The Valachi Papers (book)
Paperback edition
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| Author | Peter Maas |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime, Biography |
| Publisher | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
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Publication date
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June 1968 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 285 pp (Hardback ed) |
| ISBN | |
The Valachi Papers is a biography written by Peter Maas, telling the true story of former mafia member Joe Valachi, a low-ranking member of the New York-based Genovese crime family, who was the first ever government witness coming from the American Mafia itself. His account of his criminal past revealed many previously unknown details of the Mafia. The book was made into a film (The Valachi Papers), released in 1972, starring Charles Bronson as Valachi.
In October 1963, Valachi testified before Senator John L. McClellan's congressional committee on organized crime, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations. In the so-called Valachi hearings he gave the American public a firsthand account of Mafia activities in the United States.
In 1964, the US Department of Justice urged Valachi to write down his personal history of his underworld career. Although Valachi was only expected to fill in the gaps in his formal questioning, the resulting account of his thirty-year criminal career was a rambling 1,180-page manuscript titled The Real Thing.
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach authorized the public release of Valachi’s manuscript. He hoped that publication of Valachi’s story would aid law enforcement and possibly encourage other criminal informers to step forward. Author Peter Maas, who broke Valachi’s story in The Saturday Evening Post, was assigned the job of editing the manuscript and permitted to interview Valachi in his Washington, D.C., jail cell.
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