Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  Soon the scope of this involvement spread beyond the waterside. Haffenden had Lansky place agents in hotels and restaurants throughout Manhattan that were suspected of being used by enemy spies. “One of the places he mentioned was the Pierre Hotel,” said Lansky. “He also told me about a place in Brooklyn—some sort of a seamen’s club.”

  In German-populated Yorkville, Lansky hired Germanspeaking naval agents into cafés and bars as waiters to listen in on conversations. To make their cover even more authentic, these agents sometimes served as collectors for the Mob. “They handed over the money they collected and were always honest in their dealings,” said Lansky. “I think this must be the only time the U.S. Navy ever directly helped the Mafia.”

  To protect the government to some extent, Captain MacFall, chief of Naval Intelligence on the East Coast, shielded his superiors from the full details of this connection. “The use of underworld informants and characters,” said MacFall, “like the use of other extremely confidential procedures, was not specifically disclosed to the Commandant or other superior officers as such use was a calculated risk that I assumed as District Intelligence Officer.” It would go no further than him and he ensured that the real names of any underworld collaborators never appeared in official wartime records.

  Lansky was confident that the government got a good deal out of working with the Mob. He knew his gangsters had complete control of the docks, and by ensuring there was no trouble, naval convoys could carry on their task of delivering supplies to Britain and Russia.

  “So,” concluded Lansky, “in the end the Mafia helped save the lives of Americans and people in Europe.”

  By February 1943, however, Luciano was hoping for some payback.

  “I won the war single-handed,” he later claimed.

  A motion was put before the state supreme court to reduce Luciano’s sentence. It came before the judge who had originally sentenced Luciano in 1936. Justice Philip J. McCook denied the motion but did hold out the following ray of hope when he referred to Luciano’s contribution to the war effort.

  “If the defendant is assisting the authorities,” said the judge, “and he continues to do so, and remains a model prisoner, executive clemency may become appropriate at some future time.”

  It was better than nothing. As the war still raged, there was little likelihood of Luciano being deported to Europe, but as the Allies won victories in North Africa, a new battlefront was opening in the Mediterranean. Allied generals looked to Sicily as a stepping-stone to the invasion of Italy. This was Luciano’s homeland—the birthplace of the Mafia. Surely there was some way that Lucky Luciano could help directly with the liberation of the old country.

  12

  LUCKY GOES TO WAR

  Locked in prison, reading daily newspaper reports of Allied victories, Charlie Luciano got impatient. He wanted to be part of the action. If the U.S. government were grateful to him for his help against enemy agents at home, then they’d be knocked out if he got his hands really dirty and stepped forward for active duty. According to Meyer Lansky, he had it all worked out. He would volunteer to act as a scout or liaison officer for frontline troops. He’d put his neck on the line by being parachuted into action—behind enemy lines—and use his considerable influence to win the war for America. Lansky laughed, picturing him landing on top of a church spire. But Luciano couldn’t see the funny side—he was deadly serious.

  By January 1943, the Allies were on the offensive in the Mediterranean. They had held and defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa and were now looking to open up a second European front to put more pressure on Hitler, while the German army was fighting for its life against the Soviet Union in Russia. The final decision was made at the Casablanca Conference between U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. After much debate, the Americans agreed to support Churchill in his desire to invade Mussolini’s Italy—the soft underbelly of Nazi Europe. To do this, they would first have to attack Sicily in an operation that would go by the code name “Husky.”

  Having determined the location of the next Allied thrust, Churchill then had to admit that the Americans possessed an undeniable advantage when it came to dealing with Italians. “In view of the friendly feeling towards America entertained by a great number of citizens of Italy,” said Roosevelt in a telegram to Churchill, “and in consideration of the large number of citizens of the United States who are of Italian descent, it is my opinion that our military problem will be made less difficult by giving to the Allied Military Government [in Sicily] as much of an American character as is practicable.”

  Churchill agreed, but in secret correspondence, his ambassador to Washington, D.C., expressed the fear that Italian-American anti-Fascist agents appointed to Sicily might well turn out to have Mafia links.

  “Italian communities in New York were already beginning to lay down the law about administration of Italy,” wrote the British ambassador. “Italian communities here had an intimate knowledge and connexion with Huskyland [Sicily] and quite unimportant appointments might have reactions here (for instance it would be known at once if one of our ‘anti-Fascist’ appointees was a Mafia man as was not unlikely).”

  He would not be far wrong. That intimate connection between New York and Sicily could well be a two-edged sword for the Allies.

  Having determined the next phase of the war, preparations began for an invasion of Sicily. East Coast Naval Intelligence officers saw an opportunity here to exploit further their connections with Sicilian gangsters. This time, rather than the criminal links confined to the files of his New York office, Haffenden was encouraged to report his contacts to the Washington headquarters of Captain Wallace S. Wharton, head of the CounterIntelligence Section, Office of Naval Intelligence.

  “On the occasions when Commander Haffenden gave names to me,” said Wharton, “he told me that he had obtained these names from his contacts in the underworld. The names of the individuals in Sicily who could be trusted turned out to be 40 percent correct, upon eventual checkup and on the basis of actual experience.”

