![]() It was released in 1972, the same year as another mob movie that you may have heard about- The Godfather. The Valachi Papers also had one other thing working against it as a theatrical endeavor. The result was a less-than-satisfying film. Still, complaints from civil rights groups and threats from Cosa Nostra resulted in much of the movie being filmed in Italy, with Italian actors playing many of the roles and the English dialogue dubbed. In what remains a historic black eye for the Justice Department, Katzenbach went to court in an attempt to block Maas from publishing his book but failed. Maas was unable to publish Valachi’s memoir but did write a third-person account based on the information he had obtained through editing the papers and through hours of interviews with the jailed mob soldier. Katzenbach, according to most reports, was responding to complaints from Italian-American groups claiming the memoir would reinforce the ethnic stereotype of Italians as gangsters. ![]() Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach went back on his agreement with Maas and sought to block publication. Justice Department to edit what became known as The Valachi Papers.īefore they could be published, however, U.S. In fact, Maas, then a young journalist who broke the story about Valachi’s decision to become a witness in Life magazine, was asked by the U.S. As he was cooperating, Valachi was told that he would be able to write his memoirs. Not an informant before the prison murder, Valachi quickly became one afterward. The prison intrigue and murder are part of the opening scenes in the movie. Panicked and paranoid, Valachi mistakenly killed a fellow inmate he thought had been assigned to kill him by beating him with a pipe. Valachi, like his boss Vito Genovese, was serving a prison term for heroin dealing in the 1960s and believed that Genovese had marked him for death because he thought he was an informant. Just as interesting is the back story that led to journalist Peter Maas’ book on which the movie is based. It offers an easily digestible history lesson about Cosa Nostra and its origins in America. While the acting is choppy and sometimes overly dramatic in The Valachi Papers, the story stays close to actual events. Many were arrested and their secret society was again exposed publicly. Set in flashbacks after Valachi agrees to cooperate, The Valachi Papers traces the history of the American Mafia, from the Castellammarese War that pitted 1930s mob bosses Salvatore Maranzano against “Joe the Boss” Masseria, all the way up through the emergence of a ruling commission, the dominance of Lucky Luciano, the infamous murder of Albert Anastasia (no relation to one of the authors of this series) and the 1957 Apalachin Conference that was designed to reestablish order in the underworld but ended up having an entirely different effect.ĭiscovered by a New York State Police trooper, the conference became an embarrassment for mob leaders who had to scatter through the fields and woods around an upstate New York farm. And this movie does a more-than-adequate job of telling his story. Even after the infamous Kefauver Committee hearings in the 1950s-which included an appearance by Mafia boss Frank Costello-many Americans still failed to grasp the scope and power of the Italian-American crime families. Edgar Hoover had downplayed the possibility that a large-scale organized crime syndicate existed in the U.S. You can watch the full version of The Valachi Papers.įor years, FBI Director J. Senate subcommittee in 1963 was covered by both television and radio and captured the imagination of the country. In fact, he was the one who first disclosed that the organization was known as the Cosa Nostra, literally translated as “Our Thing.” His appearance before a U.S. Valachi, a soldier in the Genovese crime family, was the first Mafioso to publicly testify about the inner workings of the secret society. Joe Valachi literally changed the face of the American Mafia-and for that reason alone, Terence Young’s uneven docudrama about him would belong in any discussion about the Top 100 gangster movies. Charles Bronson plays Joe Valachi, a Mafia soldier turned informant, in ![]()
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