On the morning of September 21, 1952, residents of 107th Street in East Harlem discovered a man lying in the gutter. He had been shot and left in the open, not hidden or buried, on a residential street where hundreds of people would pass him before breakfast. That placement was no accident.
It was the message.
The dead man was Eugenio Giannini, 42, known to most as Jean. He was a soldier in what is now called the Lucchese crime family and, according to federal narcotics agents, one of the ten biggest heroin dealers in the United States. He was also, and had been for some time, an informer.
That single fact explains the killing. But the full story of Giannini’s death is known because of another man, the most famous informer in the history of the American Mafia. The man who arranged the murder of a rat became, eleven years later, the rat by which all other rats are measured.
His name was Joseph Valachi.
East Harlem in the first half of the 20th century was one of the largest Italian neighborhoods in America. It was bigger, poorer, and more crowded than the tourist-friendly Little Italy downtown. A district of tenements and pushcarts stretched block after block above 96th Street.
It produced an extraordinary number of the men who ran organized crime in New York for the next fifty years.
They grew up on the same streets, attended the same schools, and knew each other’s mothers. This matters because it explains why these stories are so often about people who were close. Nobody in this world was recruited from outside.
They were boys from the same block who grew up and carried on knowing each other. When things went wrong, they were not killing strangers. They were killing the person they had sat next to at somebody’s wedding.
After Prohibition ended, the organization needed a replacement for liquor money, and narcotics was that replacement. It was enormously profitable and, from the beginning, the thing the bosses publicly forbade and privately took a cut of. The rule against narcotics was not based on morality.
It was arithmetic. A gambling charge got you a few years, but a narcotics charge in that era could get you a life sentence. And a man facing a life sentence is a man who might start talking.
Eugenio Giannini was in it up to his neck. Federal agents ranked him among the top ten dealers in the country, which meant he was moving heroin at a level that touched Sicily, Marseille, and ports on both sides of the Atlantic. In that trade, one name stood above all others: Charles Luciano.
Lucky Luciano had organized the modern American Mafia in the 1930s. He had gone to prison, and in 1946 he was released and deported to Italy. Deported was not the same as finished.
Luciano in Italy was still Luciano. He was on the European end of a trade whose other end was in New York, and men came to see him constantly. The route ran through Sicily and the ports of Southern France, where raw material was refined before crossing the Atlantic.
American narcotics agents spent years in Italy trying to prove what everybody assumed. Luciano went to the races, had lunch, and gave interviews saying he was a retired man being persecuted. Jean Giannini was one of the men who went to see him.
He dealt with Luciano and the people around him.
Then Giannini was arrested on a heroin conspiracy charge and went away for fifteen months. That is not a long sentence by the standards of that world. It is the sort of stretch a serious man does without complaining, keeps his mouth shut, and comes home with an improved reputation.
That is not what Eugenio Giannini did.
While inside, he agreed to work for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency that had put him there. Later, he was also talking to the FBI. Why he did it, nobody can say for certain now.
It might have been money, a promise about future charges, or simply fear. What is certain is that he had something the government wanted very badly.
Informing is not a single decision. It is a second job that never stops. You go on doing the crimes because if you stop, you are useless and also obvious.
You sit in the same rooms with the same men. You go home and write down what was said. Every day, you are the only person in every room carrying something that would get you killed if it fell out of your pocket.
Giannini had been in rooms with Lucky Luciano. The American government had spent years trying to establish what Luciano was doing in Italy and whether he was still directing narcotics traffic into the United States. An informer who had actually dealt with him was worth more than almost anything else the Bureau of Narcotics could have had.
So Gene Giannini went back to New York and carried on being a heroin dealer in East Harlem while reporting on it. He got away with it for a while. Informers usually do, at first.
What eventually catches them is almost never brilliant detective work by the organization. It is arithmetic. Somebody notices that certain arrests keep happening around a particular man, or that he was in the room the three times something went wrong.
In Giannini’s case, it was worse. The person who worked it out was Luciano himself.
On or about September 20, 1952, word came from Italy that Eugenio Giannini was an informer. What happened next is the clearest picture anybody has ever had of how an order traveled through that organization.
Luciano in Italy sent word to Vito Genovese in New York. Genovese did not do anything himself. He told Anthony Strollo, known as Tony Bender, to have Giannini killed.
Strollo did not do it either. He passed it to Joseph Valachi, a soldier with a crew, and told him to take care of it. Valachi did not do it himself.
He put together a small team and supervised them.
Four levels of separation stood between the man who wanted it and the men who did it. Nobody at the top touched a telephone or a weapon. Every link could truthfully say he had not killed anybody.
That is not an accident of this one case. That is the design. It is why these organizations were so difficult to prosecute for so long.
