Peter Maas, Writer Who Chronicled the Mafia, Dies at 72
Mr. Maas’s last article, scheduled to appear Sept. 9 in Parade magazine, was an interview with Elouise Cobell
The New York Times
August 24, 2001
Peter Maas, who turned real-life good guys and bad guys into the stars of a long string of nonfiction best sellers, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 72.
A hospital spokeswoman declined to give the cause of death. Time and again Mr. Maas returned to organized crime, organized corruption and people whose revelations shattered myths or created new ones. He spent the 1980’s and 90’s investigating everyone from Mafia turncoats to rogue C.I.A. agents to clemency-sellers in Tennessee after he became famous in the 1960’s and 70’s for a pair of true-crime stories.
One was about Joseph Valachi, who revealed the secrets of the Mafia. The other was about Frank Serpico, who revealed the secrets of corruption on the beat in the New York City Police Department.
But Mr. Maas insisted that he cared less about the story line than about what motivated strong characters. “When I write nonfiction, it’s like fiction,” he said in 1986. “All the research, and the writing too, is a continual process of discovery for me. I never have an outline.”
But he had his extensive research to go on. He spent months doing interviews for “Serpico,” and accumulated enough documents for his book “Manhunt” (1986), about the international arms dealer Edwin Wilson, to fill five filing cabinets. Just indexing the “Manhunt” material took three months.
And for “Marie” (1983), about a whistle-blowing Tennessee official named Marie Ragghianti, who discovered that Gov. Ray Blanton was trading clemency for cash and that she was expected to handle the paperwork, Mr. Maas sorted through 2,827 pages of trial transcripts and depositions, 4,200 pages of interviews with Mrs. Ragghianti, 400 pages from her journal and transcripts of 310 sessions with 76 other witnesses.
He said in 1990 that his work usually started “with some anger I have about something, or what someone does about something that gets them hurt.” But his first best seller, “The Valachi Papers,” began with a tip. Mr. Maas began gathering information for three magazine articles on Valachi, a pudgy, elderly, semiliterate mobster who became the first person to admit that he belonged to a crime family.
The Valachi Papers” detailed the structure and workings of the Mafia, which Valachi — a confidant of Vito Genovese, Thomas Lucchese and other crime bosses — had described to a Senate committee in 1963. The Justice Department, which initially wanted Valachi to write a history of his underworld career, let Mr. Maas work with Valachi in prison. Mr. Maas was, in effect, Mr. Valachi’s editor.
But a number of well-known Italian-Americans objected to the project, and in 1966 the government went to court to stop publication of the 1,180-page manuscript. The Justice Department maintained that publishing the work would be “detrimental to law enforcement.”
The case was settled in 1968, when a federal judge upheld a regulation prohibiting a prisoner from publishing writings about crimes he or she had committed.
But the government could not stop a book by Mr. Maas alone. So he turned out a new version of the Valachi story, based on his interviews with Valachi, tape recordings and other material.
Writing “The Valachi Papers” was the easy part. More than 20 publishers turned it down.
“The message, however it was specifically couched, amounted to the same thing: ‘Sorry. The Mafia doesn’t sell. Nobody cares,’ “Mr. Maas wrote in 1990. “Even the house that finally acquired rights to the book did so reluctantly, and only because of the insistence of a single editor there.”
In hardcover, the small first printing of “The Valachi Papers” sold out within days. No one had bothered to sell the paperback rights before the book came out. By the time a paperback deal was made, the first printing was 1.75 million copies. In 1972 — when “The Godfather” had become a hit — “The Valachi Papers” was turned into a movie starring Charles Bronson. But Mr. Maas called it “one of the worst films ever made.”
Mr. Maas moved on to “Serpico,” the story of Detective Frank Serpico and Sgt. David Durk, who had told their story to The New York Times after first telling it to higher-ups who did nothing about their allegations of rampant corruption on the beat. The Times ran a series on police corruption that prompted Mayor John V. Lindsay to establish the Knapp Commission, which held public hearings on police corruption. Mr. Maas had access to transcripts of closed sessions of the commission.
Detective Serpico was an important informer against corruption in the police ranks who became a household name for blowing the whistle on graft in the New York City Police Department. He was not the only officer who spoke out against accepting free meals or money to protect the wrong people, but he was the most famous, in part because Al Pacino played him in the 1973 film version of Mr. Maas’s book.
Mr. Maas was born on June 27, 1929, in New York. His first scoop as a reporter was for the school newspaper at Duke University in the 1940’s. His editor was Clay Felker, who later founded New York magazine. He assigned Mr. Maas to interview the labor leader Walter Reuther.
Reuther was in Durham, N.C., in a hospital recovering from an assassination attempt. Mr. Maas got Reuther’s room number from someone he knew and sneaked past a guard. Once in Reuther’s room, he explained that he had an assignment. Reuther waved away “two enormous guys” who burst in, Mr. Maas recalled last year as he described how he got his the story.
After graduating in 1949 and spending two years in the Navy, he moved to Paris to be a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune. He returned to New York in 1955 to work for Collier’s magazine as an entertainment writer; in 1959 he jumped to a rival, Look, as a senior editor. In 1963 he switched to another rival, The Saturday Evening Post, where he was working when he began his work on Valachi.
He joined Mr. Felker, his old college editor, as New York magazine was starting in 1968. But Mr. Maas left when New York began what he later called “a trend toward boutique journalism,” although he continued to write occasional articles for New York.
He wrote frequently for The New York Times Magazine and, when The Times started the SportsMonday section in 1978, he wrote a column for several months. Since 1983 he had been a contributing editor of Parade magazine, which said it would publish Mr. Maas’s final article, about a member of the Blackfeet Indian tribe who sued the federal government for mismanagement of Indian funds, on Sept. 9.
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