by Tim Newark
Howe was also closely connected with Laurent Deleglise, who headed a major smuggling network bringing drugs from Europe into Canada. One of his favorite methods of trafficking narcotics was described in another Canadian police report of September 1923.
The shipper of the drugs would load up one or two trunks full of drugs and send them aboard the ship, taking tickets, he would then miss the boat and the baggage would be held unclaimed. The shipper would then arrive by another route or boat and go to some small town and wire or write for his trunks, omitting to send the keys. The Baggage man would explain the difficulty of opening the trunk to the Customs Officer who would not bother his head and pass it out, or possibly the Customs man was squared, this is not known. It is known that he was either crooked or too lax to open the trunks.
This was just one way in which narcotics flowed into Canada and on to New York in the 1920s. When Deleglise forwarded narcotics to the United States, he had them sent by express to a Japanese store in New York—his distribution center for the city. This may well have been the source for Lucania’s narcotics during this period. By the end of the decade, the market had grown enormously and it was this that attracted Lucania, Jack Diamond, and their associates to set up their own narcotics importing business based in Germany in 1930.
Frank Costello was learning, like Rothstein, that life in the shadows was much more profitable than headline-making gangster antics. A Calabrian by birth, he and his family came to East Harlem and he earned an early reputation as a teenage tough guy. But as his own gang grew and developed their interests in bootlegging, he could see the real power lay in organization and fostering links with the establishment, leaving the rough stuff to the mad-eyed hoodlums. A few years older than Lucania, he would become an important elder statesman in the New York Mafia.
Other key figures also started to coalesce around Lucania and Lansky. There was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who worked for Rothstein first as a union enforcer and then graduated to running major labor racketeering as well as dealing in narcotics with Lucania. Then there was Vito Genovese, a coldhearted assassin who operated under Masseria’s wing but recognized Lucania’s potential. Willie Moretti carved out gambling and bootleg interests in Brooklyn and New Jersey, recruiting a small army of some sixty gunmen. Among the up-and-coming young killers were Joe Adonis and Albert Anastasia.
By the mid-1920s, this association of top liquor racketeers was known as the “Big Six” and was said to include Lucania, Lansky, Siegel, Lepke, Longy Zwillman, and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. A later FBI report doubted whether they were ever known at the time as the Big Six, quoting a criminal informant who said that “the term ‘Big Six’ probably referred to the better known men controlling bootlegging in the East who had allotted territories in which they operated.” This informant also stated that the groups maintained liquor headquarters at many of the leading hotels in New York City. This was true. Sometime in 1924, Charlie Lucania and Meyer Lansky leased a suite in the Claridge Hotel. That was their base, but their business stretched everywhere.
Even though he wasn’t part of the Diamond gang, Lansky had impressed Lucania with his business skills and they forged their own alliance. Lansky had met Rothstein and the Big Bankroll gave him his blessing as a trusted associate. But the mobsters who didn’t like each other were the old Sicilian gangsters—led by Joe “the Boss” Masseria—and the Jews. Whenever they could, they beat up on each other. According to Lansky, an opportunity arose with the arrival of a consignment of Scotch whisky in Atlantic City. It was destined for an associate of Rothstein—Waxey Gordon—in Philadelphia and he had arranged for Joe Masseria’s heavies to guard the convoy of booze.
Bugsy Siegel, Meyer’s violent sidekick, got word of the deal and their gang grabbed their weapons and, wearing masks like old-time outlaws, prepared an ambush for the Italians. A tree was cut down to block the road. At 3:30 A.M., the four trucks loaded with bottles shuddered to a halt and ten of Masseria’s gunmen climbed out to pull away the tree trunk. A fusillade of bullets tore into them. The mobsters that survived the gunfire quickly surrendered but were savagely beaten by the vengeful Jews, who hated the way they looked down on them.
