On this day in 1903 Joe Valachi was born in East Harlem, and by the age of 27 he had become a soldier in the Reina Crime Family during the peak of the Castellammarese War.

After the war had ended in the bloody murder of Joe Masseria, Valachi had become a bodyguard for Maranzano. He hadn’t switched allegiance as he always fought on the side of Maranzano but was offered this new position in the aftermath of Masseria’s death. However, he wasn’t his bodyguard for long as Maranzano was also executed in true mob fashion in the same year.

Under the new family structure Lucky Luciano offered Valachi a place as a soldier in his family, which would later go on to be known more commonly as the Genovese Crime Family. He remained a soldier in the family from the early 1930’s until his time came to become a government informant.

The Valachi Hearings

Perhaps what we all know Joe Valachi for, more than anything else is the fact that in 1963 he testified at the McClellan hearings and was the first Mafia member to publicly acknowledge that the Mafia existed. During the hearings he uncovered many secrets of the mob, from rituals, traditions, right through to who he was working for. He was also the first person to make Cosa Nostra a household name.

Joe Valachi at The McClellan Hearings

Valachi would go on to die of heart attack in 1971 at the age of 67 years old, outliving his former mob boss Vito Genovese by two years.

On this day in 1903, Joseph Valachi was born in the tough streets of East Harlem, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. Growing up in one of the most densely populated and poverty-stricken neighbourhoods in America, Valachi drifted into a life of crime at an early age, running with local gangs before graduating to more serious criminal enterprises. By the time he reached his late twenties, he had earned himself a position as a soldier in the Reina Crime Family, one of the prominent New York outfits operating during the brutal and bloody Castellammarese War of 1930 to 1931 — a savage power struggle between the factions loyal to Joe Masseria and those aligned with Salvatore Maranzano.

Valachi fought on Maranzano's side throughout the conflict, and when the war concluded with Masseria's murder in a Coney Island restaurant, his loyalty was rewarded. Maranzano, now declaring himself the boss of all bosses, took Valachi on as a personal bodyguard. The arrangement was short-lived, however, as Maranzano himself was assassinated just a few months later in September 1931, allegedly on the orders of Lucky Luciano, who had grown tired of Maranzano's autocratic ambitions.

Under the restructured American Mafia that Luciano helped architect — a commission-based system that also gave rise to the infamous Five Families of New York — Valachi was absorbed into Luciano's own family as a soldier. He would remain a rank-and-file member of what would eventually become known as the Genovese Crime Family for the better part of three decades, operating under the watchful eye of Vito Genovese. His criminal activities ranged from numbers running to drug trafficking, and though he was never a prominent figure within the organisation, he was a trusted and active earner.

Everything changed in 1962 when Valachi, convinced that Genovese had ordered a contract on his life while the two were serving time in the same federal prison, killed a fellow inmate he mistakenly believed was sent to murder him. Facing the death penalty, Valachi made the extraordinary decision to cooperate with federal authorities. In 1963, he appeared before the McClellan Senate Committee and became the first made member of the American Mafia to publicly confirm its existence, introducing the term "Cosa Nostra" to the wider world and pulling back the curtain on mob rituals, hierarchies, and operations in extraordinary detail. He died of a heart attack in April 1971 at the age of 67, having outlived Vito Genovese by two years.

Valachi's testimony fundamentally changed how law enforcement understood and prosecuted organised crime in America, laying the groundwork for the RICO legislation that would later cripple the mob.