let Valachi know he was the apple to be removed...
Mistaken Murder. Valachi quickly kissed Genovese back "to let him know I was smart and I would answer him in the same style-kill him too." Valachi was so frightened he asked prison guards to put him in solitary confinement. But as soon as he got out, Mafia Mobster John Dioguardia (Johnny Dio), who was in charge of the prison shower room, invited Valachi in to take a shower. Valachi, convinced he would be murdered there, refused. Panicky, he tried to "stay out of crowds" in the prison yard, finally grabbed a length of iron pipe lying conveniently...
...then Valachi began to sing to federal officials. Ever since he has been under heavy guard-and kept away from federal prisons. When McClellan asked him what might happen if he went back to prison, Valachi croaked: "I'd have to kill or be killed. If they got at me, I wouldn't last five minutes...