by Tim Newark
The anonymity of living in hotels suited Luciano very well, especially as he gave alias names when he registered with them. It protected him from rival gangsters, he said. Whenever he was arrested, he invariably gave his home address as that of his parents living at 265 East Tenth Street. Luciano claimed to have lived there after he left school at the age of fourteen, so from about 1912 onward. His parents lived there until 1933, and this address is the only one that can truly be connected with him as a family home. The five-story tenement building still stands today, painted green on street level and redbrick above. A police investigator visited it in 1935 and spoke to the superintendent of the building, who said that the Lucania family had lived there for some time prior to 1933. The superintendent had never seen Charlie Luciano but regularly saw his mother and father, Rose and Antonio, and a girl, presumably his sister. They lived in apartment five, paying from $24 to $30 a month rent.
In 1933, the Lucania family moved to a more modern apartment, 205 East Tenth Street, where Luciano’s younger brother, Bartolo, signed a lease for them at $960 rent per year. The superintendent there said he saw Luciano visit his parents several times late at night. By this time, his older sister, called Fanny, had married a plumber and moved to White Plains. Bart Lucania lived in Brooklyn and was the secretary and treasurer of the Associated Master Barber’s Chapter 629. In early 1935, Luciano’s mother became seriously ill and left the building, dying in the hospital. His father then quit the building in September of that year, owing two months’ rent, to live with his daughter in White Plains.
Generally, Luciano lived the life of a man about town, calling on a variety of girlfriends, some coming from the brothels he was connected with. He never got married and never seems to have yearned for that kind of intimacy or long-term friendship with a woman—certainly not when he was young. He never expressed the wish for a family and acknowledged no children. He loved straight sex with young women, but sometimes he was slowed down by venereal disease that reoccurred throughout his life.
For such a wealthy and powerful man, rubbing shoulders with politicians, businessmen, and show business stars, Luciano sometimes chased after high-profile women, but, generally, he didn’t like to be outshone by his girlfriends. One woman closely associated with Luciano was Gay Orlova—the stage name of a twenty-year-old chorus girl in a Broadway show. Luciano, reputedly, fell head over heels for her. Born in Russia, she had left with her family during the revolution. Luciano met her in 1934 after she performed in a show at the Palm Island Casino in Florida. He was staying with Al Capone’s brother, Ralph, in his mansion. After that first meeting, they were smitten with each other and seen around town together. Lee Mortimer, a gossip columnist, asked her what she saw in Luciano.
“How can you go for that gorilla?” he said.
“I love Charlie because he is so sinister,” she replied.
For Charles Luciano, being a gangster was all about business and making money. The raw adrenaline of robbing, fighting, and killing had energized him in his teens and twenties, but by the time he hit thirty he had a more sober approach to criminality. With his like-minded associates, Lansky and Costello, he adopted the persona of a businessman. A businessman who used the ultimate persuasion of personal injury and murder to get what he wanted, but a businessman nevertheless, more interested in managing his commercial interests than in running around the streets shooting people. As Joe Profaci, head of one of the five Mafia families, was heard to say one day: “We were just interested in business, and going legit someday so our kids wouldn’t have the gangster curse. We didn’t really care who was boss.”
Luciano was always happy to take tips on management techniques from those with more experience. Johnny Torrio, who had retired from the underworld in Chicago, handing it over to Al Capone, was living in New York and gave advice to Luciano over games of cards at the Barbizon-Plaza. It was his idea of a national convention to settle points of conflict between the leading gangs. Luciano had attended such a gathering in May 1929 in Atlantic City—one of the first of several sit-downs where criminal bosses tried to bring a more businesslike tone to their activities.
All the leading gangsters agreed to work together to ensure they didn’t compete with each other and thus lower the price of illicit booze. Most important, Al Capone attended the meeting. Calling it a “peace conference,” he accepted the need to reduce his incessant killings in Chicago after his headlining St. Valentine’s Day Massacre three months earlier. As a result of the meeting, Capone handed himself over to a friendly policeman so he could serve a brief ten-month period in jail for possession of a gun in order to allow other cooler heads to run his business empire more efficiently. Typically, neither Maranzano nor Masseria attended this conference because they would not sit down with Jewish gangsters on an equal footing.
With the killings of Masseria and Maranzano and the establishment of what was dubbed the Commission, Luciano had abandoned a dictatorial vision of organized crime and settled on something more discreet and collaborative. He discouraged the old Sicilian manner of greeting fellow mobsters with a kiss—a simple handshake would do—drawing less attention. Negotiation, not fighting, was the preferred way forward, but that didn’t stop Luciano and his associates from using guns when necessary to settle any business problems—that’s what gave them their competitive edge against regular corporations.
