June 12, 2025 • 57 mins
Dive into the intriguing world of organized crime with our latest episode, "Unraveling the Legacy of Lucky Luciano: Architect of the American Mafia." Join us as we explore the life and influence of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, from his early days in Sicily to his ascent as a powerful crime boss in New York City. Discover how his survival instincts and strategic partnerships, especially with Meyer Lansky, helped him reshape the underworld.
We'll guide you through the turbulent times of the Castellammarese War, revealing how Luciano's cunning tactics led to the creation of the influential Commission, forever changing the American Mafia landscape. Learn about his strategic alliances, betrayals, and the shift in organized crime's focus post-Prohibition.
The episode also delves into Luciano's later years, marked by imprisonment, deportation, and his enduring influence over global crime networks. We discuss his cooperation with the U.S. government during World War II and his life in Naples post-deportation, culminating in his complex legacy as both a criminal mastermind and a strategic leader.
Tune in for a comprehensive exploration of Luciano's life, offering insights into the profound impact he had on organized crime, securing his place in Mafia lore.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:04):
The man known to history as Charles Lucky Luciano was born
Salvatore Lucania on the 24th ofNovember 1897 in the village of
Le Cara Fridi, near the city of Palermo, in the northwest of the
island of Sicily. Salvatore's father was Antonio,
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a miner who worked in the local sulphur pit near Palermo.
He and Salvatore always had a contentious relationship, one
which got worse over the years. His mother was Rosalie at home
in Italy. He also had two siblings, a
sister named Francesca and a brother by the name of Giuseppe.
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Another brother by the name of Bartolo was later born in New
York. His name gradually changed from
Salvatore Lucania over time. In his teenage years, he adopted
the name Charles, as people in America had begun referring to
him as Sal or Sally as an abbreviation of Salvatore, and
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he didn't like the sound of this.
Lucania became Luciano during the 1930s as the New York
newspapers consistently garbled his surname and spelled it
wrong. While it has been assumed that
he became nicknamed Lucky in an ironic sense after he luckily
survived a gang war attack in October 1929, during which he
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was beaten so badly he could barely see out of his eyes and
had his throat slashed before being left unconscious in a
forest on Staten Island. Others applied the name Lucky to
him thereafter, though in personhe nearly always went by Charles
or Charlie. Luciano had a droopy eye from
the attack for the rest of his life.
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Many of the details of Lucky Luciano's incredible life story
are debated today. There are significant reasons
for this. Firstly, he was a crime boss,
one who necessarily attempted tokeep his actions and the details
of his life secret for much of his own lifetime in order to
avoid police prosecution. But the waters were muddied
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further by the publication in the mid 1970s, over a decade
after Luciano died, of The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, a
memoir of his life which he allegedly dictated to the film
producer Martin Gosch in the months prior to his death in
anticipation of making a film version of his story.
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It was subsequently edited and published after Gosch died in
1973 as a book by Richard Hammer, a freelance writer who
Gosch had employed before his death to write up what Luciano
had allegedly told him. However, there was immediately a
debate, even before it was published, as to whether the
details provided in the book were genuinely related to Gosh
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by Luciano, or to what extent the memoirs were a work of
invention. With the New York Times at the
point of publication noting thatthe Last Testament reproduced
errors found in other books which had been written up to
that point on the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia.
A seeming indication that Ghosh or Hammer had simply taken much
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of their information from other secondary literature, rather
than the Last Testament being the genuine reflections of
Luciano on his life looking backfrom the vantage point of the
early 1960s. Nevertheless, while it can be
difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to such a
legendary character, the generalfacts of his life have been well
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established nearly a century after many of the most important
details of it occurred. In just over half a century
following the completion of the unification of Italy in the
early 1860s, some 15 or so million people left Italy in
search of a better life in the Americas, with the overwhelming
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majority settling in either Argentina or the United States,
with Buenos Aires and New York City being the key entry points.
The Lucanias were just one such family, setting sail from Sicily
bound for the New World in the spring of 19 O 7.
This was around the absolute peak of the Italian migration,
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and there was also a massive influx of Irish, Jews and other
groups. At this time, 20,000 migrants
arrived in just one day to the Lower East Side of New York
City, breaking all previous records set up to that point.
This was the chaotic environmentwhich greeted the Lucanias as
they themselves arrived to the Lower East Side.
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People heaved everywhere, poverty was rife, jobs were
available, paid little garbage lined the streets.
The smell was foul. The disease outbreaks were
common, compounded around the time the Lucanias arrived to New
York by a strike by city street cleaners, a huge number of which
were Italians. People lived with four families
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on each floor in the sprawling tenements, with one toilet for
all four apartments and with constant noise from the street,
plus sweltering heat in the summers which led some to sleep
in the fire escapes at night. This was how America was built.
It was not a good environment and many Italians, Irish, Jews
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and others turned to crime in a very short period of time after
arriving to better themselves. Luciano was amongst those who
were enticed into New York's less legal activities.
Before long, in the late 1900s, there were numerous gangs of
children and teenagers operatingaround the Lower East Side and
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Manhattan more broadly, picking the pockets of their victims,
robbing St. vendors and even getting into low level gambling
operations, often venturing further afield to relieve the
wealthier denizens of the great metropolis of their money and
belongings while riding the ferries from Manhattan to Staten
Island and Queens. Luciano was soon amongst these
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child hoodlums and before long had formed his own gang, running
an operation whereby they extorted protection money from
other children in return for keeping them safe on their way
to and from school. One day Luciano and his band of
teenage extortionists approacheda Jewish kid and Charles
explained that he would have to pay them $0.05 a week for
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protection. The boy told him, in not a very
polite fashion, that he wouldn'tbe paying him the money.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between
Luciano and Maya Lansky, who wasover 4 years younger than
Luciano and his associates and whose gumption in standing up to
his would be harasses impressed Lucky.
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Luciano's father was a traditional Italian working man
who continued the humble existence he had lived back in
Sicily. In New York.
He tried to discipline and control Lucky for his criminal
activity and his constant non attendance at school, eventually
being sent to a secure school inBrooklyn where he was forced to
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attend classes for a few months in 1911.
Thereafter he left entirely at 14 years of age and got a
citizen's job working as a clerkat the Goodman Hat Company on
Green Street, running N from lower Manhattan towards the
Bowery and Greenwich Village. He would stay working there for
four years and must have been good at it as his pay rose
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steadily. At the same time, though, he was
working his way up in the criminal world, running a gang
of young criminals on the East Side of Manhattan.
Clearly, this group was not engaged in minor activities.
In June 1916, when he was still just 18 years old, he was
arrested in a bar, and Luciano ended up serving his first jail
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sentence for a term of eight months at New Hampton Farms
Reformatory. When he got out, he briefly
returned his job at Goodman's, but it didn't stick.
Luciano's philosophy by then being quote if I have to be a
crumb, I'd rather be dead. A crumb to Luciano being the
average working man. Thereafter, he became ever more
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embedded in the New York crime world.
He got to know many of the 20th century's most famous criminals
during these years, figures likeAl Capone who were also rising
up in the New York underworld atthis time, though Capone soon
absconded to Chicago after a violent bar fight in Manhattan
in 1919 landed him in trouble with the police.
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Luciano's closest associates after a time were his old friend
Maya Lansky and Bugsy Seagull, the latter being another Jewish
teenage hoodlum who got his namefor being crazy as a bug and his
over willingness to use a gun when needed.
On the Italian front, Luciano befriended 2 other important
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figures at this time, Francesco Castelia, better known to
history as Frank Costello, an Italian from Calabria, the boot
of Italy near Sicily on the Italian mainland, and Vito
Genovese, another Italian originally from near the city of
Naples. Luciano Lansky and the others
worked together on and off through the late 1910s and early
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1920s, but they were small time criminals at this juncture for
the most part. What would change things was
their growing association with some of the foremost Italian
gangsters in New York. Men like Joe the Boss Maseria,
who Luciano was close enough to.By the late summer of 1922, the
word Maseria was targeted by a hitman by the name of Umberto
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Valenti during a turf war in a failed murder attempt.
Luciano was amongst those who later went after Valenti.
It was apparently Lucky who remained calm during the
engagement and killed him. What allowed Luciano and others
like Genovese, Costello and Lansky to go from peripheral
figures in New York's underworldto become some of the most
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dominant criminals on the East Coast of the United States was
the prohibition on the sale and supply of alcohol, which was
introduced across America through the 18th Amendment in
1920. Prohibition was introduced in
many ways as a way for the political establishment in
America, which were people of generally British heritage and
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Protestants to attack Roman Catholics arriving from Ireland,
Italy and other parts of Europe and setting up restaurants and
bars across the 1900s and 1910s.It had the opposite effect.
Firstly, it did not work and secondly, it became a catalyst
for the expansion and professionalization of the
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Italian, Irish and Jewish mafias, in particular in cities
like New York, Chicago, Boston and many others.
Luciano was one of the great beneficiaries.
As he, Lansky and others began producing, moving, and selling
ever greater quantities of bootleg alcohol around the
tri-state area during the 1920s,they grew to become some of the
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foremost figures in Masseria's criminal organization.
Without Prohibition, it is possible that very few people
would know a century later who Salvatore Lucarna even was.
Luciano and Lansky did not rise entirely owing to their links
with Joe Masseria. They had another connection.
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Arnold Rothstein, often nicknamed the Brain, was a
somewhat different kind of early20th century New York criminal.
He was born into an affluent Jewish American family in
Manhattan back in 1882. In the course of the 1910s he
rose on the back of his application of mathematical
principles to illegal gambling and a keen business sense,
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running casinos and horse racingtracks up and down much of the
East Coast. He was infamously alleged to
affix the 1919 World Series of Baseball in order to make
$350,000, yet this has never been fully proven.
By the mid 1920s, Luciano and Lansky were being mentored by
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Rothstein, who lent a more businessman like approach to
their burgeoning operations. He also cultivated the idea in
them that appearances were important.
Did Luciano want to be viewed asa small time gun for hire or a
leading crime boss? Rothstein asked him.
Luciano and Lansky both decided on the latter.