  Luciano’s wild proposal of putting himself in the frontline proved to be true. Lansky told Haffenden about Luciano’s suggestion and the commander passed it on to Captain Wharton in Washington. “Haffenden told me that Luciano was willing to go to Sicily,” recalled the head of Counter Intelligence, “and contact natives there, in the event of an invasion by our armed forces, and to win these natives over to support the United States war effort, particularly during the amphibious phase of an invasion.”

  Haffenden argued the case for Luciano, saying he could persuade Governor Dewey to give him a pardon and send him to Sicily via a neutral country, such as Portugal. Full of enthusiasm for the idea, he said that Luciano recommended that U.S. forces land in the Golfo di Castellammare—a favorite Mafia drug-smuggling haunt near Palermo and home to many of those mobsters caught up in the gang war of the late 1920s. Wharton seriously considered the fantastic suggestion of sending the U.S. head of organized crime to a theater of war but could see this might well become a scandal after the war and reprimanded Haffenden for a lack of political judgment. He was more than happy just getting information from these gangsters without actually sending them to fight with tommy guns on the beaches of their homeland.

  Lieutenant Anthony J. Marsloe had no qualms about dealing with gangsters. “The exploitation of informants, irrespective of their backgrounds, is not only desirous,” he said, “but necessary when the nation is struggling for its existence.”

  He was a law graduate and had served under Captain MacFall and Haffenden since the beginning of the project. Two other members of his four-man team were a practicing attorney and an investigator who would later be tasked with exposing waterfront racketeering. They were now told to speak to all kinds of shady characters in order to get data of use in a projected invasion.

  “Because of my personal knowledge of Sicily and the dialects of Sicily,” recalled Marsloe,
“various personalities, otherwise unidentified, were sent to me by Commander Haffenden. These men were interviewed and photographs, documents or other matters of interest were taken, and in turn given to Commander Haffenden.”

  Meyer Lansky was actively involved in bringing some of these personalities to Haffenden’s office. The naval officers wanted everything they knew about the shape of the coastline and major landing points. “The Navy wanted from the Italians all the pictures they could possibly get of every port of Sicily, of every channel,” said Lansky, “and also to get men that were in Italy more recently and had knowledge of water and coastlines—to bring them to the Navy so they could talk to them.” Haffenden would then pull out big maps and “he showed them the maps for them to recognize their villages and to compare the maps with their knowledge of their villages.”

  From his jail cell, Luciano recommended certain people who knew Sicily well, and Lansky escorted them to the Naval Intelligence offices. Socks Lanza helped out, too. “Sometimes some of the Sicilians were very nervous,” said Lanza. “Joe [Adonis] would just mention the name of Lucky Luciano and say he had given them orders to talk. If the Sicilians were still reluctant, Joe would stop smiling and say, ‘Lucky will not be pleased to hear that you have not been helpful.’”

  All the information was sifted and analyzed with much of it ending up on a huge wall map in Haffenden’s office with code numbers referring to particular reports from specific individuals. Some of these were major underworld figures who were part of the international network of drug smugglers established by Luciano before he went to jail. Vincent Mangano ran an importexport business between the United States and Italy before the war, which was a cover for his role as key broker between the American and Sicilian Mafias.

  That Frank Costello was also involved in this gathering of material was suggested by the testimony of federal narcotics agent George White. He told the Kefauver Senate Committee inquiry into organized crime in 1950 that veteran drug smuggler August Del Grazio had approached him with a deal coming from Frank Costello on behalf of Luciano.

  “The proffered deal,” recalled Senator Estes Kefauver, “was that Luciano would use his Mafia position to arrange contacts for undercover American agents and that therefore Sicily would be a much softer target than it might otherwise be.” Luciano’s asking price for all this was freedom from jail and his own travel to Sicily to make the arrangements.

  Lansky denied the involvement of August Del Grazio in the wartime dealings. “I never knew of George White and I still don’t know of August Del Grazio,” said Lansky in 1954. Was he shielding some secret connection? It is interesting to note that Del Grazio, also known as “Little Augie the Wop,” was the drug smuggler trusted by Luciano to consolidate his narcotics shipments in Weimar Germany in 1931.

  As the days counted down to Operation Husky—the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943—it was not only U.S. Naval Intelligence that woke up to the advantages of having homegrown links with the Sicilian Mafia. Planners for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—those senior military commanders in Washington—came up with a daring line of action not dissimilar to Lucky Luciano’s own suggestion. In their Special Military Plan for Psychological Warfare in Sicily, dated April 9, 1943, they suggested infiltrating Sicilian-Americans onto the island so they could link up with dissident organizations and foment revolt against the Fascist authorities.

  This included the “Establishment of contact and communications with the leaders of separatist nuclei, disaffected workers, and clandestine radical groups, e.g., the Mafia, and giving them every possible aid,” stated the joint staff planners’ report.

