Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  For the last four years, he said, he had lived at a house in Ardonia, Ulster County, the northernmost county of the New York metropolitan area. He was not married and lived alone. When he was not living in Ulster County, he said he stayed with his parents at 265 East Tenth Street. His main business was a restaurant he owned at 232 West Fifty-second Street, but he had sold that eight months previously and was living on the money. He was currently occupied as a private chauffeur and owned a Lincoln 1928 model automobile, but he had no taxi license and could not give the names of anyone he had driven. Richmond County District Attorney Albert Fach then noted the scars on the mobster’s neck.

  “How did you receive those?”

  “I really don’t know how I received them,” said Luciano, “because the time I was picked up by the men in the car I was knocked out and that’s all I remember until I woke up in the woods on Staten Island.”

  Four men picked him up at 6:30 P.M., while he was waiting to meet a date he called Jennie. They claimed they were police officers. One put handcuffs on him and pulled him into their car. Once inside, they started kicking and punching him.

  “One of the men then put a handkerchief over me and hit me and that’s all I know,” said Luciano.

  At some stage, they stuck adhesive tape over his face. Beyond that, Luciano could give no further information. DA Fach then tried to paint a picture of Luciano’s criminal life.

  “Have you ever been known by any other name?”

  “Lucky.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Was that the family name or a combination of the Charles and your last name?”

  “Charles Lucky,” said the mobster, not quite answering the question.

  Fach then listed some of Luciano’s previous criminal charges, including felonious assault. Luciano denied everything.

  “You realize you are under oath?” said the DA.

  “I suppose you have the record of arrests I was under and I couldn’t tell you if I remembered them all.”

  Exasperated, Fach tried to relate some of Luciano’s past activities to the abduction and beating.

  “You have enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Make any in the drug business?”

  “None at all.”

  “Engage in liquor traffic?”

  “No.”

  “Sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never been charged with violation of the Prohibition Act?”

  “No.”

  Getting nowhere fast, Fach returned to the central mystery of the attack on the gangster.

  “What is it all about?”

  “I don’t know,” Luciano said, shrugging. “I haven’t the least idea. If I did, I wouldn’t have been in that car or found in the woods.”

  “Did you ever have such an experience before?”

  “Never.”

  Luciano denied ever saying he would take care of the perpetrators of the assault and with that, he was dismissed and released from custody. Shortly afterward, Ulster County authorities sought to revoke a pistol permit they had issued to him, but he denied ever having a permit and had no revolver. Ever helpful, Luciano promised to check in with the authorities when he next went home upstate.

  Rumors ran wild that Luciano was the victim of a gang war, and when the so-called confessions of The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano came out forty-five years later, it seemed to confirm this. In that account, Vito Genovese is supposed to have picked him up on the Manhattan street corner on the seventeenth and driven him to Staten Island, where he was met by Maranzano. The Castellammarese boss told Luciano that he wanted him to kill Masseria. Luciano refused and the next thing he knew he was hanging up by his wrists from a beam. Men masked with handkerchiefs used their fists, clubs, and belts to beat him, burning him with cigarette stubs. Meyer Lansky, in his recollections, Mogul of the Mob, backs up this version and also links it to the Castellammarese feud with Masseria. He reasoned that Maranzano wanted to threaten Luciano into doing his dirty work for him because he was so close to Masseria and could get around his security.

  When Lansky visited the battered Luciano, it was the opportunity to dub him with his famous nickname. “From now on we’re going to call you ‘Lucky,’” said Lansky, “because you ought to be dead.”

  In the light of seeing the actual court transcript of Luciano’s statement just two weeks after the ride, this all now seems nonsense. Luciano was already known as Lucky and was happy to use the name, unlike other accounts, which claimed that no one dared used it in his presence. In fact, a New York Times article described him as “Charles (Lucky) Luciania” in their report just the day after the event.

