Narcotics hearings, Part 3, printed page 788: the Bureau of Narcotics entry for Joseph Valachi and John Freeman

The Bureau of Narcotics entry for Joseph Valachi says that in the 1930s he supplied heroin to John Freeman, whom the Bureau calls one of the most active interstate heroin traffickers, and that in 1960 Valachi was sentenced to fifteen years in a case involving Freeman's son. The Freeman sentence is paraphrased because the OCR is garbled.

Date

1964-07

Kind

hearing

Source

National Criminal Justice Reference Service, scan of the printed hearings (NCJ 119303)

Retrieved

2026-10-12

Docket

Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, 88th Cong., 1st and 2d sess., pursuant to S. Res. 278, 88th Cong., Part 3

Rights

A work of the United States Senate, printed by the Government Printing Office. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105. The NCJRS cover sheet records reproduction permission as "Public Domain / U.S. Senate."

Printed page 788 of Part 3 (NCJRS PDF page 884), the entry for Joseph Valachi in the Bureau of Narcotics list of “high echelon narcotic traffickers who have been apprehended since 1951.” It says his record “dates from 1921,” that “For many years Joseph Valachi was a member of one of the large criminal syndicates in New York City,” and that he was at times employed “as a strong-arm man.”

The sentence about Freeman is garbled in the text layer and is paraphrased here: Valachi was very active in the narcotics traffic and in the 1930s supplied heroin to a man the Bureau calls the “notorious violator” John Freeman, described as one of the most active Negro interstate traffickers of heroin in the United States. The entry continues that in 1960, after a Bureau investigation, Valachi was sentenced in the Eastern District of New York “to 15 years imprisonment for violation of the Federal narcotic laws,” in a case concerning “the narcotic traffic with John Freeman’s son and other individuals,” and that while in federal prison he killed an inmate and was sentenced to life.

The fifteen-year figure differs from Part 4, page 924, which says Valachi “was sentenced to 20 years in prison in this case” (the Freeman case). The hearing prints both, and this archive does not reconcile them. The list is the Bureau of Narcotics’s description of people it had arrested, submitted to a Senate subcommittee. Its characterizations are the agency’s allegations, not court findings. The word “Negro” is the Bureau’s.