The problem for Lansky was that one of the surviving Sicilians recognized him and reported the hijack back to Masseria. Joe the Boss wanted Lansky and Siegel dead but knew he couldn’t move against them because they were close to Lucania and he valued their business alliance. Word was passed on to Waxey Gordon, who also wanted revenge for this humiliation, particularly as he owed Rothstein his slice of the business, but Gordon held his tongue, too, because Rothstein hated Masseria and didn’t want Masseria knowing that he’d subcontracted his business to the Sicilians. In that way, Lansky and Siegel got away with the ambush, but it was not forgotten, and it exacerbated the vendetta between the Sicilian and Jewish mobsters.
Sometimes Lucania got caught up in the frequent ambushing of liquor deliveries. On February 9, 1927, truck driver Joseph Corbo reported to the police that he had been held up in Brooklyn by three men armed with revolvers. Their truck was loaded with sacks of grain and denatured alcohol. Corbo and his assistant were ordered into a Flint sedan and taken to Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street in Manhattan, where they were told to walk away. The sedan was licensed to Anthony Scalise, who was arrested for the robbery, along with Carmine Napoletano, Charles Paradiso, and John Manfredi. Lucania was associated with the Scalise family and he was arrested as a material witness. He was promptly dismissed from the case, but Scalise and the others were convicted of the armed robbery and received hefty prison sentences.
It was in 1927 that Lucania moved into the plush Barbizon-Plaza Hotel, where he rented a suite. To shield his real identity, he registered at the hotel under the Anglo-Saxon name of Charles Lane. The anonymity of hotel life suited Lucania and he stayed there on and off for several years. Sometimes hotel living provided other opportunities.
Joe Bendix was a thief who preyed on hotel guests, stealing jewelry from them. In the summer of 1928, he stole an emerald necklace and some bracelets, rings, and brooches worth a total of $50,000 from an out-of-towner at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Thinking of how to dispose of it, he approached Lucania. They rode around Central Park in a taxi as Lucania examined the jewelry. From there, they went down to the Jewelers Exchange on the Bowery near Canal Street, where Lucania had the stolen property appraised. A week later, he met Bendix at the Chesterfield Hotel.
“I went into one of the pay toilets there,” said Bendix on oath at a later trial, “and he looked it over, looked over the things to see if they were the same things; checked up on them and turned over the money to me. He had the money in a little brown paper portfolio.” Bendix claimed Lucania paid him $24,000 for the stolen emerald necklace and other pieces. Perhaps it was intended as an impressive present for one of his uptown lady friends.
After the breakup of Diamond’s bootleg gang, Lucania went back to working with the Sicilians as well as developing his own business with Lansky. At the same time, Rothstein was stepping away from bootlegging. Instead, he preferred to fund speakeasies and make a mockery of the law by subverting thousands of illicit liquor court cases. As Rothstein let slip his control of the underworld, Joe the Boss stepped up the activities of his Mafia family with Lucania firmly back in the crew. But even though liquor no longer linked Rothstein to Lucania, narcotics did. This business suited Rothstein’s links with Europe and he invested his money in importing heroin and opium. He opened up links with Asian sources in China and British Hong Kong. The drug shipments were hidden in a string of art galleries and antique shops set up by Rothstein in Manhattan.
With the money still pouring in, Rothstein continued to gamble heavily. It was his first passion and he couldn’t give it up. It cost him his longtime marriage to his wife, who eventually decided she was finished with long nights spent alone. In September 1928, he joined a high-rolling game in a friend’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. Eight men sat around the table. They started first
with dice, moved to stud poker, then, wanting to “speed” the gambling, went for cutting the deck with the highest spade winning. Rothstein’s good luck—and gambling skill—deserted him and by the time the game ended, he was out $340,000. He threw down a bankroll of $37,000 and everyone knew he was good for the rest. But two months later, he still hadn’t paid up.
On the evening of November 4, he was sipping coffee at Lindy’s delicatessen and restaurant at Fiftieth Street and Broadway when at 10:45 P.M., a telephone call came through for him. He got up from his usual booth, slipped on his overcoat, and told the headwaiter, “McManus wants me over at the Park Central.” McManus was one of the players he owed, and Rothstein dispatched his chauffeur waiting outside Lindy’s to get some cash from his apartment.