Aping Rothstein, Luciano made sure he developed his own political contacts and firmed up a strong relationship with New York State governor Al Smith, ensuring the appointment of several friendly politicians in his administration. In 1929, Smith was succeeded as governor by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and there is no reason not to expect that Luciano also had links to him, as he did with all leading Democrat politicians in New York at the time. It was the historic legacy of the Lower East Side gangs and their assistance to Tammany Hall. Luciano’s go-between in political matters was Albert Marinelli. During the early years of Prohibition, Governor Smith had appointed Marinelli port warden of the city, a position that allowed him to ensure the unloading of bootleg whiskey was carried out without intervention.
In July 1932, Luciano and Marinelli, along with Lansky and Costello, attended the Democratic convention in Chicago. Both Smith and Roosevelt were the leading presidential contenders. Eventually Roosevelt was chosen, partly because he was less tainted with Tammany Hall than Smith, and the next year he became president. It was a new era for the United States.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had brought an end to the heady postwar boom and reduced some of the money that flowed into criminal coffers during Prohibition. With the Great Depression taking hold of the country, citizens wanted an end to the discredited period of rapacious capitalism headed by the Republicans and wanted someone to clear up the mess. That person was Roosevelt. Three weeks after becoming president, on March 23, 1933, he signed into law an amendment to the Volstead Act, which allowed the manufacture and sale of certain kinds of alcoholic beverages. By the end of the year, Prohibition was repealed and the business of bootlegging was at an end. Luciano and his fellow gangsters had known the end was coming to this lucrative trade and were already prepared for it.
In May 1933, another national convention of gangsters was arranged—perhaps by Luciano—at a Park Avenue hotel. Johnny Torrio again took center stage as the voice of wisdom. His argument for a more secretive and cohesive approach to organized crime had been proved by the jailing of Al Capone more than a year earlier. Capone’s brand of shock-and-awe gangsterism had eventually pushed the authorities to nail him for income tax evasion, and this more sophisticated method of law enforcement was not lost on the gang bosses, who also took note of Capone’s hefty eleven-year sentence. They had to stay out of the limelight for their own survival or face a more determined crackdown on their activities.
Luciano understood the virtue of working together, said Torrio. He had overseen the establishment of a successful monopoly over illicit liquor. Now that bootlegging was coming to an end, the s
ame approach had to be taken with other rackets. When it was Luciano’s turn to speak, he carried on the theme of criminal cooperation. He argued that the major gangs should establish a nationwide syndicate. Each city or region would belong to its leading gang and other subsidiary gangs would recognize their supremacy. It didn’t matter that they were not a hundred percent Sicilian or Italian, as in the old Mafia. Any ethnic gang that had fought its way to the top had earned its title. But if those gangs started messing around in the business interests of another gang in another city, then a meeting should be called of the national syndicate to discuss the misdemeanor and sort it out before it ended in war.
If one gang wanted to carry out an enterprise within another gang’s sphere of influence they had to ask permission before barging in. They should also share any of their valuable assets, such as corrupt politicians who could help out other gangsters. It all operated on a currency of favors owed and repaid. Some territories were to be considered open and gangs could come together to invest in developing criminal interests there. This would include areas such as Nevada or Cuba, where gambling casinos were built with Mob money. Luciano repeated his assertion there would be no boss of bosses—just an association of key gangsters who would work together to oversee the peaceful development of the underworld. The presence of Meyer Lansky, Louis Lepke, and Longy Zwillman reassured the large Jewish contingent that this syndicate was not a purely Italian club.
As he surveyed the underworld around him, Luciano was pleased to see how many of his teenage associates had prospered alongside him. This satisfied him, for he felt that everyone should have a slice of the pie and not lord it over the others, as Masseria and Maranzano had tried to at their cost. This really was the secret of Luciano’s success. Through good fortune and the power of his personality, Luciano was at the center of a group of friends who had all established themselves in various aspects of New York crime. Their strength was their friendship and the money they channeled into their various enterprises.
It should also be emphasized that although much of the literature about Luciano portrays him as a master criminal in New York in the early 1930s—with him presiding over gangster conferences like a chairman of the board—this is probably more legend than reality. It is partly a construct of the crime busters who later confronted him, as they needed to show him as a master criminal to justify their own expensive crusades against him. Luciano was too interested in managing his own moneymaking rackets—and the countless day-to-day problems with them—to devote much time at all to overseeing a national syndicate, if it ever really existed. Most Mafia enterprises were local businesses operating in specific parts of cities. They liked to emphasize the importance of their personal contacts and this gave them considerable reach throughout the country if they needed it.
In the same month as the Park Avenue conference calling for an end to gang warfare, there was a spectacular gunfight on Broadway that somewhat undermined the pacifying words of Luciano and Torrio. On the evening of May 24, as crowds were coming out of movie theaters, they came under fire from two expensive sedans racing northward along Broadway. Bullets flew everywhere and wounded three bystanders, including a forty-five-year-old nurse who was taken to the hospital in critical condition. At West Seventy-ninth Street, one car drew abreast of the other and the fedora hat–wearing passengers inside sprayed it with bullets.