  The more fanciful story of torture by Maranzano also unravels as other mobsters who knew Luciano closely told a different tale in later years. First, there is the obvious flaw that a beating delivered by Maranzano’s men to a mobster with a reputation like Luciano would achieve the very opposite of what they wanted—it would turn Luciano into Maranzano’s undying enemy. In which case, once the humiliation had been inflicted, it would have been better to finish him off, as the Sicilian would get his revenge one way or another—and Maranzano, being of the old school, would have known that very well.

  It was Luciano’s longtime associate Frank Costello who gave the most convincing inside account of that night to his attorney. He said that Luciano was picked up by several men in the back of a car and driven to Staten Island. They were not mobsters but cops. Costello said they wanted Luciano to tell them where Jack “Legs” Diamond was because he had disappeared after committing a murder in his Hotsy Totsy Club.

  Luciano wouldn’t tell the police and he was punished with a beating that consisted of his head being stomped on and boots ground into his face. According to Costello, there was no knife slashing or use of ice picks or hanging from rafters. It was a police interrogation with force. The irony of the situation was not lost on Costello, who said that Luciano “almost got himself killed on Staten Island just to protect a jerk he didn’t even like.” That isn’t exactly true, as Luciano liked Diamond enough to let him stay at his house in the country, often when he was on the run.

  Costello’s version is backed up by Sal Vizzini, an undercover narcotics agent who talked to Luciano about the incident in 1960. Fifteen years before Luciano’s so-called memoirs appeared, Vizzini said that Luciano told him that he was picked up outside his house by plainclothes police. He was pushed down on the backseat of the car and tape was stuck over his eyes and mouth. Luciano believed he was on a car ferry to New Jersey and kicked out the side windows of the car to attract attention, but no one responded, except one of the cops in the car who worked him over.

  “One of them was pounding me in the face,” recalled Luciano. “He must have had on a big ring or something because he busted my lip under the tape and cut my chin open and ripped my throat. I could feel blood all over me and I kinda passed out.”

  That was how he got his scars. After the ferry trip, the car stopped and Luciano was pushed out onto some rough ground. The police ripped the tape off his mouth and one of them held a gun against his head.

  “The guy who did all the talkin’ says I better tell now where they can find Legs [Diamond] or they’re gonna blow my damned brains out. I tell him he’d better get to it then because I got no goddamned idea where he is.”

  Knowing the men weren’t mobsters, Luciano gambled they weren’t going to kill him. He said nothing and the police tired of the beating, leaving him in the muddy field. As he staggered away from the field, he was picked up by the local police and ended up in hospital surrounded by reporters. “The upshot is that the papers had all the garbage about how lucky I was to get away,” Luciano told Vizzini. “I guess that’s how it got to be Lucky Luciano. I still don’t like it.”

  In the wake of Luciano’s 1929 testimony at Richmond County Court, this last statement is unconvincing—as he volunteered the name “Charle
s Lucky”—but the rest of the story seems the best account there is of the incident. The beating was nothing to do with the Castellammarese at all, but the encounter did leave Luciano with the scars that made him look like a gangster.

  It also brought him into the public eye—and that was a big mistake as far he was concerned. As soon as he entered the public arena, he became an irritant to the authorities and that meant they’d never give up on him until he was behind bars.

  Curiously, it may have been Luciano’s own fault that he was grabbed by the police searching for Diamond. Just seven months before the ride, he was in Ardonia on Good Friday enjoying some hunting with friends. They were shooting pheasants, but it was closed season for the birds and he was in violation of the local conservation laws. When state game protector Ed Nolan came to arrest Luciano at his upstate home, he was accompanied by the state trooper in charge of the district, who noted that Jack Diamond was staying at the house with Luciano.

  That Diamond regularly stayed with him in the country was indicated by a story later told by Luciano in which Diamond tested out a machine gun on one his prized fig trees, shooting it to pieces. Luciano was furious with the trigger-happy mobster and told him to practice shooting at the brick wall behind the house. That the police would come calling on Luciano while hunting down the murderer Diamond was not exactly surprising.