Twenty minutes later, Rothstein was found staggering toward the service entrance of Park Central Hotel. A bellboy thought he was drunk and called the house detective. By then, Rothstein was leaning against a wall and asked them to call for a doctor. Rothstein had been shot in the groin and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency operation. Two days later, he was dead. He told no one who shot him—and in the end no one was convicted for his murder.
In the meantime, Rothstein’s attorney, William Hyman, realized there were some highly incriminating financial records sitting in his deceased client’s apartment. Every deal he ever made, every politician and lawman he ever paid off, every aspect of the New York underworld was carefully annotated in the pile of ledgers he kept meticulously throughout his career. “If these papers are ever made public,” said Hyman, “there are going to be a lot of suicides in high places.”
It was now a race between the district attorney and the Mob to see who could lay their hands on the most sensitive of these records. Charles Lucania was one of the first mobsters through the doors of Rothstein’s apartment, and he grabbed the papers he wanted. It indicated the degree to which he had become involved in Rothstein’s empire. He had himself to protect, as well as gathering information on his rivals. Alongside Lansky, he was ambitious to position himself as the new Rothstein, but so were many other mobsters.
Thirteen days after Rothstein’s killing, Lucania was arrested alongside George Uffner, a narcotics associate of Rothstein, and James “Fats” Walsh, his bodyguard. Bizarrely, they were accused of a payroll robbery near Central Park on October 5, 1928, in which two men got away with $8,374. In truth, it was just a way for the police to question the three men informally about what they knew of the Rothstein murder. When witnesses to the robbery failed to identify the prisoners, they were discharged.
The ripples caused by Rothstein’s death spread out like an earthquake. Documents from his desk were leaked to shame the ruling political and police administrations. In the following years, a thorough investigation was carried out into the magistrates courts of New York, and new lawmen were brought in to sweep away the old corrupted system. Among them was a young special prosecutor called Thomas E. Dewey, who would in due course become nemesis to Charles Lucania.
Rothstein’s death left a gap in the New York underworld that the Sicilian Mafia rushed to fill. In truth, Rothstein’s decline in real power had already allowed them in, but his removal certainly left the question open as to who could replace him—an uncertainty that would provoke rival gang leaders into outright warfare. The outcome of this vicious conflict would determine whether Lucania had the cunning and the brutality to become the new boss of bosses.
4
SURVIVING THE RIDE
In 1925, an elegantly dressed man stepped off a ship arriving in New York from Palermo in Sicily. Tall for a Sicilian at five feet nine inches, Salvatore Maranzano was powerfully built. At thirty-nine years old, he was in the prime of his life. Well educated, he spoke Latin and liked to use elaborate and poetic vocabulary. He had trained to be a priest. One young hoodlum, himself recently arrived in America, was very impressed by him. “He dressed like a conservative businessman,” recalled Joseph Bonanno, “preferring gray or blue suits, soft pinstripes on the blues. He didn’t wear any jewellery other than a watch and his wedding band.” Bonanno was twenty-one years old and ready to be led by such a man. “His voice had an entrancing echolike quality. When Maranzano used his voice assertively, to give a command, he was the bellknocker and you were the bell.”
He was the direct antithesis of Joe “the Boss” Masseria—even those who worked closely with him regarded him as a peasant, a pig, in his manners. Within three years, Maranzano and Masseria would be at war with each other—and Charles Lucania would gain most from their bitter struggle.
There were several reasons why Maranzano arrived in New York in the mid-twenties. In Sicily, the Fascists were in power and Benito Mussolini had vowed to eradicate the Mafia. The Italians could not have two masters, he declared, and the criminal families had to be brought to heel. His chief prosecutor, Cesare Mori, jailed hundreds of mafiosi and hounded them remorselessly. As well as Maranzano, Joseph Bonanno fled the island after he refused to don their black shirt and join the Fascist party.