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And as the. Years went by, they evolved from
criminals on the make on the Lower East Side to well dressed
operators living in the suburbs of New York or discreetly in
Manhattan hotels under aliases and directing affairs rather
than getting their hands dirty moving bootleg alcohol
themselves. It was an ethos which would be
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adopted throughout much of the Italian American Mafia in years
to come. It was not all risk free.
Far from it. Before they came fully under
Rothstein's wing, Luciano was still selling and handling
narcotics, even as alcohol was becoming the bread and butter of
people like him in the 1920s. In the summer of 1923, he is
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recorded as regularly meeting a distributor by the name of John
Lyons in a pool room on E 14th St. in Manhattan.
That is until the day that he realized that Lyons was an
undercover cop. After being taken to a police
station, they informed him aboutwhat he already knew with his
previous conviction from back in1916.
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He was looking at a 10 year sentence to save himself.
Luciano gave them some information about a storehouse
where they could find a huge quantity of drugs.
They checked out the address andconfirmed that the information
he had given them was accurate. Luciano walked, and he did so
without informing on anybody. The storehouse was where he was
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stashing his own drugs. It was a narrow escape, though,
one which also gives an insight into how much money he was
already making. By then, the stash had an
estimated street value of $150,000.
By then he was able to survive aloss like that, and within a
year he and Lansky were renting out a suite in the upmarket
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Claridge Hotel from where they were directing a brigade of
bootleggers who were operating up and down the East Coast,
often bringing in narcotics fromCanada as well, where the Port
Of Montreal was a major entry point for the North American
market in the interwar period. While in due time, Luciano also
benefited from Rothstein's connections to people who were
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importing opium along the main route available for importation
in the 1920s from China and the Port of Hong Kong.
In 1928, Luciano and Lansky had become major players in New
York's crime world, operating their own business along with
being senior associates of Rothstein and Joe Masseria.
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A reorientation occurred later that year.
In September, Rothstein, who wasa notorious gambler, took part
in a gambling session in New York which involved dice, stud
poker, and even high car draw. By the time it ended, he had
lost $340,000, a sum equivalent to about $6 million today.
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This was a sum of money Rothstein could have quite
easily paid off. Nevertheless, he refused to do
so afterwards claiming that the poker game had been fixed to con
him out of a large sum. His refusal to pay up proved
very costly indeed, and on the 4th of November he was shot in
the groin near Park Central Hotel.
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He died in hospital two days later, having refused to reveal
to police who had shot him. With his death, his empire was
divided up between a number of gangsters.
Luciano decided to move closer to Joe Masseria in the aftermath
of the collapse of Rothstein's empire.
It was the beginning of a brief yet significant alliance between
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them. More broadly, Rothstein's death
would have a bearing on events throughout the 1930s.
When he died, many of his records were leaked, a great
percentage of which included details of bribes he had paid to
police and state prosecutors in New York over a period of nearly
20 years. In response, in 1929 and into
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the early 1930s, a generation ofcorrupt state officials were
ousted across New York and replaced by more zealous
newcomers. Chief amongst them was a special
state prosecutor by the name of Thomas E Dewey, who would play a
major role in Luciano's life in years to come.
Dewey's involvement in Luciano'sstory lay.
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A few years ahead. What was of more immediate
consequence in the aftermath of Rothstein's death was the
rivalry which was developing between Masseria and a rival
boss by the name of Salvatore Maranzano.
Maranzano was a Sicilian who hadarrived to New York in 1925,
well dressed, educated, ruthless, and a strangely
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paradoxical figure, one who was a crime boss yet also spoke
Latin and at once considered entering the priesthood.
By the late 1920s he was a growing problem for Maseria, and
the attack on Luciano, which left him scarred and nearly dead
in 1929, was possibly carried out by some of Maranzano's
allies. Maseria responded to his rival's
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growing power by ordering Luciano, Genovese and others to
murder Gaetano Reyna, a former member of the Maseria gang,
after he joined Maranzano's crewwith Reyna's murder.
In February 1930, the Castella Marezi War broke out between
Masseria's crime family and thatof Maranzano.
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The conflict was named for the port town in Sicily where
Maranzano and many of his crew members came from.
It raged for over a year, eventually seeing that Maranzano
had gotten the upper hand. Luciano, along with Costello and
Genovese. Decided to switch.
Sides and agreed to kill their boss on the 15th of April 1931,
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in an episode which inspired thefamous murder scene from the
first Godfather book and film. Luciano met Maseria at the Nuova
Villa Tamaro restaurant on ConeyIsland, where he, Maseria and
others had some food and then played cards.
At a certain time, Luciano went to the bathroom, the signal for
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Genovese and others to enter thepremises, and gunned down
Maseria. With the Castella Marezi war at
an end, Luciano and the others went to work for Maranzano.
In the weeks that followed, Maranzano decided to come up
with a new dispensation whereby the different outfits and crews
of Italian Americans operating in New York and the wider
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tri-state area would function. Resurrecting an idea which had
been proposed by Johnny Torrio, a Chicago boss who had been
dominant there in the early 1920s before the rise of Al
Capone, He decided that the fivemost prominent outfits would
divide power between them, each of them having their own parts
of the city, state and New Jersey in which they would be in
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charge of bootlegging, prostitution, gambling and other
criminal activity. They would be called the Five
Families, and were headed by five of the most powerful bosses
of the time, Maranzano himself, Luciano Giuseppe Profaci, Thomas
Galliano and Vincent Mangano. Each would have the ability to
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operate independently of each other in their respective zones
of influence, but Maranzano decided at the same time to
proclaim himself. As the capo di tutti.
Capi, the boss of bosses. Through this, each of the other
families would pay tribute to him.
This concept of a boss of bosseswould play a central role in
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Luciano's story over the next several years, and would be
resurrected at various times over the decades that followed.
The arrangement did not last long.
Within a few months, there was evident tension between
Maranzano and Luciano, much of it based on Maranzano's heavy
handedness and also his clear prejudice against their Jewish
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colleagues like Lansky and Seagull.
By the autumn of 1931, Madanzanowas already discussing the idea
of removing Luciano and others close to him who had been
working with Masseria in the 1920s, including Genovese and
Costello. Luciano's suspicions about
Maranzano's intentions were aroused when the boss of bosses
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asked him on several occasions what his home address was, to
which Luciano dismissively replied that he didn't have a
fixed home. Lucky also began planning to
murder Maranzano, a plan he accelerated when he got a call
in September 1931 asking for himand Genovese to meet him at his
new office suite near Grand Central Station on Park Ave.
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Instead, Luciano contacted Lansky, who had arranged for
four hit men who Maranzano wouldnot recognize, to go to his
office disguised as Internal Revenue Service officers.
It was known that Maranzano was having tax difficulties and was
expecting IRS officials to call to his office, so the bodyguards
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were let in. There, Maranzano was stabbed 6
times as he fought back. The assassins, who had tried to
do things quietly pulled out their weapons and shot him four
times to make sure he was dead. They then slit his throat.
Luciano was now in a position ofunprecedented power following
the rapid disappearance from NewYork's criminal underworld of
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Rothstein, Masseria and Maranzano.
He could, at this juncture have made a claim to be the boss of
bosses, much like Maranzano had tried to set himself up.
As particularly so as another major figure, Al Capone, was
also about to be removed from the scene out in Chicago, as the
authorities there were coming tothe end of a case which would
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see him sentenced over a decade in prison on charges of tax
evasion. Nevertheless, Luciano chose not
to claim a position of preponderance.
After years of bloodshed, he contended that collegiality and
a fair division of territory in which everyone would benefit was
the best way of proceeding. Accordingly, within weeks of
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Maranzano's death, the Commission was established
whereby 7 individuals, the headsof the five families in New
York, plus the head of the Chicago Outfit and a 7th figure
from the region in between Cleveland, OH and Buffalo, NY,
which in 1931 was Frank or Chicho Milano, would each meet
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occasionally to direct the affairs of the Italian American
Mafia, which would be run as a decentralized syndicate with
each family administering its own territory and staying out of
the affairs of others except where their interests
overlapped. It was the beginning of the
Mafia as a National Crime organization, and Luciano, more
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than any other individual, brought it about.
The next several years were onesof flux for Luciano and his
crime family. Genovese became his second in
command, with Costello as his conciliere.
They continued to work closely with Lansky and Seagull and the
wider Jewish mob, as well as theother four New York families.
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A transition was undertaken in 1933 when prohibition came to an
end and the massive loss of revenue was compensated for by
an expansion of their activitiesinto many other fields, notably
gambling, with Seagull heading out West to try to establish a
gambling haven in Galveston, TX,later relocating to Las Vegas,
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NV. Other initiatives included a
growing role in the unions and labour movement, as well as the
expansion of the narcotics trade.
Luciano became a very wealthy man in the process.
He was difficult to pin down, residing at various luxury
hotels around Manhattan, notablythe Waldorf Astoria, arguably
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the most esteemed hotel in the whole world at the time, later
relocating to the Barbizon Plaza.
Despite the plush surroundings, he maintained some of his old
habits. 1 evening at the Barbizon.
He ordered silverware and dishesup to his room without any food.
An associate of Luciano's had brought him over some spaghetti
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cooked by his mother. He didn't marry and at least in
the 1920s and 1930s, rarely had any committed relationships
other than that with his sometime girlfriend gay all
over, instead dating a string ofwomen for short periods of time,
a habit which apparently resulted in a venereal disease
which troubled him periodically throughout his life.
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The mid 1930s were a period of instability for reasons beyond
the end of Prohibition. It was during this period that
Thomas Dewey, the New York special investigator who in
years to come would become the Republican candidate in both the
1944 and 1948 presidential elections, intensified his
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efforts to crack down on organized crime in New York.
Having acquired a strong supporter when Fiorello
LaGuardia, himself the son of Italian immigrants, was elected
as mayor of New York in 1934, Dewey set his sights first on
Dutch Schultz, a German Jewish mobster who was an associate of
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Luciano and Lansky. He had diversified out of
bootlegging in the early 1930s by becoming a major player in
the numbers game, or lottery in Harlem.
Dewey followed the money and wassoon tightening the noose on
Schultz with tax evasion charges.
