Pages added to Valachi text

Additional pages of Joe Valachi's autobiography, The Real Thing, are now on the website ( Click here ). Readers are cautioned that groups of pages remain unavailable to us and some of the available pages have missing portions.

Update 5 Feb 2015: About 150 full and partial pages of the Valachi manuscript are now available on the website.

Update 6 Feb 2015: About 225 full and partial pages are now available. These represent the entirety of the pages available to us at this time. As we acquire additional pages, they will be added to the website.

Update 7 Feb 2015: We are experimenting with an index to the available pages of the Valachi autobiography. 

Valachi's story in his own words

We have begun the process of making the autobiographical notes of Joseph Valachi, a manuscript titled, The Real Thing, available online for the free access of those interested in the subject. The manuscript is the foundation of the 1968 Peter Maas book, The Valachi Papers. In it, Valachi recalls his early personal life, his career as a burglar in New York City, his participation in the Castellammarese War, his induction into the American Mafia and a great deal more.

To this point, The Real Thing has been out of reach for most. To our knowledge, it has never been published. The original is held in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Copies can be obtained, but with the document running more than a thousand pages long, obtaining copies can be prohibitively expensive.

Our collection of The Real Thing pages is far from complete. We are hopeful that researchers who have obtained portions of the document will decide to share them.

Our thanks to crime historian Alex Hortis for his assistance in this project.

Visit: http://mafiahistory.us/a023/therealthing.htm