But there was another stronger reason why Maranzano came to America—the smell of money. Stories of the fortunes to be made from Prohibition had flowed back to the old country and Maranzano was an accomplished operator. He came with the blessing of Don Vito Cascio Ferro—the boss of bosses in Palermo who had mercilessly shot down an American detective in a park when he came to investigate the links between American and Sicilian organized crime.
Maranzano was respected and had close links already with several established mobsters in the United States. They all came from the seaside town of Castellammare del Golfo, a few miles to the west of Palermo. A little fishing port dominated by the remains of a castle, it was the birthplace of Stefano Magaddino, Gaspar Milazzo, Joe Aiello, and Joseph Bonanno. “The Castellammarese tended to stick together,” said Bonanno. “We had our own distinct neighborhoods, not only in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but also in Detroit, Buffalo and Endicott, New York. Not only did we all know each other, but were often related to one another.” It was a ready-formed Mafia family.
Using his natural authority and charm, Maranzano carved a niche for himself in the bootlegging business, seeking slowly but surely to attract key mobsters away from Joe the Boss. He approached Lucania, but even though the Lower East Sider recognized his sophistication, he resented his old country manners. He didn’t want to bend the knee and kiss the ring on the don’s finger. Also, like Masseria, Maranzano hated the Jewish gangsters who formed an essential part of his crew. Lansky warned Lucania against getting too close to either of the Sicilians.
“Once you accept such an offer,” he told him, “you’ll find yourself under their total control. Neither will hesitate to kill you the minute he thinks you’ve stepped out of line. Each of these guys wants to maintain his own empires and squeeze the life out of the other. You’re the pawn in their game. Only it isn’t a game. Our lives are at stake.”
Lansky’s strong-arm man, Bugsy Siegel, wanted to take on the Sicilians and wipe them out, but Lucania and Lansky decided to play the long game. Taking their cue from the master—Arnold Rothstein—they wanted to assert their power by making money and buying influence. “Shooting and killing was an inefficient way of doing business,” said Lansky. But no one told that to the Sicilian bosses. Was Lucania, in fact, an early victim of the conflict between Maranzano and Masseria?
Underworld legend has it that on October 17, 1929, Charles Lucania was found stumbling along Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island at 1:00 A.M., his face a bloody mess, his eyes so swollen he could barely see out of them, his neck and throat slashed. He’d been taken on a one-way ride in the back of a car, thoroughly beaten, and left for dead in a wooded field. When he regained consciousness—he couldn’t believe he was still alive—he just wanted to get back to Manhattan. The first person he saw, he barked at to get him a taxi. The man was a patrolman and took him to the 123rd Precinct station, where a surgeon from the Richmond Memorial Hospital treated his wounds.
; Realizing they had a top mobster in their custody, the police swarmed around him, asking him questions. Lucania said he had been abducted by several men he didn’t know as he stood at Fiftieth Street and Third Avenue. They had put handcuffs on him, dragged him into a car, and when they finished with him threw him into a field. He said he believed it had all happened in New Jersey—he didn’t know it was Staten Island. Beyond that, he wouldn’t give any more information and told Detective Gustave Schley to “forget about it.” He didn’t want the police to take any further action—he would take care of it himself.
But the police weren’t buying it and believed the whole situation was too suspicious to leave alone. Lucania was charged with grand larceny of an automobile pursuant to a police alarm on October 16. He was arraigned on October 17 and released on bail of $25,000 two days later. In the meantime, he was taken to Richmond Memorial Hospital for further treatment.
Detectives visited the location where he had been found—eight hundred feet from the Terra Marine Inn—and when they searched the ground about ten feet from the road, they found small pieces of adhesive tape and a bandage saturated with blood. Witnesses who had been on the corner of Fiftieth and Third at the time of the abduction were questioned, but no one knew anything. Lucania had $300 in cash on him and a watch and chain worth $400, neither of which was stolen from him—so it was not a simple mugging.
Twelve days after the ride, Lucania appeared before a grand jury at Richmond County Court House, St. George, on Staten Island. As he stood up in court to give his testimony, he gave his name as Charles Lucciano—two “c”s noted in the court transcript—possibly the first official record of his now familiar name.
