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."
"Got Dat, Senators?" With professional nonchalance, Valachi detailed hits (murders) he had a hand in, punctuated his scrambled syntax ("There was this fella named which he died a long time ago") with a solicitous "got dat clear, Senators?" They sometimes had not. Cried South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt at one murky point: "You're getting me all confused. It sounds like a Chinese chess game."
To others it sounded more like a fairy tale. Police and gangsters alike scoffed at Valachi's melodramatic re cital of his initiation into the mob.
"This knife and gun business is nonsense—strictly amateur-night material," said one. Added a cop: "Valachi must be talking off the top of his head. We know that some of these things can only be hearsay because by his own testimony he was only small potatoes in the mob. He just wouldn't have been privy to what was happening."
Even worse than the stale underworld gossip being mouthed by Valachi was the fact that he got mixed up on names and places.
"Awfully Sorry." The night after Valachi described "Bobby Doyle" of Stamford, Conn., as triggerman in three 1930 slayings, a Stamford businessman named Robert Doyle, who was twelve years old in 1930, began getting nasty phone calls. Next day, Connecticut's Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff protested, and Valachi remembered that his Bobby Doyle, an alias for Gangster Girolamo Santuccio, lived in Hartford. Chairman McClellan allowed that he was "awfully sorry" about the mistake, but a good many people thought that it was disgraceful for the Senate to permit Valachi to broadcast rumors and hearsay. Said Maine's Democratic Edmund Muskie, a committee member: "What a waste of time."