Valachi is hands down 10x more reliable than bill b. he may have only been a soldier but he was there from the beginning and had an unbelievable memory. The book was not redacted valachi wrote over 1000 pages and Maas had the task of deciphering it and making it into a readable book. Valachi's info is reliable and w/o it the history of lcn would be 99.9% conjecture instead of the 90% it is