As he did so, Schultz made it known that he was considering
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trying to kill Dewey. When it became clear what he
intended, Luciano and others hadno option except to act.
Luciano made it clear that murdering a special prosecutor
who was close to the mayor and an emerging Republican Party
politician would bring unprecedented attention to bear
on the Mafia's activities and would lead to a major
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investigation. Consequently, on the 24th of
October 1935, Dutch Schultz was murdered in Newark, NJ.
The problem presented by Dewey did not go away once Schultz was
removed from the scene. Instead, it only got worse for
Lucky. On the 1st of February 1936,
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just over three months after Schultz's murder, Dewey oversaw
the simultaneous launching of police raids.
On a huge number of brothels allover Manhattan and Brooklyn,
over 100 prostitutes were arrested, along with Madam's and
brothel managers. Questioning followed.
Many didn't have much information to provide other
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than what was readily apparent to anyone who had raided the
establishments. But Dewey and his colleagues
managed to pull together enough information to just about come
up with a case to charge Lucianowith pandering, a crime which
involves profiting from the vices.
Or weaknesses of others, one which was usually used against
pimps and brothel runners. As the investigation team did
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its work operating out of the Woolworth Building in Tribeca,
which until 1930 had held the crown of the world's tallest
building, Luciano was down in Miami, FL, where he often spent
the colder winter months overseeing the mobs growing
business in Florida and offshorein Havana, Cuba.
He received word there from Lansky about the brothel raids
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and decided to make himself scarce.
Heading out to Hot Springs in Arkansas, where the mob had
several casinos and numerous biddable politicians on the
payroll, he waited there to see how events in New York would
unfold in the weeks that followed.
Luciano's whereabouts in Arkansas were discovered, and he
was eventually picked up and puton a train under armed escort in
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mid-april 1936. Returned to New York, he was
greeted by a crowd of journalists at Penn Station and
was put in front of a judge a few hours later.
There Dewey began his attack, stating that Luciano was the
head of a wide-ranging, yet still improperly understood
criminal enterprise with nationwide concerns.
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He believed Luciano was a very wealthy man and requested a bail
of $350,000. The judge agreed the arraignment
had set a precedent whereby Dewey would attempt to turn what
was a fairly flimsy vice and pandering charge into a much
wider case concerning Luciano's criminal affairs in general.
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Despite A resounding lack of evidence on matters pertaining
to the narcotics trade, gambling, and other areas of
activity, the trial began just over 3 weeks later and lasted
one month. Dewey followed his initial
pattern at the arraignment of making it about much more than
the vice and pandering offences and instead built up a case
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concerning Luciano's wider role as a leading New York criminal
boss. It culminated in Luciano taking
the stand during cross examination.
Dewey got the better of him withLucky slipping at one juncture
during a lengthy session in which he lied about virtually
everything else but admitted to being a minor bootlegger for a
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time in the 1920s, as Dewey questioned how he had become so
wealthy without having a legitimate job throughout the
Prohibition era. This and other revelations led
the jury to determine that Luciano's testimony could not be
trusted. His lawyer had already told him
before the verdict came down that he would be found guilty 11
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days later. The judge sentenced him to 30 to
50 years in prison. The sentence, when it came, was
a major blow to Luciano. Although he had expected to be
found guilty on some offences, it had never seemed feasible
that he would be given what in reality amounted to nearly a
life sentence. There were serious questions
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asked at the time about how the case was prosecuted and the
nature of the evidence, with Maya Lansky proclaiming that his
buddy Charlie had been set up. He was perhaps not entirely
incorrect. While there is little doubt that
the Mafia was involved in prostitution in New York, the
level of that involvement was debatable.
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During the 1920s and early 1930sit was negligible and Luciano
appears to have had almost 0 involvement as figures like him
viewed it as hardly worth the effort when money could be made
much more easily from bootlegging.
In the mid 1930s, with prohibition ending and the Great
Depression continuing to impact on businesses countrywide, the
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illegal variety included. Luciano and his many associates
did become involved in prostitution in New York, but
even then he viewed it as a small sideline which didn't
generate a lot of money. His role was certainly
peripheral enough that at least some of the evidence presented
against him in court was exaggerated.
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More broadly, Dewey had made thecourt case a prosecution of
Luciano's wider life and career,for much of which he had only
speculation and hearsay to go on.
The judge had been happy to proceed on this basis, however,
and in the end Luciano was convicted in a manner which was
excessive. Based on the available evidence,
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Luciano appealed his conviction,but to no avail.
He was going to prison. There he would try to maintain
some role in the running of New York's underworld.
However, for the most part, VitoGenovese took over as acting
head of the Luciano crime family, with Frank Costello
succeeding him within a year as Genovese fled to Italy after
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Dewey began focusing on his activities, notably the murder
of Ferdinand Bocher in 1934. Luciano was originally sent to
Sing Sing Prison, a place where,when it was first built, the
cells measured 7 foot by 3 1/2 foot and were just 6 1/2 foot
from floor to ceiling. New saner cells were built in
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the 1920s and 1930s, but Sing Sing deserved its fearsome
reputation. Luckily for Lucky Luciano, he
was quickly moved from there to Dannimora Prison, though things
were far from pleasant here either.
Dannemora was notoriously cold and was dubbed Siberia by the
inmates. Luciano quickly established
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himself as the most important prisoner, brokering a peace
between rival gangs and evidently bribing a significant
enough portion of the guards that the conditions of his
detention became relatively pleasant.
That said, Dannemora lay furtherupstate in New York, and he
found it nigh on impossible to continue to play a role in
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managing affairs in New York in the late 1930s.
By the time Lucky's minimum sentence of 30 years in prison
would have been served, it wouldhave been 1966.
He would have been nearing his 70th year and there is no
guarantee he would have been released at that juncture.
As such, Luciano would almost certainly have spent most of the
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rest of his life in an American prison serving out the pandering
conviction, had it not been for events far away in Europe.
On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, leading
Britain and France to declare war on it two days later in the
inception of the Second World War.
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In the second-half of 1940, after Italy entered the war,
North Africa became a major theatre of the conflict as the
Italians and Germans tried to secure the Suez Canal in Egypt.
When the US entered the conflictin December 1941 after Germany's
ally, the Empire of Japan attacked the Pacific Fleet at
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anchor in Pearl Harbor, the US and Britain decided to
prioritize the North Africa campaign with a view to securing
the Maghrib and then opening a southern front in Europe by
launching an invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.
As these plans were developed, the administration of President
Roosevelt in Washington began toconsider forming an alliance
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with the Italian Mafia to aid them with their contacts in
Italy. It would be Luciano's salvation.
On the 9th of February 1942, almost exactly 2 months after
the US entered the war followingthe attack on Pearl Harbor, the
s s Normandy, a French ship which had been captured by the
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US and was rechristened as the Lafayette with ambitions to
repurpose it as a troop carrier for the war effort, caught fire
while undergoing repair work in New York Harbor.
It sank the following day. In the days that followed,
suspicions arose that the fire had been intentionally started
by a German agent of some kind. This was one of the key reasons
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why the US government approacheda number of figures within the
Italian and Jewish crime syndicates of New York,
including Luciano's close friendand ally Maya Lansky, in the
spring of 1942. They hoped to use the mob's
massive influence over New York's Docklands and workers to
prevent further arson attacks and to block foreign agents from
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coming in through the port. Early on in these talks,
Luciano's imprisonment became a point of discussion.
He was moved to Great Meadow Correctional Facility closer to
New York, a much more comfortable situation for him,
and promises were made that in return for his aid, his sentence
would be commuted once the war ended.
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In return, the US government would have the cooperation of
the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia in managing the port of
New York, and the labor unions for the duration of the war.
Luciano also promised to use hiscontacts in Sicily and southern
Italy to facilitate the Allied invasion of the peninsula as
much as possible. This entire arrangement is
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typically known as Operation Underworld, though it is a major
point of debate as to whether the government viewed it as a
formal arrangement or operation.The extent to which Luciano
managed to aid the government issomewhat conjectural.
It is, for instance, believed that he put the US government in
contact with Calogero Vidzini, the most powerful figure within
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Cosa Nostra. Back in Sicily itself, legend
has it that during the Allied invasion of the island in the
summer of 1943, Vidzini spent a week riding around between the
towns and villages of Sicily in an American tank, convincing
people to lay down their arms and welcome the Americans.
Meanwhile, in New York, Costello, Lansky and others
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facilitated a wide range of other measures which the
government required. While many historians have cast
doubt on the significance of Luciano's aid to the government
during the Second World War, there is no doubt that in
January 1946, once the conflict was over, his sentence was
commuted and he was released from prison after serving just 9
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1/2 years of a 30 to 50 year prison sentence.
That said, nobody in Washington was anxious to have him hanging
around in New York. The terms of his release were
that he was to be deported back to Italy immediately.
As such, after one last meal with some of his associates
since the 1920s on board the ship that would convey him back
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to the homeland. Luciano was deported from
America on the 10th of February 1946.
Lucky arrived in Naples 2 1/2 weeks later.
He seems to have had little intention of staying there.
Instead he intended to relocate to Cuba.
The Caribbean island had been a quasi American colony for over 4
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decades, ever since the Spanish American War of 1898 had ousted
the Spanish from the island and allowed the US to set up a
system of oversight which allowed it to largely decide who
was in charge of the country. Usually the individuals so
chosen were wildly corrupt, and as well as being closely aligned
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with Washington, the island had also become an offshore
playground for the Mafia, one where gambling was legal and a
few dollars could lead to blind eyes being turned quite easily.
It was also close enough to the US that Luciano could keep a
hand in running affairs in New York without the fear of
extradition. And so in the autumn of 1946, he
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set off for Cuba, taking a circuitous route through several
South and Central American countries to ensure that he
shrugged off any American or Italian police who are
monitoring his movements. He arrived in the capital,
Havana in October 1946. Within days of arriving in Cuba,
Luciano was organising a major meeting of the heads of the
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Italian and Jewish mafias from New York and further afield.
The Havana Conference took placeat the Hotel Nacional from the
22nd of December 1946 onwards, continuing through Christmas.
There were a. Wide range of things to be
discussed. A notable topic was the mob's
growing involvement in the development of Las Vegas.
