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Mafia's Greatest Hits - Charles 'Lucky' Luciano

In The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words , a purported semi-autobiography that was published after Luciano's death, Luciano described how his father always had a new Palermo-based steamship company calendar each year and would save money for the boat trip by keeping a jar under his bed. He also mentions in the book that his father was too proud to ask for money, so instead his mother was given money in secret by Luciano's cousin, named Rotolo, who also lived in Lercara Friddi.

Although the book has largely been regarded as accurate, there are numerous problems that point to the possibility that it is, in fact, fraudulent. As The New York Times reported shortly before the book's publication, the book quotes Luciano talking about events that occurred years after his death, repeats errors from previously published books on the Mafia, and describes Luciano's participation in meetings that occurred when he was in jail. In April , when Luciano was eight years old, the family emigrated from Sicily to the United States. As a teenager, Luciano started his own gang and was a member of the old Five Points Gang. Unlike other street gangs, whose business was petty crime, Luciano offered protection to Jewish youngsters from Italian and Irish gangs for 10 cents per week.

He was also learning the pimping trade in the years around World War I. Luciano also met Meyer Lansky as teenagers when Luciano attempted to extort Lansky for protection money on his walk home from school. Luciano respected the younger boy's defiant responses to his threats, and the two formed a lasting partnership. It is not clear how Luciano earned the nickname "Lucky". It may have come from surviving a severe beating and throat slashing by three men in as the result of his refusal to work for another mob boss. On January 17, , the Eighteenth Amendment to the U. Constitution took effect and Prohibition lasted until the amendment was repealed in The amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages.

Demand for alcohol naturally continued, and the resulting black market for alcoholic beverages provided criminals with an additional source of income. By , Luciano had met many future Mafia leaders, including Vito Genovese and Frank Costello , his longtime friend and future business partner through the Five Points Gang. Rothstein served as a mentor for Luciano; among other things, Rothstein taught him how to move in high society. In , Luciano was caught in a sting selling heroin to undercover agents. Although he saw no jail time, being outed as a drug peddler damaged his reputation among his high-class associates and customers.

To salvage his reputation, Luciano bought expensive seats to the Jack Dempsey — Luis Firpo boxing match in the Bronx and distributed them to top gangsters and politicians. Rothstein then took Luciano on a shopping trip to Wanamaker's Department Store in Manhattan to buy expensive clothes for the fight. The strategy worked, and Luciano's reputation was saved.

Luciano soon became a top aide in Masseria's criminal organization. In contrast to Rothstein, Masseria was uneducated, with poor manners and limited managerial skills. By the late s, Masseria's main rival was boss Salvatore Maranzano , who had come from Sicily to run the Castellammarese clan. Masseria and Maranzano were so-called " Mustache Petes ": older, traditional Mafia bosses who had started their criminal careers in Italy. They believed in upholding the supposed "Old World Mafia" principles of "honor," "tradition," "respect," and "dignity.

Some of the most conservative bosses worked with only those men with roots in their own Sicilian village. Luciano, in contrast, was willing to work with not only Italians, but also Jewish and Irish gangsters, as long as there was money to be made. Luciano was shocked to hear traditional Sicilian mafiosi lecture him about his dealings with close friend Costello, whom they called "the dirty Calabrian ". Luciano soon began cultivating ties with other younger mobsters who had been born in Italy but began their criminal careers in the United States. Known as the Young Turks, they chafed at their bosses' conservatism. Luciano wanted to use lessons he learned from Rothstein to turn their gang activities into criminal empires. The Young Turks believed that their bosses' greed and conservatism were keeping them poor while the Irish and Jewish gangs got rich.

Luciano's vision was to form a national crime syndicate in which the Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs could pool their resources and turn organized crime into a lucrative business for all — an organization he founded after a conference was hosted in Atlantic City by Luciano, Johnny Torrio , Lansky and Costello in May In October , Luciano was forced into a limousine at gunpoint by three men, beaten and stabbed, and strung up by his hands from a beam in a warehouse in Staten Island. When picked up by the police after the beating, Luciano said that he had no idea who did it. However, in , Luciano told an interviewer that it was the police who kidnapped and beat him in an attempt to find Jack "Legs" Diamond.

