![]() “It was a good meeting,” Jack Miller would say. Progress had been slow, but it was coming. As usual, he had tugged open the tie, tossed the coat on a chair, rolled up his shirtsleeves. Bobby wore a light-gray suit, two-buttoned, long lapel-“a Kennedy suit,” as it was now called. ![]() One day was not enough: Bobby had asked the men to stay on, the meeting continuing on Friday morning. In the wake of the Cosa Nostra revelations, Kennedy decided it was time for the next phase. Morgenthau had come down to D.C., bringing with him Sil Mollo, his Criminal Division chief. attorneys had flown in from across the country. The next day, Bobby presided over an organized crime conclave-U.S. Another aide recalled saying, “I guess Bob won’t be here by Christmas.” Ramsey Clark would remember Bobby being “melancholic-almost hopeless-sounding.” It seemed as if he was done as attorney general, and Kennedy Justice-from RFK’s own zeal and outsized role in the administration to the re- cent headlines over his hunger for more FBI bugging-had become a political liability. ![]() He’d built a record, he joked dryly, sure to be a boon to his brother’s reelection. He spoke of his successful but politically controversial run- managing Jack’s campaign, playing the lead in his cabinet, championing civil rights, leading the fight against Hoffa, and pushing for a bill to authorize FBI wiretapping-with irony. Bobby had climbed on the desk in the enormous office to deliver a mock oration. At Justice, they had held an impromptu party in his office. NOVEMBER 20, 1963, was the Attorney General’s thirty-eighth birthday. But for Morgenthau, Valachi’s confessional also marked a far more personal threshold: He and Bobby Kennedy, who at least in their public personae, appeared near opposites, had not only found an easy kinship: Now they would be bound in common cause. ![]() His chief federal prosecutor in New York was elated: Valachi’s testimony spelled the end of omertà-the once-impenetrable code of silence-and the start of the war on the Mafia. There would be no turning back.īobby Kennedy had found his celebrity witness. When a senator from Nebraska asked, “Can you tell me about the state of organized crime in Omaha?,” Valachi turned around to William Hundley, chief of the Justice Department’s organized crime section, seated behind him, and asked, “Where the fuck is Omaha?” Still, Valachi put the lie to Hoover’s blindness in vivid detail: Americans heard the witness speak of bodies, bullets, and millions of dollars reaped in illegal profits. The gravel-voiced canary, columnist Jack Anderson wrote, “sang like a crow.” He looked the part of a henchman-square head and graying buzz cut-but offered a confessional short on particulars. The televised proceedings proved a national sensation, yet Valachi was a less-than-perfect witness. In September 1963, Valachi testified as the star witness at the Senate’s McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime. He’d prove instrumental in bringing in a hoodlum he’d known from “the old neighborhood,” a “made man” in Vito Genovese’s organized crime “family,” who, in the hands of RFK and Morgenthau, would gain infamy as one of the most important witnesses in the history of criminal justice in the United States: Joseph Valachi. Selvaggi had grown up a hardscrabble Italian section of the Bronx, home to many of the wise guys. Morgenthau would turn to the FBN again-in particular to a trusted agent, Frank Selvaggi. “But we believe there does exist today in the United States a society, loosely organized, for the specific purpose of smuggling narcotics and committing other crimes.” “That is a big question to answer,” Joseph Amato replied. ![]() In 1957, on the day before the mass arrests of suspected organized crime bosses in Apalachin, New York, RFK, as counsel to the Senate rackets committee, had asked a witness, an undercover agent of the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), “Is there any organization such as the ‘Mafia,’ or is that just the name given to the hierarchy in the Italian underworld?” But Kennedy and Morgenthau shared a sense as to where they might find allies. “But the Italians? Not even on the radar.” Few in federal law enforcement had studied the state of organized crime across the country, let alone attempted to curb its rise. “We were up to our necks with the Soviets,” Richard McCarthy, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, would recall. Instead, counterintelligence predominated: In New York in the late 1950s, the Bureau had 150 agents working a single spy case. ![]()
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