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Bugsy Siegel, a Jewish American mobster who had been involved
with Luciano and many others since the 1920s, had been the
visionary behind the Mafia's quest to establish a gambling
Oasis out West. But his management of the
construction and opening of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas had
been disastrous, and Siegel had clearly lined his own pockets
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with the mobs investments while working on it.
Lansky, who had known Bugsy since they were teenagers in New
York. But when the Flamingos opening
night was a shambles, a decisionwas taken to murder Seagull and
he was killed in Los Angeles in the summer of 1947.
Other issues discussed included narcotics, the unions, gambling,
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the Italian lottery in New York,and the respective positions of
Genovese and Costello in New York, Genovese having returned
from Italy after the war ended. Eventually, Luciano met with
Genovese alone, and after a discussion in which Vito urged
him to claim the title of boss of bosses and then let him
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exercise the position on the ground in America, Luciano
angrily told him he didn't want to ever hear the idea mentioned
again. With the end of the Havana
meeting, most of the attendees headed back to the US and
resumed their operations. Luciano, of course, could not.
He remained on in Havana, enjoying the fact that for once
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he was not being observed by either the US or Italian police.
Quite the contrary, in fact. Instead, he was something of a
local celebrity, one who met regularly with the Cuban
President Ramon Grau and was invited to social occasions by
prominent American businessman with interests in Havana.
Those who knew him at the time stated later that this was a
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period in which he was quite happy with his circumstances.
Inevitably, it didn't last. By the spring of 1947,
journalists in Cuba had begun toreceive reports that the Mafia
Don was living in Havana, and asphotos of him appeared in a
growing number of newspapers, American political agents in
Cuba had to act. Pressure was applied on Grau's
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administration by restricting the import of various medicines
to Cuba from America, and with this the government in Havana
politely detained Luciano in March 1947 and informed him that
he was to be deported back to Italy.
Thus, in mid March he boarded the Backier ship bound for
Europe. Although he paid $300.00 for a
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first class cabin, he was reported to have spent much of
his time playing cards with tourists in economy as he headed
E back to his homeland. It has been speculated that the
details of his presence in Cuba were leaked by some of his
associates after the conference,fearing that Luciano intended to
try to continue running affairs in New York from Havana.
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While the post war period saw Luciano being prevented from
playing a leading role in the Italian American Mafia following
his release from prison, his personal life did shift after
his return to Italy from Cuba. He had never married or had
children and seemed to have no interest in doing so.
Yet in early 1948 he did begin arelationship with a woman whom
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he would term the love of his life.
Ijiya Lisoni was a 26 year old woman whom Luciano first met in
Milan. She was a dancer who had
performed at the La Scala Opera House in her youth.
Luciano was apparently too shy to ask her out when they first
met, but later he attended a nightclub in Rome where she was
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performing, and before long theywere seeing one another.
She moved into his Rome apartment just a few weeks
later. She's the only girl I ever
loved. Luciano later related Due to the
police continuously harassing Lucky in Rome, they eventually
had to move to Naples, where they lived in a penthouse
apartment on the Via Tasso with a panoramic view of Mount
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Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. They would never have children
though, with Luciano claiming hedidn't want any child to grow up
tarred with being Lucky Luciano's child.
Luciano and Lisoni lived a somewhat quiet life in Naples.
Despite the efforts of the Italian police to continue
digging up information on his alleged criminal activity, there
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was no doubt that there was someillegal activity. 1 of Luciano's
pastimes was visiting the horse tracks in Naples, where he
invariably won. The races were undoubtedly fixed
at least some of the time. Other than this, he continued to
have contacts with the Italian Mafia, although less so with
people back in America meeting people who visited Italy from
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New York, but little more than that.
Police reports from the 1950s noted that he continued to spend
considerably more money than he was earning through any legal
channels, yet they could never make anything stick to him.
This quiet and relatively happy period of his life came to an
end in October 1958 when Lizzonidied of breast cancer at just 36
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years of age. Friends noted he cried at her
funeral, something they had never seen before.
A magazine article for which he had been interviewed and which
appeared not long after Lizzoni's death, described him
as a tight lipped individual whomet many questions with silence.
The same interviewer concluded that quote, his life is a quiet
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one and his greatest desire is to forget and be forgotten.
At the same time that Luciano was living his relatively quiet
life in Italy, one which surely felt like an exile yet was
actually a return to his homeland, a rivalry was brewing
in New York between two of his oldest allies.
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Genovese never accepted the factthat Costello had succeeded him
as the head of the Luciano crimefamily in New York after he fled
to Italy in the late 1930s. Costello's unwillingness to
relinquish the position after the war, when Genovese returned
to America, was a source of growing tension between the two
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figures. Costello's position was weakened
in the early 1950s by the Kiefover hearings, where the US
Senate forced him and many otherfigures to testify about the
existence of an organized crime syndicate amongst Italian
Americans. Finally, in 1957, Genovese tried
to have Costello murdered. He survived the attempted hit
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carried out by Vincent the Chin Gigante.
However, Costello decided to retire and allow Genovese to
take over. At this juncture, rather than
engaging in a bloody and possibly protracted power
struggle. With this, Genovese became the
head of the Luciano crime family, but ironically, the man
after whom the outfit was named was never happy with this
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decision. Far away in Italy, it has been
suggested on more than one occasion that Luciana was in
some way involved when charges were pressed against Genovese in
New York. Not long after he took over
affairs there, Genovese was implicated in a large sale of
narcotics and would eventually be sentenced to 15 years in
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prison in 1959. He surrendered himself and began
his sentence in 1960 and would die in prison in 1969.
There is certainly a case to be made that the incident which
brought Genovese down, an alleged deal with a low level
Puerto Rican drug dealer, seems curious.
Why would Genovese have been directly involved in such a deal
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instead of letting a minion handle it?
Whether Luciano, who had been visited on a few occasions in
Naples by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in
the late 1950s, was involved remains speculative, though
friends who knew him in Italy inhis later years did recount that
news of Genovese's conviction and imprisonment was one of the
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few things that cheered Luciano up in the months following
Lissoni's death. Luciano's final years were spent
living in Naples. Somewhat surprisingly, he was
not especially well off during these years, in part because
much of his revenue was coming in from Havana, and after the
success of the Cuban Revolution,the Mafia's activities there
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came to an end in 1959, while the changing of the guard in New
York saw much of the residual payments he received from there
over the years dry up. He resented this, and it rubbed
salt in the wound when Joey Adonis, 1 of Luciano's gunmen
back in the 1920s and a much more junior figure in the mob in
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general, arrived in Italy in 1956 after agreeing to be
deported from America after a perjury charge, setting himself
up in Milan in a grand mansion. Where he held.
Court in a manner which Luciano was financially incapable of.
It was in an effort to turn his ailing financial situation
around that he agreed to discussa movie project based on his
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life with Martin Gosch in the early 1960's.
The timing seemed propitious as a feature film starring Rod
Steiger on the life of Al Caponehad appeared in 1959 and Murder
Inc, another gangster film. Was released a year later.
In the last months of his life, Luciano had been in contact with
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Gauche and was laying the groundwork for such a film.
Though how this project would have been received by those who
are still active in the mafia isvery debatable, as it turned
out, the film would never come to fruition.
On the evening of the 26th of January 1962, Luciano headed to
Capo de Quino airport in Naples to meet Gauche as he got off a
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plane flying in from Rome. They were planning to complete
the work on the movie script over the next several days.
Instead, Luciano collapsed as they walked from the terminal.
When a doctor attended shortly afterwards, he pronounced him
dead. He had.
Passed of a heart attack at 64 years of age.
Word quickly spread out internationally, with news of
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his death featuring the following day on the front page
of The New York Times. There were other revelations in
the days that followed about howLucky was under investigation at
the time of his death for his role in a $150 million narcotics
ring between Europe and the US, which had been operating for
decades. Luciano's funeral was held three
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days later in Naples. Approximately 300 guests
attended, doubtlessly a smaller number than would have been the
case had he died in New York. The ceremony was disturbed by
scuffles which broke out when over enthusiastic
photojournalists got too close to the mourners.
His body was originally taken. By a horse.
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Drawn hearse to Poggio Riali Cemetery on the outskirts of
Naples, but an arrangement was subsequently reached whereby his
body was repatriated to America.2000 mourners attended his
burial in Queens. By the time Luciano died,
investigations into the extent of the Mafia's activities were
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escalating in America. Genovese was already in prison.
In 1963, Joseph Falaki gave testimony to U.S.
Senate hearings in which he revealed how the organized Mafia
in America had come into being, including the central role
Luciano had played in the creation of the Commission back
in 1931. Although it took 20 years for
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the tide to turn, by the 1980s all of these revelations and
attacks on the Mafia's extensiveinvolvement in the narcotics
trade, gambling and control of labour and the unions began to
pay off. That decade saw their influence
in Las Vegas vanquished and widespread arrests and
successful prosecutions. 1/2 a century after he built it up in
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the early 1930s, Luciano's Mafiawas beginning to decline.
In 1998, when it published its list of the 100 most important
persons of the 20th century, Time magazine included Charles
Lucky Luciano in its list of builders and Titans on account
of his role in the emergence of the Italian American Mafia as
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the foremost criminal enterprisein the United States during the
20th century. He featured in this particular
section of the list alongside Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Bill
Gates and Ray Kroc respectively,The Pioneers behind Disney, Ford
Automobiles, Microsoft and McDonald's.
It was a left of centre choice by time and entirely fitting at
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the same time. Luciana was the most significant
figure in the history of the Italian American Mafia.
Emerging out of the East Side inthe late 1910s and forged
through Prohibition, he came outof the pivotal Castella Marezi
War of the early 1930s as the most powerful Mafia figure in
New York and countrywide. By extension.
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At that juncture, he could have continued the divisive attempts
to claim absolute power which had led to conflict for many
years. But instead, he elected to rule
as the first of equals and in the process allowed the Mafia to
begin strengthening its network on a national level and
expanding into new cities and todevelop operations as far afield
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as Las Vegas, NV and Havana, Cuba.
Although owing to his arrest andincarceration in 1936, he was
eclipsed during much of his later life by figures like
Genovese and Costello, there is no doubting that, for better or
for worse, Lucky Luciano was thesingle most important figure in
the. History of the.