In early , Luciano decided to eliminate Masseria. The war had been going poorly for Masseria, and Luciano saw an opportunity to switch allegiance. In a secret deal with Maranzano, Luciano agreed to engineer Masseria's death in return for receiving Masseria's rackets and becoming Maranzano's second-in-command. However, Adonis instead warned Luciano about the murder plot. While they played cards, Luciano allegedly excused himself to go to the bathroom, at which point gunmen, reportedly Anastasia, Genovese, Adonis, and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel , entered the restaurant.

Maranzano called a meeting of crime bosses in Wappingers Falls, New York , where he declared himself capo di tutti capi "boss of all bosses". Luciano appeared to accept these changes, but was merely biding his time before removing Maranzano. Convinced that Maranzano planned to murder them, Luciano decided to act first. They had been secured with the aid of Lansky and Siegel. The other two, aided by Lucchese who was there to point Maranzano out, stabbed the boss multiple times before shooting him. Several days later, on September 13, the corpses of two other Maranzano allies, Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo, were retrieved from Newark Bay, showing evidence of torture. Meanwhile, Joseph Siragusa, leader of the Pittsburgh crime family , was shot to death in his home.

The October 15 disappearance of Joe Ardizonne , head of the Los Angeles family , would later be regarded as part of this alleged plan to quickly eliminate the old-world Sicilian bosses. With the death of Maranzano, Luciano became the dominant crime boss in the United States. He had reached the pinnacle of America's underworld, setting policies and directing activities along with the other Mafia bosses. His own crime family controlled lucrative criminal rackets in New York City such as illegal gambling, extortion, bookmaking , loansharking , and drug trafficking.

Luciano became very influential in labor union activities and controlled the Manhattan Waterfront , garbage hauling, construction, Garment District businesses, and trucking. Although there would have been few objections had Luciano declared himself capo di tutti capi, he abolished the title, believing the position created trouble between the families and made himself a target for another ambitious challenger. However, Luciano did not discard all of Maranzano's changes. He believed that the ceremony of becoming a " made man " in a crime family was a Sicilian anachronism.

However, Genovese persuaded Luciano to keep the title, arguing that young people needed rituals to promote obedience to the family. In addition, he kept Maranzano's structure of five crime families in New York City. Luciano elevated his most trusted Italian associates to high-level positions in what was now the Luciano crime family. Genovese became underboss and Costello consigliere. Because Lansky and Siegel were non-Italians, neither man could hold official positions within any Mafia family. However, Lansky was a top advisor to Luciano and Siegel a trusted associate. Later in , Luciano called a meeting in Chicago with various bosses, where he proposed a Commission to serve as the governing body for organized crime.

The Commission was originally composed of representatives of the Five Families of New York City, the Buffalo crime family , and the Chicago Outfit ; later, the crime families of Philadelphia and Detroit were added, with smaller families being formally represented by a Commission family. The group's first test came in , when it ordered Dutch Schultz to drop his plans to murder Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Luciano argued that a Dewey assassination would precipitate a massive law enforcement crackdown; the national crime syndicate had enacted a hard and fast rule stating that law enforcement and prosecutors were not to be harmed.

An enraged Schultz said he would kill Dewey anyway and walked out of the meeting. Upon hearing the news, the Commission held a discreet meeting to discuss the matter. After six hours of deliberations the Commission ordered Lepke Buchalter to eliminate Schultz. During the early s, Luciano's crime family started taking over small scale prostitution operations in New York City. Lehman appointed Dewey, a U. Attorney , as a special prosecutor to combat organized crime in the city. Carter took measures to prevent police corruption from impeding the raids: she assigned police officers outside of the vice squad to conduct the raids, and the officers were instructed to wait on street corners until they received their orders, minutes before the raids were to begin.

