In September and October 1963 the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by John L. McClellan, heard Joseph Valachi in public. The hearings were titled “Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics.” Everything filed here is cited to the printed hearings, the National Archives, the FBI, or the Library of Congress. The printed record is cited by its printed page and by its page in the NCJRS scan. See the person page for Joseph Valachi.
The hearings
The hearings were printed in five parts and an index. Each is filed as a hearing record:
- Part 1, September 25 to October 9, 1963.
- Part 2, October 10 to 16, 1963: Detroit, Chicago, Tampa, Rhode Island and Boston, and Buffalo.
- Part 3, October 29, 1963 and July 28 to 30, 1964: narcotics.
- Part 4, July 30, 1964.
- Part 5, August 4 and 5, 1964.
- The index, 1965.
The only complete scan this archive could open is the National Criminal Justice Reference Service PDF. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and the HathiTrust viewer could not be reached.
Valachi’s testimony
These are his sworn answers, quoted from the printed transcript. They are not findings:
- September 27, 1963: his birth, his sentences, joining “Cosa Nostra” in 1930, and its ranks.
- His account of the June 1962 killing in the Atlanta penitentiary yard.
- October 1: the initiation ceremony.
- October 2, with Hartford and New York police records.
- October 8, when the New York charts were presented.
- October 9, the last public day.
- The executive session of October 29, released in 1964.
His criminal record, as printed in the hearings, is a police identification record. The statement of Deputy Superintendent Joseph Morris is a Chicago police history placed in the same record.
The charts
The charts are subcommittee exhibits:
- Exhibit 8 was prepared by staff.
- Charts A to E were prepared by the New York police: the Genovese chart, the Lucchese chart, the Gambino chart, the Magliocco chart and the Bonanno chart. With them is the arrest table.
- The regional charts were prepared by the police of Detroit, Chicago, Tampa, Rhode Island and Boston and Buffalo.
- The 1964 charts are the Bureau of Narcotics’ conviction charts, route charts and world map.
Each chart page stores one scanned segment of the fold-out and says which segments have been viewed. It also says which name boxes are illegible in the scan, among them the boss boxes on Exhibit 8 and the “Top Man” box on the Tampa chart. Eight charts have no stored image yet.
The names and ranks on these charts are the labels of 1963 police and staff charts, not findings. No chart name is copied onto a family page or a person page in this archive. The family charts elsewhere on this site keep their empty seats.
The Attorney General
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy opened the hearings on September 25, 1963. His statement is filed in two forms: his testimony in the printed record and the Justice Department typescript at the National Archives. It is a statement of the Department’s view in 1963, not a court finding.
Records
These records come from outside the hearing:
- Criminal docket No. 23273 of the court at Atlanta records his indictment for the 1962 killing and his plea of July 17, 1962.
- Two Atlanta penitentiary index cards: No. 77320-A and No. 82811-A.
- The FBI Vault file, from 1959 to 1962.
- Two FBI history pages, La Cosa Nostra and And Justice for All. They are agency narratives and are cited as such.
Photographs
Four U.S. News & World Report photographs at the Library of Congress are marked “No known restrictions on publication”:
- Kennedy on September 25.
- Valachi on September 27.
- Valachi beside Exhibit 8 on October 1.
- Valachi with the five family charts hung behind him on October 8.
Two other Library of Congress items were left out because they are marked as possibly restricted: an AP photograph of Valachi (95511488) and a 1963 newspaper cartoon (2016680577).
