Joe Valachi Biography

This small-time gangster with a big mouth broke the mob's ranks by breaking its code of silence. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Mafia sergeant Joe "The Rat" Valachi's revelations about Cosa Nostra, the government's "single biggest intelligence breakthrough" in combating organised crime.

Joe Valachi cut an unimpressive figure as the squat, chain-smoking, coarse, thug with the crew cut. This low-level mobster was tougher than he was smart and more opportunistic than he was brave. His criminal dalliances included contract killings, loan sharking, racketeering, burglary, narcotics dealing and other marginally successful attempts at a gangster's life. Valachi had been part of the infamous Genovese crime family since its beginning, but it was his role as informant that would propel him to national notoriety and shake the very core of the Mafia's secret and corrupt society.

Trying to save his own neck, the paranoid Valachi turned on fellow Mafiosi by naming names before a Senate subcommittee. Until Joe squealed, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., had publicly denied the very existence of Cosa Nostra. By the time Valachi finished, feds could not only substantiate the reality of the Mafia but could identify key players in the hierarchy of the organised crime syndicate.

Joe was an unremarkable foot soldier who seemed to fail at everything but informing. If only for an instant, Joe "Joe Cago" Valachi became the world's best known and most hated mobster. Even as he proclaimed, "A dumb man is more dangerous than a hundred rats." Joe had the dubious distinction of being both the first Mafia foot soldier to rat out the entire mob and the first who lived to tell about it.