(54:28):
Italian American Mafia, what do you think of Lucky Luciano?
Please let us know in the comments section.
And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
(55:22):
The. The.
(56:39):
Yeah.
The man known to history as Charles Lucky Luciano was born
Salvatore Lucania on the 24th ofNovember 1897 in the village of
Le Cara Fridi, near the city of Palermo, in the northwest of the
island of Sicily. Salvatore's father was Antonio,
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a miner who worked in the local sulphur pit near Palermo.
He and Salvatore always had a contentious relationship, one
which got worse over the years. His mother was Rosalie at home
in Italy. He also had two siblings, a
sister named Francesca and a brother by the name of Giuseppe.
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Another brother by the name of Bartolo was later born in New
York. His name gradually changed from
Salvatore Lucania over time. In his teenage years, he adopted
the name Charles, as people in America had begun referring to
him as Sal or Sally as an abbreviation of Salvatore, and
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he didn't like the sound of this.
Lucania became Luciano during the 1930s as the New York
newspapers consistently garbled his surname and spelled it
wrong. While it has been assumed that
he became nicknamed Lucky in an ironic sense after he luckily
survived a gang war attack in October 1929, during which he
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was beaten so badly he could barely see out of his eyes and
had his throat slashed before being left unconscious in a
forest on Staten Island. Others applied the name Lucky to
him thereafter, though in personhe nearly always went by Charles
or Charlie. Luciano had a droopy eye from
the attack for the rest of his life.
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Many of the details of Lucky Luciano's incredible life story
are debated today. There are significant reasons
for this. Firstly, he was a crime boss,
one who necessarily attempted tokeep his actions and the details
of his life secret for much of his own lifetime in order to
avoid police prosecution. But the waters were muddied
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further by the publication in the mid 1970s, over a decade
after Luciano died, of The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, a
memoir of his life which he allegedly dictated to the film
producer Martin Gosch in the months prior to his death in
anticipation of making a film version of his story.
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It was subsequently edited and published after Gosch died in
1973 as a book by Richard Hammer, a freelance writer who
Gosch had employed before his death to write up what Luciano
had allegedly told him. However, there was immediately a
debate, even before it was published, as to whether the
details provided in the book were genuinely related to Gosh
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by Luciano, or to what extent the memoirs were a work of
invention. With the New York Times at the
point of publication noting thatthe Last Testament reproduced
errors found in other books which had been written up to
that point on the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia.
A seeming indication that Ghosh or Hammer had simply taken much
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of their information from other secondary literature, rather
than the Last Testament being the genuine reflections of
Luciano on his life looking backfrom the vantage point of the
early 1960s. Nevertheless, while it can be
difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to such a
legendary character, the generalfacts of his life have been well
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established nearly a century after many of the most important
details of it occurred. In just over half a century
following the completion of the unification of Italy in the
early 1860s, some 15 or so million people left Italy in
search of a better life in the Americas, with the overwhelming
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majority settling in either Argentina or the United States,
with Buenos Aires and New York City being the key entry points.
The Lucanias were just one such family, setting sail from Sicily
bound for the New World in the spring of 19 O 7.
This was around the absolute peak of the Italian migration,
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and there was also a massive influx of Irish, Jews and other
groups. At this time, 20,000 migrants
arrived in just one day to the Lower East Side of New York
City, breaking all previous records set up to that point.
This was the chaotic environmentwhich greeted the Lucanias as
they themselves arrived to the Lower East Side.
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People heaved everywhere, poverty was rife, jobs were
available, paid little garbage lined the streets.
The smell was foul. The disease outbreaks were
common, compounded around the time the Lucanias arrived to New
York by a strike by city street cleaners, a huge number of which
were Italians. People lived with four families
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on each floor in the sprawling tenements, with one toilet for
all four apartments and with constant noise from the street,
plus sweltering heat in the summers which led some to sleep
in the fire escapes at night. This was how America was built.
It was not a good environment and many Italians, Irish, Jews
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and others turned to crime in a very short period of time after
arriving to better themselves. Luciano was amongst those who
were enticed into New York's less legal activities.
Before long, in the late 1900s, there were numerous gangs of
children and teenagers operatingaround the Lower East Side and
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Manhattan more broadly, picking the pockets of their victims,
robbing St. vendors and even getting into low level gambling
operations, often venturing further afield to relieve the
wealthier denizens of the great metropolis of their money and
belongings while riding the ferries from Manhattan to Staten
Island and Queens. Luciano was soon amongst these
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child hoodlums and before long had formed his own gang, running
an operation whereby they extorted protection money from
other children in return for keeping them safe on their way
to and from school. One day Luciano and his band of
teenage extortionists approacheda Jewish kid and Charles
explained that he would have to pay them $0.05 a week for
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protection. The boy told him, in not a very
polite fashion, that he wouldn'tbe paying him the money.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between
Luciano and Maya Lansky, who wasover 4 years younger than
Luciano and his associates and whose gumption in standing up to
his would be harasses impressed Lucky.
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Luciano's father was a traditional Italian working man
who continued the humble existence he had lived back in
Sicily. In New York.
He tried to discipline and control Lucky for his criminal
activity and his constant non attendance at school, eventually
being sent to a secure school inBrooklyn where he was forced to
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attend classes for a few months in 1911.
Thereafter he left entirely at 14 years of age and got a
citizen's job working as a clerkat the Goodman Hat Company on
Green Street, running N from lower Manhattan towards the
Bowery and Greenwich Village. He would stay working there for
four years and must have been good at it as his pay rose
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steadily. At the same time, though, he was
working his way up in the criminal world, running a gang
of young criminals on the East Side of Manhattan.
Clearly, this group was not engaged in minor activities.
In June 1916, when he was still just 18 years old, he was
arrested in a bar, and Luciano ended up serving his first jail
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sentence for a term of eight months at New Hampton Farms
Reformatory. When he got out, he briefly
returned his job at Goodman's, but it didn't stick.
Luciano's philosophy by then being quote if I have to be a
crumb, I'd rather be dead. A crumb to Luciano being the
average working man. Thereafter, he became ever more
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embedded in the New York crime world.
He got to know many of the 20th century's most famous criminals
during these years, figures likeAl Capone who were also rising
up in the New York underworld atthis time, though Capone soon
absconded to Chicago after a violent bar fight in Manhattan
in 1919 landed him in trouble with the police.
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Luciano's closest associates after a time were his old friend
Maya Lansky and Bugsy Seagull, the latter being another Jewish
teenage hoodlum who got his namefor being crazy as a bug and his
over willingness to use a gun when needed.
On the Italian front, Luciano befriended 2 other important
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figures at this time, Francesco Castelia, better known to
history as Frank Costello, an Italian from Calabria, the boot
of Italy near Sicily on the Italian mainland, and Vito
Genovese, another Italian originally from near the city of
Naples. Luciano Lansky and the others
worked together on and off through the late 1910s and early
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1920s, but they were small time criminals at this juncture for
the most part. What would change things was
their growing association with some of the foremost Italian
gangsters in New York. Men like Joe the Boss Maseria,
who Luciano was close enough to.By the late summer of 1922, the
word Maseria was targeted by a hitman by the name of Umberto
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Valenti during a turf war in a failed murder attempt.
Luciano was amongst those who later went after Valenti.
It was apparently Lucky who remained calm during the
engagement and killed him. What allowed Luciano and others
like Genovese, Costello and Lansky to go from peripheral
figures in New York's underworldto become some of the most
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dominant criminals on the East Coast of the United States was
the prohibition on the sale and supply of alcohol, which was
introduced across America through the 18th Amendment in
1920. Prohibition was introduced in
many ways as a way for the political establishment in
America, which were people of generally British heritage and
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Protestants to attack Roman Catholics arriving from Ireland,
Italy and other parts of Europe and setting up restaurants and
bars across the 1900s and 1910s.It had the opposite effect.
Firstly, it did not work and secondly, it became a catalyst
for the expansion and professionalization of the
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Italian, Irish and Jewish mafias, in particular in cities
like New York, Chicago, Boston and many others.
Luciano was one of the great beneficiaries.
As he, Lansky and others began producing, moving, and selling
ever greater quantities of bootleg alcohol around the
tri-state area during the 1920s,they grew to become some of the
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foremost figures in Masseria's criminal organization.
Without Prohibition, it is possible that very few people
would know a century later who Salvatore Lucarna even was.
Luciano and Lansky did not rise entirely owing to their links
with Joe Masseria. They had another connection.
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Arnold Rothstein, often nicknamed the Brain, was a
somewhat different kind of early20th century New York criminal.
He was born into an affluent Jewish American family in
Manhattan back in 1882. In the course of the 1910s he
rose on the back of his application of mathematical
principles to illegal gambling and a keen business sense,
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running casinos and horse racingtracks up and down much of the
East Coast. He was infamously alleged to
affix the 1919 World Series of Baseball in order to make
$350,000, yet this has never been fully proven.
By the mid 1920s, Luciano and Lansky were being mentored by
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Rothstein, who lent a more businessman like approach to
their burgeoning operations. He also cultivated the idea in
them that appearances were important.
Did Luciano want to be viewed asa small time gun for hire or a
leading crime boss? Rothstein asked him.
Luciano and Lansky both decided on the latter.
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And as the. Years went by, they evolved from
criminals on the make on the Lower East Side to well dressed
operators living in the suburbs of New York or discreetly in
Manhattan hotels under aliases and directing affairs rather
than getting their hands dirty moving bootleg alcohol
themselves. It was an ethos which would be
(13:07):
adopted throughout much of the Italian American Mafia in years
to come. It was not all risk free.
Far from it. Before they came fully under
Rothstein's wing, Luciano was still selling and handling
narcotics, even as alcohol was becoming the bread and butter of
people like him in the 1920s. In the summer of 1923, he is
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recorded as regularly meeting a distributor by the name of John
Lyons in a pool room on E 14th St. in Manhattan.
That is until the day that he realized that Lyons was an
undercover cop. After being taken to a police
station, they informed him aboutwhat he already knew with his
previous conviction from back in1916.