  Luciano, incidentally, was fined $50 on March 31, 1929, for shooting a pheasant out of season—the only killing he was ever successfully prosecuted for.

  5

  WAR OF THE SICILIAN BOSSES

  The Castellammarese War began at a low level with rival Sicilian gangsters hijacking each other’s convoys of illicit booze. Castellammarese gunmen shot it out with Joe “the Boss” Masseria’s soldiers. “We carried pistols, shotguns, machine guns and enough ammunition to fight the Battle of Bull Run all over again,” said Bonanno.

  Sicilian-born New York mafioso Nick Gentile blamed the war on “Joe the Boss.” “The actions of the administration of Masseria were imposed in dictatorial and exasperating commands which did not allow reply,” said Gentile in his typically elaborate Italian. “They used to govern through fear.”

  Masseria had links with Al Capone in Chicago and encouraged him to make a move against Joe Aiello, one of the leading Castellammaresi in that city. Elsewhere, Masseria tried to split away Detroit gang leader Gaspare Milazzo, another key Castellammarese figure. The plan was to drain Maranzano of his network of support throughout the United States and isolate him so Masseria could finish him off on the streets of New York. In May 1930, this culminated in Milazzo being shot dead in a Detroit fish market. In response, Maranzano called a war council of his followers in Brooklyn.

  “It’s a dirty spot on the honor of Castellammare,” he told the assembled mobsters. “It was as if he were sounding our battle cry,” said Bonanno. Maranzano dominated the meeting and even though other senior members of the crime family wanted to quiet down the affair so they could carry on with their business, the well-groomed Sicilian took them to war against Masseria in New York. Even Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo, the elder statesman of the clan, granted him permission to become their warlord.

  Maranzano had two Cadillacs fitted with armor plating and bulletproof windows and these formed the core of his convoy as he patrolled his fiefdom. “Maranzano would sit in the back seat of his car with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs,” said Bonanno. “He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.”

  On August 15, 1930, Maranzano struck back at the very top of Masseria’s organization. Peter “the Clutch” Morello was so called because of his maimed right hand, on which only the little finger remained. Born in Corleone, his brothers had grown rich out of muscling in on legitimate immigrant businesses. His half brother Ciro was known as the “Artichoke King,” because of his domination of the vegetable racket, and Peter controlled the Bronx building racket. With his droopy mustache, he was a classic old-style Sicilian, dubbed a “Mustache Pete,” and had become a valued adviser to Joe the Boss. At 3:50 P.M. on the fifteenth, the sixty-year-old Morello was sitting in a sparsely decorated office on the second floor above the Sassone Realty Company on East 116th Street. Across a table from him was twenty-six-year-old Joseph Perrano, who was looking forward to going back to Italy the next day, and a third associate called Gaspar Pollaro.

  There was a loud rap on the office door, and Morello opened it a crack to see who it was. Two men armed with pistols pushed their way into the room. They aimed point-blank at the Clutch and nailed him with five bullets, one through the forehead. The other two men sat motionless before they realized the gunmen could not leave any witnesses and the gunmen turned on them. Two shots hit Perrano as he jumped through the second-floor window, crashing to his death on the sidewalk below. Pollaro was shot once and seriously wounded.

  Twenty minutes later, farther along the same street in a building housing the Harlem Casino, there was another hit. Benjamin Prince, a gambler and narcotics dealer, was just about to enter a Hungarian restaurant when he was called to the telephone in the barbershop on the floor below. As he turned around, an assassin hidden in the corridor washroom stepped out and executed him with a shot to the forehead. It looked like a day for clearing up unfinished business.

  As a crowd gathered outside the Morello headquarters, the police asked for witnesses, and a little boy handed them a black book he had picked up off the street. The book contained more than fifty names with large sums of money written next to each one. It seem likely that one of the two assassins had taken it from Morello but dropped it as he ran to the getaway car waiting for them.