The men who actually carried out the killing were named Joe Pagano and Fiore Ciano. Remember that second name.
They killed Giannini, and then they made a decision that was not about the killing at all. They drove him to East Harlem and put him in the gutter on a residential street where he would be found in daylight. If you want a body to disappear in New York, it disappears.
There are marshes, water, and concrete going into the ground somewhere in the five boroughs every single day. Every man in this story knew that.
Leaving Eugenio Giannini at the curb was a piece of communication addressed to several thousand people at once. It said: We know who talks. We find out, and this is where you end up.
Not in a legend, not missing, but in the gutter on your own street for the neighbors to see on their way to work.
For eleven years, nothing happened. The police had a dead narcotics dealer in a district with a great many dead narcotics dealers. Nobody was charged.
The case sat.
What changed had nothing to do with Giannini at all.
Joseph Valachi, the man who had supervised his murder, was in federal prison in Atlanta in the early 1960s on a narcotics sentence. So was Vito Genovese, by then the boss of the family. Inside that prison, Valachi became convinced that Genovese had marked him for death.
There is a famous account of Genovese embracing and kissing him, which Valachi understood as a sentence. He became so certain of it that he attacked a man in the prison yard with an iron pipe and killed him, believing that man had been sent to do it. He was wrong.
The man he beat to death had nothing to do with it at all.
Joseph Valachi now faced a murder charge on top of everything else, and he was convinced that his own organization intended to kill him whatever happened. He went to the government.
In October 1963, Valachi sat in front of a committee of the United States Senate on television and talked. It is difficult now to explain how large that was. Until that moment, the official position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been essentially that a nationwide Italian-American criminal organization did not exist.
Valachi was a made member of one, describing it in public, on camera, with a name for it, and giving the structure, the ranks, the rules, and the names of the men in it. He was the first. Everybody who has done it since is walking through a door that Joseph Valachi opened.
The hearings ran for days, and the country watched them. Newspapers printed the charts. For the first time, ordinary Americans saw the ranks, the induction ceremony, and the oath described by somebody who had actually taken it.
Valachi was not an impressive figure, and he was not trying to be. He was a heavy, aging, frightened man in a suit giving evidence with federal marshals around him.
Among the many things he described was the murder of Eugenio Giannini. He laid out the chain exactly as it happened. Word from Luciano in Italy.
Genovese to Strollo. Strollo to Valachi. Valachi to the men who did it.
He named Pagano. He named Ciano.
That testimony is the only reason we know any of it. Without Valachi, Gene Giannini is an unsolved shooting in a Harlem gutter in 1952, and nothing more.
Which brings us to the last part, and it is the part that gives this story its shape.
Fiore Ciano, called Fury, one of the men who killed Eugenio Giannini, was Joseph Valachi’s nephew, his sister’s son. Valachi had brought the boy into that life himself. By every account, he was proud of him.
When there was work to be done, he used him.
In 1963, Joseph Valachi went on television and became the most notorious informer in America, and left his nephew standing in New York. People who saw Fiore Ciano in the months afterward said he began walking around with a haunted look on his face. He knew exactly what he was.
He was the living relative of the man who had broken the oath in an organization that had just been humiliated in front of the entire country.
About nine months after his uncle testified, at the end of April or the beginning of May in 1964, three men came to a pizzeria in New York and took Fiore Ciano out of it. He was never seen again. Not that year, not since.
The police view was that he was killed immediately and that the body was disposed of in a way specifically designed to make sure it was never found.
Look at what that means, side by side. In 1952, Fiore Ciano helped kill an informer and they left the body in the gutter so everybody could see it. In 1964, Fiore Ciano was killed for being an informer’s nephew and they made sure that nobody would ever see anything at all.
The same organization, twelve years apart, chose opposite methods for opposite reasons. The first was a warning. The second was an erasure.
Joseph Valachi, who ordered the first and caused the second, died in his bed in 1971 in protective custody of a heart attack.
Eugenio Giannini is not remembered because there is nothing to remember him for. He did not build anything, he did not run anything, he was not admired. He sold heroin at an industrial scale in a neighborhood full of children, and when he was caught, he tried to trade his way out.
But he is the earliest clear picture we have of the machinery. Before Valachi described what happened to Gene Giannini, the shape of that organization, who tells whom, and how an order comes down four levels without anybody at the top being anywhere near it, was a thing law enforcement guessed at. A man in a gutter on 107th Street is the reason they stopped guessing.
Giannini was killed to teach a lesson about informers. And the man who ran that lesson broke the same rule eleven years later in front of a television camera and then died of old age in a government bed. The bill for it went to a nephew.
In that world, it almost never goes to the man who ran it up.