  It would not prove too difficult, as Mussolini had come down hard on the Mafia in the 1920s when he sent to Sicily the tough law enforcer Cesare Mori to subdue and humiliate mafiosi and their families. Many had been tortured, sent to jail, or fled abroad to America. It was this hunger for revenge against the Blackshirts that the American military wanted to utilize. The United States would supply them with weapons and explosives so they could blow up Axis military installations and strategically important bridges and railroads. This extraordinary concept of arming lawbreakers so they could fight against Fascists and Nazis was approved by the very highest military authorities—including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commanding general of the North African Theater of Operations.

  The Americans were not alone in their wish to make contact with the Mafia in Sicily. Their military partners, the British, had their own plans to connect with the Sicilian underworld. The British Secret Intelligence Service produced a Handbook on Politics and Intelligence Services for Sicily. In it they identified a figure called Vito La Mantia as head of a Mafia group. They described him as “very anti-Fascist and, if still alive, might supply valuable information: uneducated but influential: was last reported as the manager of a property belonging to the Mafia in Via Notabartolo, Palermo.” It was not a very impressive contact and does not tally with any known Mafia figure quoted in American circles, but it does reveal that it was not exclusively the Americans or their Naval Intelligence that considered utilizing the Mafia in the conquest of Sicily.

  On the night of July 9, 1943, American and British landing craft crashed through the waves of the Mediterranean to land on beaches along the southeast corner of Sicily. Ahead of them exploded a curtain of Allied shells and bombs, smashing against Axis pillboxes, crushing any resistance to the landing. Once ashore, troops scrambled across the sand as tanks and trucks were unloaded, building up their strength for the next phase of the invasion. The British were to advance north along the eastern coast of the island from Siracusa to Messina. All the way they would encounter stiff resistance from German soldiers determined to slow their advance, so they could evacuate as many of their own troops across the sea to mainland Italy. The British advance would be measured in blood.

  In contrast, the Americans quickly cut across Sicily to occupy the western half of the island and take its capital, Palermo, on the northwest coast. Their casualties were a fraction of those suffered by the British. Had Roosevelt and Eisenhower been right? Had they secretly deployed their Italian-American contacts to somehow ease the progress of their own soldiers? Had underworld links across the ocean instructed the Mafia in Sicily to aid the Americans and discourage Axis troops from attacking them? It has been a long-held belief that that is exactly what happened.

  Despite his wishes, Lucky Luciano was not among the seasick Americans staggering out of their landing craft, but Lieutenant Marsloe was. He had swapped his desk job in New York for active service, along with three other Naval Intelligence colleagues, and their mission was to make the most of the information given to them by Luciano’s contacts. They were broken up into two teams and Marsloe landed at Gela. The data gathered in New York was of “tremendous help following the landing,” said Marsloe, “because we gained an insight into the customs and mores of these people … the manner in which the ports were operated, the chains of command together with their material culture.”

  For Marsloe’s colleague, Lieutenant Paul Alfieri, there were more direct benefits. “One of the most important plans was to contact persons who had been deported for any crime from the United States to their homeland in Sicily,” said Alfieri, “and one of my first successes after landing at Licata was in connection with this.”

  This connection began back on the Lower East Side, when a sixteen-year-old kid shot a policeman and was destined for the electric chair. His mother was a cousin of Lucky Luciano and begged him to help her boy escape justice. The mobster intervened and had him smuggled out of the country via Canada to Sicily. There, with his American connections, he became head of his local Mafia family. It was this criminal that Alfieri made contact with in Licata, and the code word he was to give him was “Lucky Luciano.”

  “Maybe that sounds crazy right in the middle of the war,” said Lansky, “but one of those agents told me later that those words were magic. People smiled and after that everything was easy.�
� Even if Luciano wasn’t there, his reputation was opening doors.

  The young renegade mafioso led Alfieri to the local headquarters of the Italian navy. With the assistance of his armed henchmen, they killed the German guards outside and broke in. They blew open a safe and inside Alfieri found documents describing German and Italian defenses for the island as well as a valuable radio codebook. Secret maps revealed the locations of minefields and the safe routes through them, thus saving many American lives. It was a tremendous breakthrough for which Alfieri was awarded the Legion of Merit—his actions “contributing in large measure to the success of our invasion forces,” said the presidential citation. It was a medal that Luciano might well have felt he deserved, too.

  But Marsloe, Alfieri, and their colleagues were only four intelligence agents compared to the hundreds of others serving with the army. Their impact on the campaign in Sicily began and ended on the coast. From then on, it was up to the military officers of the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) to assist the advance of their frontline soldiers into the heart of Sicily, and they did not have the benefit of Luciano’s briefings.

  Or did they? There is a notorious story that is often quoted as proof that Lucky Luciano’s long shadow hung over the fighting in Sicily.

  Five days after the Allied landing, on July 14, 1943, an American fighter plane flew low over the small town of Villalba in central Sicily. As its wings nearly brushed the terra-cotta roofs of the buildings, native Sicilians could see a yellow banner fluttering from the side of the cockpit. They swore it bore a large black “L” in the middle of the flag. As the aircraft swooped over a grand farmhouse on the outskirts of the town, the pilot tossed out a bag that crashed into the dust nearby. A servant from the farmhouse hurriedly retrieved it and showed it to his master.