  The Morello killing was a very high-profile blow against Joe the Boss, and several rival mobsters later claimed responsibility for it. Bonanno says Maranzano was behind it, while the government informer Joseph Valachi, a minor Maranzano gang member at the time, says it was a fresh-faced gunman hired from Chicago known only as Buster. Buster had supposedly told Valachi the detail that Morello just wouldn’t go down when he shot him and he had to chase him around the office with four more shots before he finished the job. It has since been suggested that Valachi made up the killer “Buster from Chicago” to cover his own role in murders ascribed to him, although other sources have identified Buster as the professional killer Sebastiano Domingo.

  In The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, it is claimed that Luciano ordered the killing of Morello and it was his gunmen, Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise, who shot him. This contradicts Valachi’s testimony and doesn’t make sense. Why would Luciano bother doing this when the Castellammaresi were on a war footing anyway? In Mogul of the Mob, Lansky also claims it was Anastasia and Scalise, but this clashes with his own stated intention of letting the Sicilians shoot themselves to pieces without getting involved. Yet again, this casts doubt on certain aspects of Mogul of the Mob, first published in 1979, which tries too hard to accord with the Last Testament, which appeared four years earlier

  Regardless of who was behind it, Masseria was furious and blamed Maranzano. He put word through to Al Capone to shoot Joe Aiello, his major Castellammarese rival in Chicago. In October, Aiello was struck by fifty-nine slugs from two Thompson machine guns and a sawed-off shotgun. As the bodies stacked up on both sides, Luciano and Lansky stayed out of the war until the end of the conflict approached. In fact, Luciano was so keen to stay out of the firing line that it was in late August 1930 that he accompanied Jack Diamond on the transatlantic trip to Weimar Germany to set up their drug-importing business.

  The high-profile deaths of gangsters and innocent citizens caught in the crossfire were attracting too much attention from the authorities and those not directly involved wanted an end to it. Nick Gentile, in his chronicle of the Castellammarese War, says he was visited by a lieutenant of Al Capone who asked him to exert his influence on Maranzano. Otherwise the Chicago Mob would wage their own war against him. “We will employ even airplanes!” he was warned.


  Gentile took the suggestion and later had a meeting with the Castellammarese leader. “We were brought in the presence of Maranzano who appeared in all his majesty: with two pistols stuck in his waist and encircled by about ninety boys, who were also armed to the teeth. I had the impression that I found myself in the presence of ‘Pancho Villa.’”

  Maranzano talked at length to Gentile and tried to convince him that Masseria was at fault. “Masseria has always been our enemy,” argued one of Gentile’s associates, “to end this war it is necessary that Mangano should kill Masseria being that he has unlimited trust in him.” He was referring to Vincent Mangano, who was part of the Brooklyn Al Mineo crime family, closely linked with Masseria, and including a young Albert Anastasia. Other members of Masseria’s army had to be convinced, however, and that included Luciano.

  On February 2, 1931, Charles Luciano was arrested for felonious assault. Police file photographs were taken of him and on the reverse of one of them his name was given as Charles Lucania “Lucky,” with another Anglo-Saxon alias of “Charles Reed.” He gave his address as 265 East Tenth Street. His height was recorded as 5 feet 9¾ inches, his build Mediterranean, his eyes brown, his complexion dark, his hair “blond,” but presumably this is a mistake or some form of police humor, as his hair was clearly black. His occupation was logged as chauffeur. Shortly after he was released, Maranzano approached Luciano with an offer too good to ignore.

  The Castellammarese War was bad for business and Maranzano let it be known that the best way to end the fighting was for someone to knock off Masseria. Once that had been completed, he vowed, he would not take vengeance on any of Masseria’s gang. It was a tempting solution and Luciano visited him in March 1931 to discuss it further. Joseph Bonanno was at the meeting and said it was his first opportunity to see the man he had heard so much about.