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He was looking at a 10 year sentence to save himself.
Luciano gave them some information about a storehouse
where they could find a huge quantity of drugs.
They checked out the address andconfirmed that the information
he had given them was accurate. Luciano walked, and he did so
without informing on anybody. The storehouse was where he was
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stashing his own drugs. It was a narrow escape, though,
one which also gives an insight into how much money he was
already making. By then, the stash had an
estimated street value of $150,000.
By then he was able to survive aloss like that, and within a
year he and Lansky were renting out a suite in the upmarket
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Claridge Hotel from where they were directing a brigade of
bootleggers who were operating up and down the East Coast,
often bringing in narcotics fromCanada as well, where the Port
Of Montreal was a major entry point for the North American
market in the interwar period. While in due time, Luciano also
benefited from Rothstein's connections to people who were
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importing opium along the main route available for importation
in the 1920s from China and the Port of Hong Kong.
In 1928, Luciano and Lansky had become major players in New
York's crime world, operating their own business along with
being senior associates of Rothstein and Joe Masseria.
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A reorientation occurred later that year.
In September, Rothstein, who wasa notorious gambler, took part
in a gambling session in New York which involved dice, stud
poker, and even high car draw. By the time it ended, he had
lost $340,000, a sum equivalent to about $6 million today.
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This was a sum of money Rothstein could have quite
easily paid off. Nevertheless, he refused to do
so afterwards claiming that the poker game had been fixed to con
him out of a large sum. His refusal to pay up proved
very costly indeed, and on the 4th of November he was shot in
the groin near Park Central Hotel.
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He died in hospital two days later, having refused to reveal
to police who had shot him. With his death, his empire was
divided up between a number of gangsters.
Luciano decided to move closer to Joe Masseria in the aftermath
of the collapse of Rothstein's empire.
It was the beginning of a brief yet significant alliance between
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them. More broadly, Rothstein's death
would have a bearing on events throughout the 1930s.
When he died, many of his records were leaked, a great
percentage of which included details of bribes he had paid to
police and state prosecutors in New York over a period of nearly
20 years. In response, in 1929 and into
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the early 1930s, a generation ofcorrupt state officials were
ousted across New York and replaced by more zealous
newcomers. Chief amongst them was a special
state prosecutor by the name of Thomas E Dewey, who would play a
major role in Luciano's life in years to come.
Dewey's involvement in Luciano'sstory lay.
(17:09):
A few years ahead. What was of more immediate
consequence in the aftermath of Rothstein's death was the
rivalry which was developing between Masseria and a rival
boss by the name of Salvatore Maranzano.
Maranzano was a Sicilian who hadarrived to New York in 1925,
well dressed, educated, ruthless, and a strangely
(17:31):
paradoxical figure, one who was a crime boss yet also spoke
Latin and at once considered entering the priesthood.
By the late 1920s he was a growing problem for Maseria, and
the attack on Luciano, which left him scarred and nearly dead
in 1929, was possibly carried out by some of Maranzano's
allies. Maseria responded to his rival's
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growing power by ordering Luciano, Genovese and others to
murder Gaetano Reyna, a former member of the Maseria gang,
after he joined Maranzano's crewwith Reyna's murder.
In February 1930, the Castella Marezi War broke out between
Masseria's crime family and thatof Maranzano.
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The conflict was named for the port town in Sicily where
Maranzano and many of his crew members came from.
It raged for over a year, eventually seeing that Maranzano
had gotten the upper hand. Luciano, along with Costello and
Genovese. Decided to switch.
Sides and agreed to kill their boss on the 15th of April 1931,
(18:38):
in an episode which inspired thefamous murder scene from the
first Godfather book and film. Luciano met Maseria at the Nuova
Villa Tamaro restaurant on ConeyIsland, where he, Maseria and
others had some food and then played cards.
At a certain time, Luciano went to the bathroom, the signal for
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Genovese and others to enter thepremises, and gunned down
Maseria. With the Castella Marezi war at
an end, Luciano and the others went to work for Maranzano.
In the weeks that followed, Maranzano decided to come up
with a new dispensation whereby the different outfits and crews
of Italian Americans operating in New York and the wider
(19:22):
tri-state area would function. Resurrecting an idea which had
been proposed by Johnny Torrio, a Chicago boss who had been
dominant there in the early 1920s before the rise of Al
Capone, He decided that the fivemost prominent outfits would
divide power between them, each of them having their own parts
of the city, state and New Jersey in which they would be in
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charge of bootlegging, prostitution, gambling and other
criminal activity. They would be called the Five
Families, and were headed by five of the most powerful bosses
of the time, Maranzano himself, Luciano Giuseppe Profaci, Thomas
Galliano and Vincent Mangano. Each would have the ability to
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operate independently of each other in their respective zones
of influence, but Maranzano decided at the same time to
proclaim himself. As the capo di tutti.
Capi, the boss of bosses. Through this, each of the other
families would pay tribute to him.
This concept of a boss of bosseswould play a central role in
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Luciano's story over the next several years, and would be
resurrected at various times over the decades that followed.
The arrangement did not last long.
Within a few months, there was evident tension between
Maranzano and Luciano, much of it based on Maranzano's heavy
handedness and also his clear prejudice against their Jewish
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colleagues like Lansky and Seagull.
By the autumn of 1931, Madanzanowas already discussing the idea
of removing Luciano and others close to him who had been
working with Masseria in the 1920s, including Genovese and
Costello. Luciano's suspicions about
Maranzano's intentions were aroused when the boss of bosses
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asked him on several occasions what his home address was, to
which Luciano dismissively replied that he didn't have a
fixed home. Lucky also began planning to
murder Maranzano, a plan he accelerated when he got a call
in September 1931 asking for himand Genovese to meet him at his
new office suite near Grand Central Station on Park Ave.
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Instead, Luciano contacted Lansky, who had arranged for
four hit men who Maranzano wouldnot recognize, to go to his
office disguised as Internal Revenue Service officers.
It was known that Maranzano was having tax difficulties and was
expecting IRS officials to call to his office, so the bodyguards
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were let in. There, Maranzano was stabbed 6
times as he fought back. The assassins, who had tried to
do things quietly pulled out their weapons and shot him four
times to make sure he was dead. They then slit his throat.
Luciano was now in a position ofunprecedented power following
the rapid disappearance from NewYork's criminal underworld of
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Rothstein, Masseria and Maranzano.
He could, at this juncture have made a claim to be the boss of
bosses, much like Maranzano had tried to set himself up.
As particularly so as another major figure, Al Capone, was
also about to be removed from the scene out in Chicago, as the
authorities there were coming tothe end of a case which would
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see him sentenced over a decade in prison on charges of tax
evasion. Nevertheless, Luciano chose not
to claim a position of preponderance.
After years of bloodshed, he contended that collegiality and
a fair division of territory in which everyone would benefit was
the best way of proceeding. Accordingly, within weeks of
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Maranzano's death, the Commission was established
whereby 7 individuals, the headsof the five families in New
York, plus the head of the Chicago Outfit and a 7th figure
from the region in between Cleveland, OH and Buffalo, NY,
which in 1931 was Frank or Chicho Milano, would each meet
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occasionally to direct the affairs of the Italian American
Mafia, which would be run as a decentralized syndicate with
each family administering its own territory and staying out of
the affairs of others except where their interests
overlapped. It was the beginning of the
Mafia as a National Crime organization, and Luciano, more
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than any other individual, brought it about.
The next several years were onesof flux for Luciano and his
crime family. Genovese became his second in
command, with Costello as his conciliere.
They continued to work closely with Lansky and Seagull and the
wider Jewish mob, as well as theother four New York families.
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A transition was undertaken in 1933 when prohibition came to an
end and the massive loss of revenue was compensated for by
an expansion of their activitiesinto many other fields, notably
gambling, with Seagull heading out West to try to establish a
gambling haven in Galveston, TX,later relocating to Las Vegas,
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NV. Other initiatives included a
growing role in the unions and labour movement, as well as the
expansion of the narcotics trade.
Luciano became a very wealthy man in the process.
He was difficult to pin down, residing at various luxury
hotels around Manhattan, notablythe Waldorf Astoria, arguably
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the most esteemed hotel in the whole world at the time, later
relocating to the Barbizon Plaza.
Despite the plush surroundings, he maintained some of his old
habits. 1 evening at the Barbizon.
He ordered silverware and dishesup to his room without any food.
An associate of Luciano's had brought him over some spaghetti
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cooked by his mother. He didn't marry and at least in
the 1920s and 1930s, rarely had any committed relationships
other than that with his sometime girlfriend gay all
over, instead dating a string ofwomen for short periods of time,
a habit which apparently resulted in a venereal disease
which troubled him periodically throughout his life.
(25:37):
The mid 1930s were a period of instability for reasons beyond
the end of Prohibition. It was during this period that
Thomas Dewey, the New York special investigator who in
years to come would become the Republican candidate in both the
1944 and 1948 presidential elections, intensified his
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efforts to crack down on organized crime in New York.
Having acquired a strong supporter when Fiorello
LaGuardia, himself the son of Italian immigrants, was elected
as mayor of New York in 1934, Dewey set his sights first on
Dutch Schultz, a German Jewish mobster who was an associate of
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Luciano and Lansky. He had diversified out of
bootlegging in the early 1930s by becoming a major player in
the numbers game, or lottery in Harlem.
Dewey followed the money and wassoon tightening the noose on
Schultz with tax evasion charges.
As he did so, Schultz made it known that he was considering
(26:38):
trying to kill Dewey. When it became clear what he
intended, Luciano and others hadno option except to act.
Luciano made it clear that murdering a special prosecutor
who was close to the mayor and an emerging Republican Party
politician would bring unprecedented attention to bear
on the Mafia's activities and would lead to a major
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investigation. Consequently, on the 24th of
October 1935, Dutch Schultz was murdered in Newark, NJ.
The problem presented by Dewey did not go away once Schultz was
removed from the scene. Instead, it only got worse for
Lucky. On the 1st of February 1936,
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just over three months after Schultz's murder, Dewey oversaw
the simultaneous launching of police raids.
On a huge number of brothels allover Manhattan and Brooklyn,
over 100 prostitutes were arrested, along with Madam's and
brothel managers. Questioning followed.