“Careening wildly from side to side,” said a newspaper report, “the riddled sedan sped north to the intersection of 84th Street, where its driver lost control. The car smashed into the railing surrounding the island park just north of the street crossing and was almost completely wrecked. Two men jumped out of the car and lost themselves in the street crowds. The police found that although the sedan was equipped with bullet-proof glass an inch and a half thick, at least 11 shots had penetrated the body of the sedan. In the back seat were fresh bloodstains.”
The gunfight was thought to be linked to the death of two henchmen working for chief bootlegger Waxey Gordon. No one had told them about the need for criminal coordination.
Throughout this period, Meyer Lansky remained Luciano’s leading associate. He had imbibed the lessons of Rothstein and was an expert moneyman, investing the Mob’s money wisely and effectively and always open to the next big opportunity. He was Luciano’s number one adviser and commanded the respect of all other Jewish gangsters. He was happy to let Luciano be regarded as head of the Mob, because he was the brains behind the operation and preferred life in the shadows. He was never happier than sitting in his book-lined study at home reading about the life of another physically small but determined operator—Napoleon Bonaparte. Lansky remained close to Bugsy Siegel and would use him to open up new territories in the future, but for the moment, his childhood pal remained a feared gunman.
Louis Lepke consolidated his control over the garment district, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and other unions. The labor racket brought in millions of dollars and he lived the life of a playboy. He also headed a major narcotics smuggling network. Longy Zwillman, along with Willie Moretti, took care of illegal operations in New Jersey. Frank Costello was the fixer, forging close links with politicians and judges, and dispensing annually thousands of dollars to law enforcers, to protect the Mob’s interests. His slice of the business was gambling, and it is claimed he used his influence on the racetrack to provide FBI supremo and gambling addict, J. Edgar Hoover, with surefire winners. It helped to keep the FBI off their backs. Costello liked to spend his fortune on dressing well and when a lawyer later asked him to wear a cheaper suit for a trial he said, “I’m sorry counsellor, I’d rather blow the goddam case.”
The muscle needed to keep Luciano and his associates at the top of the pile was provided by Murder, Inc. Headed by Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis, younger members of Luciano’s original gang, this was a group of professional gunmen who were called in to execute a contract on anyone obstructing their ambitions. The idea was that orders for killings were passed down from chief mobsters through lieutenants to gunmen who knew neither their bosses nor their intended victims, so it was very difficult to link them to the murders. It was nothing personal, just business, and anyway, as Bugsy Siegel famously declared, “We only killed each other.” Actually, that wasn’t true. Murder, Inc., was directed to kill anyone who got in their way, including “civilians,” fringe criminals, and trial witnesses.
That these top gangsters were still not immune to deadly threats from rival mobsters was revealed in a violent incident on November 9, 1932. Tony Fabrizzo was a hit man for Waxey Gordon, who had a long-term vendetta against Lansky and Siegel. Fabrizzo went to the Hard Tack Social Club at 547 Grand Avenue, New York, where Lansky and Siegel liked to meet. The Italian assassin lowered a bomb down the chimney of the building but failed to take into account that the chimney had a rightangle offset that caused the bomb to become stuck before reaching the meeting room level. The bomb went off and did not kill the intended victims, but it still did considerable damage to the building and Siegel was taken to hospital with severe head injuries caused by flying bricks. Eleven days later, Siegel tracked down Fabrizzo and shot him dead.
Thomas E. Dewey was a baby-faced attorney with mighty ambitions. Eventually, he would become governor of New York and run for president of the United States. In early 1931, however, there was no sense of the illustrious career to come his way. He was just twenty-eight years old, earning a salary of $6,400 a year, and only had experience in handling civil cases related to family estates, big hotels, and banks. It was through one of these cases that he managed to impress George Z. Medalie, one of New York’s most successful trial lawyers.
When Medalie gave up his lucrative private practice to assume the role of U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York State, the much older lawyer offered Dewey the position of chief assistant U.S. attorney in March 1931. It was an extraordinary post for someone so young and inexperienced in criminal law, and it came with a federal prosecuting office of sixty lawyers work
ing for him. But Dewey grabbed the opportunity and applied himself diligently, mastering every aspect of the task before him. His appointment coincided with the national mood for political change and an end to the rotten practices of the 1920s. He came from a family of leading Michigan Republicans and was no friend of New York Democrats. Indeed, his father had told him: “Tammany Hall represents all that is evil in government.” He stayed beyond the reach of Luciano, Costello, and their Democrat stooges.
At first, Dewey took on cases of fraud. He helped Medalie prosecute a Harlem lottery racketeer called Henry Miro. They used tax law to pursue him, just as it had been used to get Al Capone. The case opened Dewey’s eyes to the vast sums of money being made in the New York underworld. He calculated that Miro alone was making something like a million dollars a year, and he was just one of ten or fifteen such crooks.
“If this is a fact,” he later broadcast to a radio audience, “then the underworld takes ten to 15 million dollars a year out of the numbers game alone to finance its depredations against legitimate business and the lives of the people of New York. With such a war chest, organized crime has abundant means for corrupting public officials and buying immunity from punishment.”