She convinced many to testify rather than serve additional jail time. Luciano associate David Betillo was in charge of the prostitution ring in New York; any money that Luciano received was from Betillo. In late March , Luciano received a tip that he was going to be arrested and fled to Hot Springs , Arkansas. Unfortunately for him, a New York detective in Hot Springs on a different assignment spotted Luciano and notified Dewey. The next day in New York, Dewey indicted Luciano and his accomplices on 60 counts of compulsory prostitution. Luciano's lawyers in Arkansas then began a fierce legal battle against extradition. Bailey to facilitate Luciano's case. However, Bailey refused the bribe and immediately reported it. On April 17, after all of Luciano's legal options had been exhausted, Arkansas authorities handed him to three NYPD detectives for transport by train back to New York for trial.

Louis , Missouri, the detectives and Luciano changed trains. During this switchover, they were guarded by 20 local policemen to prevent a mob rescue attempt. The men arrived in New York on April 18, and Luciano was sent to jail without bail. On May 13, , Luciano's pandering trial began. In his book, Five Families, longtime New York Times organized-crime columnist Selwyn Raab wrote that a number of scholars have questioned whether Luciano was directly involved in "the Combination. However, Raab wrote, several Mafia and legal scholars believed that it would have been "out of character" for a crime boss of Luciano's stature to be directly involved in a prostitution ring. Raab wrote that the evidence Dewey presented against Luciano was "astonishingly thin," and argued that it would have been more appropriate to charge Luciano with extortion.

However, Raab believed that Luciano's defense team erred in allowing him to take the stand in his own defense, opening the door for Dewey to attack his credibility on cross-examination. At least two of Luciano's contemporaries have denied that Luciano was ever part of "the Combination". In her memoirs, New York society madam Polly Adler wrote that if Luciano had been involved with "the Combination", she would have known about it. Bonanno, the last surviving contemporary of Luciano's who wasn't in prison, also denied that Luciano was directly involved in prostitution in his book, A Man of Honor. Bonanno believed that several of Luciano's soldiers used Luciano's name to intimidate brothel keepers into paying for protection and argued that Dewey built his case "not so much against Luciano as against Luciano's name.

One witness testified that Luciano, working out of his Waldorf-Astoria suite, personally hired him to collect from bookers and madams. Luciano continued to run his crime family from prison, relaying his orders through acting boss Genovese. However, in , Genovese fled to Naples to avoid an impending murder indictment in New York. However, later in , authorities moved him to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora , a remote facility far away from New York City.

At Clinton, Betillo prepared special dishes for Luciano in a kitchen set aside by authorities. Luciano's legal appeals continued until October 10, , when the U. Supreme Court refused to review his case. They also worried about sabotage in these facilities. The Navy, the State of New York and Luciano reached a deal: in exchange for a commutation of his sentence, Luciano promised the complete assistance of his organization in providing intelligence to the Navy. Anastasia, a Luciano ally who controlled the docks, allegedly promised no dockworker strikes during war. In preparation for the allied invasion of Sicily , Luciano allegedly provided the US military with Sicilian Mafia contacts. This collaboration between the Navy and the Mafia became known as Operation Underworld.

The value of Luciano's contribution to the war effort is highly debated. In , the naval officer in charge of Operation Underworld discounted the value of his wartime aid. On January 3, , as a presumed reward for his alleged wartime cooperation, Dewey reluctantly commuted Luciano's pandering sentence on condition that he did not resist deportation to Italy. On arrival, Luciano told reporters he would probably reside in Sicily. He was then driven to Havana, where he moved into an estate in the Miramar section of the city. In , Lansky called a meeting of the heads of the major crime families in Havana that December, dubbed the Havana Conference.