Many didn't have much information to provide other
(27:41):
than what was readily apparent to anyone who had raided the
establishments. But Dewey and his colleagues
managed to pull together enough information to just about come
up with a case to charge Lucianowith pandering, a crime which
involves profiting from the vices.
Or weaknesses of others, one which was usually used against
pimps and brothel runners. As the investigation team did
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its work operating out of the Woolworth Building in Tribeca,
which until 1930 had held the crown of the world's tallest
building, Luciano was down in Miami, FL, where he often spent
the colder winter months overseeing the mobs growing
business in Florida and offshorein Havana, Cuba.
He received word there from Lansky about the brothel raids
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and decided to make himself scarce.
Heading out to Hot Springs in Arkansas, where the mob had
several casinos and numerous biddable politicians on the
payroll, he waited there to see how events in New York would
unfold in the weeks that followed.
Luciano's whereabouts in Arkansas were discovered, and he
was eventually picked up and puton a train under armed escort in
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mid-april 1936. Returned to New York, he was
greeted by a crowd of journalists at Penn Station and
was put in front of a judge a few hours later.
There Dewey began his attack, stating that Luciano was the
head of a wide-ranging, yet still improperly understood
criminal enterprise with nationwide concerns.
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He believed Luciano was a very wealthy man and requested a bail
of $350,000. The judge agreed the arraignment
had set a precedent whereby Dewey would attempt to turn what
was a fairly flimsy vice and pandering charge into a much
wider case concerning Luciano's criminal affairs in general.
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Despite A resounding lack of evidence on matters pertaining
to the narcotics trade, gambling, and other areas of
activity, the trial began just over 3 weeks later and lasted
one month. Dewey followed his initial
pattern at the arraignment of making it about much more than
the vice and pandering offences and instead built up a case
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concerning Luciano's wider role as a leading New York criminal
boss. It culminated in Luciano taking
the stand during cross examination.
Dewey got the better of him withLucky slipping at one juncture
during a lengthy session in which he lied about virtually
everything else but admitted to being a minor bootlegger for a
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time in the 1920s, as Dewey questioned how he had become so
wealthy without having a legitimate job throughout the
Prohibition era. This and other revelations led
the jury to determine that Luciano's testimony could not be
trusted. His lawyer had already told him
before the verdict came down that he would be found guilty 11
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days later. The judge sentenced him to 30 to
50 years in prison. The sentence, when it came, was
a major blow to Luciano. Although he had expected to be
found guilty on some offences, it had never seemed feasible
that he would be given what in reality amounted to nearly a
life sentence. There were serious questions
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asked at the time about how the case was prosecuted and the
nature of the evidence, with Maya Lansky proclaiming that his
buddy Charlie had been set up. He was perhaps not entirely
incorrect. While there is little doubt that
the Mafia was involved in prostitution in New York, the
level of that involvement was debatable.
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During the 1920s and early 1930sit was negligible and Luciano
appears to have had almost 0 involvement as figures like him
viewed it as hardly worth the effort when money could be made
much more easily from bootlegging.
In the mid 1930s, with prohibition ending and the Great
Depression continuing to impact on businesses countrywide, the
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illegal variety included. Luciano and his many associates
did become involved in prostitution in New York, but
even then he viewed it as a small sideline which didn't
generate a lot of money. His role was certainly
peripheral enough that at least some of the evidence presented
against him in court was exaggerated.
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More broadly, Dewey had made thecourt case a prosecution of
Luciano's wider life and career,for much of which he had only
speculation and hearsay to go on.
The judge had been happy to proceed on this basis, however,
and in the end Luciano was convicted in a manner which was
excessive. Based on the available evidence,
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Luciano appealed his conviction,but to no avail.
He was going to prison. There he would try to maintain
some role in the running of New York's underworld.
However, for the most part, VitoGenovese took over as acting
head of the Luciano crime family, with Frank Costello
succeeding him within a year as Genovese fled to Italy after
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Dewey began focusing on his activities, notably the murder
of Ferdinand Bocher in 1934. Luciano was originally sent to
Sing Sing Prison, a place where,when it was first built, the
cells measured 7 foot by 3 1/2 foot and were just 6 1/2 foot
from floor to ceiling. New saner cells were built in
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the 1920s and 1930s, but Sing Sing deserved its fearsome
reputation. Luckily for Lucky Luciano, he
was quickly moved from there to Dannimora Prison, though things
were far from pleasant here either.
Dannemora was notoriously cold and was dubbed Siberia by the
inmates. Luciano quickly established
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himself as the most important prisoner, brokering a peace
between rival gangs and evidently bribing a significant
enough portion of the guards that the conditions of his
detention became relatively pleasant.
That said, Dannemora lay furtherupstate in New York, and he
found it nigh on impossible to continue to play a role in
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managing affairs in New York in the late 1930s.
By the time Lucky's minimum sentence of 30 years in prison
would have been served, it wouldhave been 1966.
He would have been nearing his 70th year and there is no
guarantee he would have been released at that juncture.
As such, Luciano would almost certainly have spent most of the
(34:11):
rest of his life in an American prison serving out the pandering
conviction, had it not been for events far away in Europe.
On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, leading
Britain and France to declare war on it two days later in the
inception of the Second World War.
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In the second-half of 1940, after Italy entered the war,
North Africa became a major theatre of the conflict as the
Italians and Germans tried to secure the Suez Canal in Egypt.
When the US entered the conflictin December 1941 after Germany's
ally, the Empire of Japan attacked the Pacific Fleet at
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anchor in Pearl Harbor, the US and Britain decided to
prioritize the North Africa campaign with a view to securing
the Maghrib and then opening a southern front in Europe by
launching an invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.
As these plans were developed, the administration of President
Roosevelt in Washington began toconsider forming an alliance
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with the Italian Mafia to aid them with their contacts in
Italy. It would be Luciano's salvation.
On the 9th of February 1942, almost exactly 2 months after
the US entered the war followingthe attack on Pearl Harbor, the
s s Normandy, a French ship which had been captured by the
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US and was rechristened as the Lafayette with ambitions to
repurpose it as a troop carrier for the war effort, caught fire
while undergoing repair work in New York Harbor.
It sank the following day. In the days that followed,
suspicions arose that the fire had been intentionally started
by a German agent of some kind. This was one of the key reasons
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why the US government approacheda number of figures within the
Italian and Jewish crime syndicates of New York,
including Luciano's close friendand ally Maya Lansky, in the
spring of 1942. They hoped to use the mob's
massive influence over New York's Docklands and workers to
prevent further arson attacks and to block foreign agents from
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coming in through the port. Early on in these talks,
Luciano's imprisonment became a point of discussion.
He was moved to Great Meadow Correctional Facility closer to
New York, a much more comfortable situation for him,
and promises were made that in return for his aid, his sentence
would be commuted once the war ended.
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In return, the US government would have the cooperation of
the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia in managing the port of
New York, and the labor unions for the duration of the war.
Luciano also promised to use hiscontacts in Sicily and southern
Italy to facilitate the Allied invasion of the peninsula as
much as possible. This entire arrangement is
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typically known as Operation Underworld, though it is a major
point of debate as to whether the government viewed it as a
formal arrangement or operation.The extent to which Luciano
managed to aid the government issomewhat conjectural.
It is, for instance, believed that he put the US government in
contact with Calogero Vidzini, the most powerful figure within
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Cosa Nostra. Back in Sicily itself, legend
has it that during the Allied invasion of the island in the
summer of 1943, Vidzini spent a week riding around between the
towns and villages of Sicily in an American tank, convincing
people to lay down their arms and welcome the Americans.
Meanwhile, in New York, Costello, Lansky and others
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facilitated a wide range of other measures which the
government required. While many historians have cast
doubt on the significance of Luciano's aid to the government
during the Second World War, there is no doubt that in
January 1946, once the conflict was over, his sentence was
commuted and he was released from prison after serving just 9
(38:12):
1/2 years of a 30 to 50 year prison sentence.
That said, nobody in Washington was anxious to have him hanging
around in New York. The terms of his release were
that he was to be deported back to Italy immediately.
As such, after one last meal with some of his associates
since the 1920s on board the ship that would convey him back
(38:33):
to the homeland. Luciano was deported from
America on the 10th of February 1946.
Lucky arrived in Naples 2 1/2 weeks later.
He seems to have had little intention of staying there.
Instead he intended to relocate to Cuba.
The Caribbean island had been a quasi American colony for over 4
(38:55):
decades, ever since the Spanish American War of 1898 had ousted
the Spanish from the island and allowed the US to set up a
system of oversight which allowed it to largely decide who
was in charge of the country. Usually the individuals so
chosen were wildly corrupt, and as well as being closely aligned
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with Washington, the island had also become an offshore
playground for the Mafia, one where gambling was legal and a
few dollars could lead to blind eyes being turned quite easily.
It was also close enough to the US that Luciano could keep a
hand in running affairs in New York without the fear of
extradition. And so in the autumn of 1946, he
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set off for Cuba, taking a circuitous route through several
South and Central American countries to ensure that he
shrugged off any American or Italian police who are
monitoring his movements. He arrived in the capital,
Havana in October 1946. Within days of arriving in Cuba,
Luciano was organising a major meeting of the heads of the
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Italian and Jewish mafias from New York and further afield.
The Havana Conference took placeat the Hotel Nacional from the
22nd of December 1946 onwards, continuing through Christmas.
There were a. Wide range of things to be
discussed. A notable topic was the mob's
growing involvement in the development of Las Vegas.
(40:22):
Bugsy Siegel, a Jewish American mobster who had been involved
with Luciano and many others since the 1920s, had been the
visionary behind the Mafia's quest to establish a gambling
Oasis out West. But his management of the
construction and opening of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas had
been disastrous, and Siegel had clearly lined his own pockets
(40:45):
with the mobs investments while working on it.
Lansky, who had known Bugsy since they were teenagers in New
York. But when the Flamingos opening
night was a shambles, a decisionwas taken to murder Seagull and
he was killed in Los Angeles in the summer of 1947.
Other issues discussed included narcotics, the unions, gambling,
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the Italian lottery in New York,and the respective positions of
Genovese and Costello in New York, Genovese having returned
from Italy after the war ended. Eventually, Luciano met with
Genovese alone, and after a discussion in which Vito urged
him to claim the title of boss of bosses and then let him
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exercise the position on the ground in America, Luciano
angrily told him he didn't want to ever hear the idea mentioned
again. With the end of the Havana
meeting, most of the attendees headed back to the US and
resumed their operations. Luciano, of course, could not.
He remained on in Havana, enjoying the fact that for once
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he was not being observed by either the US or Italian police.
Quite the contrary, in fact. Instead, he was something of a
local celebrity, one who met regularly with the Cuban
President Ramon Grau and was invited to social occasions by
prominent American businessman with interests in Havana.
Those who knew him at the time stated later that this was a
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period in which he was quite happy with his circumstances.
Inevitably, it didn't last. By the spring of 1947,
journalists in Cuba had begun toreceive reports that the Mafia
Don was living in Havana, and asphotos of him appeared in a
growing number of newspapers, American political agents in
Cuba had to act. Pressure was applied on Grau's
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administration by restricting the import of various medicines
to Cuba from America, and with this the government in Havana
politely detained Luciano in March 1947 and informed him that
he was to be deported back to Italy.
Thus, in mid March he boarded the Backier ship bound for
Europe. Although he paid $300.00 for a
(42:58):
first class cabin, he was reported to have spent much of
his time playing cards with tourists in economy as he headed
E back to his homeland. It has been speculated that the
details of his presence in Cuba were leaked by some of his
associates after the conference,fearing that Luciano intended to
try to continue running affairs in New York from Havana.
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While the post war period saw Luciano being prevented from
playing a leading role in the Italian American Mafia following
his release from prison, his personal life did shift after
his return to Italy from Cuba. He had never married or had
children and seemed to have no interest in doing so.
Yet in early 1948 he did begin arelationship with a woman whom
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he would term the love of his life.
Ijiya Lisoni was a 26 year old woman whom Luciano first met in
Milan. She was a dancer who had
performed at the La Scala Opera House in her youth.
Luciano was apparently too shy to ask her out when they first
met, but later he attended a nightclub in Rome where she was
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performing, and before long theywere seeing one another.
She moved into his Rome apartment just a few weeks
later. She's the only girl I ever
loved. Luciano later related Due to the
police continuously harassing Lucky in Rome, they eventually
had to move to Naples, where they lived in a penthouse
apartment on the Via Tasso with a panoramic view of Mount
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Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. They would never have children
though, with Luciano claiming hedidn't want any child to grow up
tarred with being Lucky Luciano's child.
Luciano and Lisoni lived a somewhat quiet life in Naples.
Despite the efforts of the Italian police to continue
digging up information on his alleged criminal activity, there
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was no doubt that there was someillegal activity. 1 of Luciano's
pastimes was visiting the horse tracks in Naples, where he
invariably won. The races were undoubtedly fixed
at least some of the time. Other than this, he continued to
have contacts with the Italian Mafia, although less so with
people back in America meeting people who visited Italy from
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New York, but little more than that.
Police reports from the 1950s noted that he continued to spend
considerably more money than he was earning through any legal
channels, yet they could never make anything stick to him.
This quiet and relatively happy period of his life came to an
end in October 1958 when Lizzonidied of breast cancer at just 36
(45:38):
years of age. Friends noted he cried at her
funeral, something they had never seen before.
A magazine article for which he had been interviewed and which
appeared not long after Lizzoni's death, described him
as a tight lipped individual whomet many questions with silence.
The same interviewer concluded that quote, his life is a quiet
(45:59):
one and his greatest desire is to forget and be forgotten.
At the same time that Luciano was living his relatively quiet
life in Italy, one which surely felt like an exile yet was
actually a return to his homeland, a rivalry was brewing
in New York between two of his oldest allies.
(46:20):
Genovese never accepted the factthat Costello had succeeded him
as the head of the Luciano crimefamily in New York after he fled
to Italy in the late 1930s. Costello's unwillingness to
relinquish the position after the war, when Genovese returned
to America, was a source of growing tension between the two
(46:40):
figures. Costello's position was weakened
in the early 1950s by the Kiefover hearings, where the US
Senate forced him and many otherfigures to testify about the
existence of an organized crime syndicate amongst Italian
Americans. Finally, in 1957, Genovese tried
to have Costello murdered. He survived the attempted hit
(47:03):
carried out by Vincent the Chin Gigante.
However, Costello decided to retire and allow Genovese to
take over. At this juncture, rather than
engaging in a bloody and possibly protracted power
struggle. With this, Genovese became the
head of the Luciano crime family, but ironically, the man
after whom the outfit was named was never happy with this
(47:25):
decision. Far away in Italy, it has been
suggested on more than one occasion that Luciana was in
some way involved when charges were pressed against Genovese in
New York. Not long after he took over
affairs there, Genovese was implicated in a large sale of
narcotics and would eventually be sentenced to 15 years in
(47:47):
prison in 1959. He surrendered himself and began
his sentence in 1960 and would die in prison in 1969.
There is certainly a case to be made that the incident which
brought Genovese down, an alleged deal with a low level
Puerto Rican drug dealer, seems curious.
Why would Genovese have been directly involved in such a deal
(48:10):
instead of letting a minion handle it?
Whether Luciano, who had been visited on a few occasions in
Naples by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in
the late 1950s, was involved remains speculative, though
friends who knew him in Italy inhis later years did recount that
news of Genovese's conviction and imprisonment was one of the
(48:32):
few things that cheered Luciano up in the months following
Lissoni's death. Luciano's final years were spent
living in Naples. Somewhat surprisingly, he was
not especially well off during these years, in part because
much of his revenue was coming in from Havana, and after the
success of the Cuban Revolution,the Mafia's activities there
(48:54):
came to an end in 1959, while the changing of the guard in New
York saw much of the residual payments he received from there
over the years dry up. He resented this, and it rubbed
salt in the wound when Joey Adonis, 1 of Luciano's gunmen
back in the 1920s and a much more junior figure in the mob in
(49:15):
general, arrived in Italy in 1956 after agreeing to be
deported from America after a perjury charge, setting himself
up in Milan in a grand mansion. Where he held.
Court in a manner which Luciano was financially incapable of.
It was in an effort to turn his ailing financial situation
around that he agreed to discussa movie project based on his
(49:39):
life with Martin Gosch in the early 1960's.
The timing seemed propitious as a feature film starring Rod
Steiger on the life of Al Caponehad appeared in 1959 and Murder
Inc, another gangster film. Was released a year later.
In the last months of his life, Luciano had been in contact with
(50:00):
Gauche and was laying the groundwork for such a film.
Though how this project would have been received by those who
are still active in the mafia isvery debatable, as it turned
out, the film would never come to fruition.
On the evening of the 26th of January 1962, Luciano headed to
Capo de Quino airport in Naples to meet Gauche as he got off a
(50:23):
plane flying in from Rome. They were planning to complete
the work on the movie script over the next several days.
Instead, Luciano collapsed as they walked from the terminal.
When a doctor attended shortly afterwards, he pronounced him
dead. He had.
Passed of a heart attack at 64 years of age.
Word quickly spread out internationally, with news of
(50:46):
his death featuring the following day on the front page
of The New York Times. There were other revelations in
the days that followed about howLucky was under investigation at
the time of his death for his role in a $150 million narcotics
ring between Europe and the US, which had been operating for
decades. Luciano's funeral was held three
(51:08):
days later in Naples. Approximately 300 guests
attended, doubtlessly a smaller number than would have been the
case had he died in New York. The ceremony was disturbed by
scuffles which broke out when over enthusiastic
photojournalists got too close to the mourners.
His body was originally taken. By a horse.
(51:28):
Drawn hearse to Poggio Riali Cemetery on the outskirts of
Naples, but an arrangement was subsequently reached whereby his
body was repatriated to America.2000 mourners attended his
burial in Queens. By the time Luciano died,
investigations into the extent of the Mafia's activities were
(51:49):
escalating in America. Genovese was already in prison.
In 1963, Joseph Falaki gave testimony to U.S.
Senate hearings in which he revealed how the organized Mafia
in America had come into being, including the central role
Luciano had played in the creation of the Commission back
in 1931. Although it took 20 years for
(52:13):
the tide to turn, by the 1980s all of these revelations and
attacks on the Mafia's extensiveinvolvement in the narcotics
trade, gambling and control of labour and the unions began to
pay off. That decade saw their influence
in Las Vegas vanquished and widespread arrests and
successful prosecutions. 1/2 a century after he built it up in
(52:36):
the early 1930s, Luciano's Mafiawas beginning to decline.
In 1998, when it published its list of the 100 most important
persons of the 20th century, Time magazine included Charles
Lucky Luciano in its list of builders and Titans on account
of his role in the emergence of the Italian American Mafia as
(52:59):
the foremost criminal enterprisein the United States during the
20th century. He featured in this particular
section of the list alongside Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Bill
Gates and Ray Kroc respectively,The Pioneers behind Disney, Ford
Automobiles, Microsoft and McDonald's.
It was a left of centre choice by time and entirely fitting at
(53:23):
the same time. Luciana was the most significant
figure in the history of the Italian American Mafia.
Emerging out of the East Side inthe late 1910s and forged
through Prohibition, he came outof the pivotal Castella Marezi
War of the early 1930s as the most powerful Mafia figure in
New York and countrywide. By extension.
(53:45):
At that juncture, he could have continued the divisive attempts
to claim absolute power which had led to conflict for many
years. But instead, he elected to rule
as the first of equals and in the process allowed the Mafia to
begin strengthening its network on a national level and
expanding into new cities and todevelop operations as far afield
(54:07):
as Las Vegas, NV and Havana, Cuba.
Although owing to his arrest andincarceration in 1936, he was
eclipsed during much of his later life by figures like
Genovese and Costello, there is no doubting that, for better or
for worse, Lucky Luciano was thesingle most important figure in
the. History of the.
(54:28):
Italian American Mafia, what do you think of Lucky Luciano?
Please let us know in the comments section.
And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
(55:22):
The. The.
(56:39):
Yeah.
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