The ostensible reason was to see singer Frank Sinatra perform. In addition to taking on the mantle of the first kingpin of the modern Genovese crime family, he and his mob associates launched the highly successful and lucrative National Crime Syndicate. Early Years Lucianos family immigrated to the United States in His criminal career began not long after. At the age of 10, he was charged with his first crime shoplifting. Luciano launched his first racket in , charging Jewish and Italian kids in his Lower East Side neighborhood anything from one or two pennies to as much as a dime for his protection to and from school.

If they refused to pay, Luciano beat them up rather than protect them. One of the kids, Meyer Lansky, refused to ante up. After Luciano failed to pound Lansky to a pulp, the two became friends and joined forces in the protection scheme. They remained friends and close associates throughout most of their lives. His parents sent him to The Brooklyn Truant School in hopes of straightening him out but in after his release, Luciano took over as leader of the notorious Five Points Gang, where he became acquainted with future Mafia leaders Vito Genovese and Frank Costello.

In the years leading up to World War I, Luciano expanded his criminal enterprises to include pimping and drug trafficking, and while the police named him as a suspect in several local murders, he was never indicted. The s By , Luciano had branched out into bootlegging and illegal gambling. Luciano, Costello, and Genovese had the largest bootlegging operation in New York with a territory that extended as far as Philadephia. By the late s, Luciano had become a chief aide in the largest crime family in the country, led by Giuseppe Joe the Boss Masseria. Initially recruited as a gunman, as time went on, Luciano came to despise the old Mafia Cosa Nostra traditions- and especially Masserias belief that non-Sicilians could not be trusted which ironically, turned out to be true in Lucianos case.

After being kidnapped and mugged, Luciano discovered Joe the Boss was behind the attack. A few months later, he decided to betray Masseria by covertly joining forces with the second largest mafia clan led by Salvatore Maranzano. The Castellammarese War began in and, over the next two years, several gangsters connected to Masseria and Maranzana were killed. Luciano, who was still working for both camps, led four men- including Bugsy Siegel- to a meeting he had arranged with Masseria. The four men sprayed his former boss with bullets, killing him. After the death of Masseria, Maranzano became the Boss of Bosses in New York but his ultimate goal was to become the leading boss in the United States. He helped arrange for Masseria to meet a grisly end in April Rising to power, Luciano took over Masseria's position as the top boss, with Marazano's approval.

He became a leader of one of the city's five families, taking his place alongside such infamous figures as Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Tommy Gagliano and Vincent Mangano. Unfortunately for Luciano, Marazano soon viewed him as a threat and ordered a hit on him. But Luciano was able to strike him first, having some of his men take out Marazano in his office in September With his rival vanquished, Luciano focused on improving how criminal gangs did business. He sought to create a national organized-crime network to quell any conflicts, manage disputes and establish guidelines between the different operations. In addition to the heads of the five families, he brought in other crime figures from across the country, including Chicago's Al Capone.

This new entity, sometimes known as the Commission, took organized crime to a new level. In the early s, Luciano was enjoying the high life. Flush with cash, Luciano looked the part of a wealthy businessman, wearing custom-made suits and riding around in chauffeur-driven cars. But the good times were about to come to end, as Thomas E. Dewey was appointed to serve as a special prosecutor to look into organized crime in Luciano met Italian ballerina Igea Lissoni in Despite their year age difference, the couple fell in love, and it was reported the following year that they had married, although others claim that wasn't the case.

Regardless, the couple's life in Naples was tumultuous, as Luciano continued his womanizing and at times turned abusive. Lissoni later developed breast cancer and died in Luciano's luck ran out in He and eight members of his vice racket were brought to trial that May. Convicted on extortion and prostitution charges in June, he was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in jail. Nicknamed "Siberia" by some, the remote prison was near the Canadian border. Luciano tried to appeal his case, but the court upheld his conviction. While in prison, Luciano offered to help in the war effort during World War II by using his criminal connections in Italy to advance the Allies' cause. After the war, Luciano received parole and a deportation order. He went back to Italy briefly and then traveled to Cuba.

There he met up with some of his old cohorts in crime, including Lansky and Siegel.

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