Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  Dickey traveled to Rome to get the advice of Colonel Poletti, but when Dickey arrived at his office, the American chief administrator seemed reluctant to see him. Bizarrely, on one occasion he appeared to be sleeping at his desk, then on another day his office was filled with people and he was too busy to see the young sergeant. Outside the office, a senior official told Dickey to steer well clear of the case, as neither Poletti nor he wanted to be involved with it. With such criminal reluctance from Poletti to prosecute Genovese, Dickey was left to oversee his extradition to America. Genovese tried to bribe the young man with $250,000 to forget about the whole business, but Dickey persisted and accompanied him back to Brooklyn by ship.

  Having made sure that the major witness against Genovese’s involvement in a murder back in the 1930s was dead, the mobster was delighted to be going back to America. “Kid,” he told Dickey, “you are doing me the biggest favor anyone has ever done me. You are taking me home.” Once he was back in the United States in June 1945, and with little evidence against him, all charges were dropped against Genovese and he was free to resume his position as a major Mafia boss.

  Since Genovese had been arrested and taken back to America just eight months before Luciano arrived in Sicily, it would have been natural for Luciano to take over running his side of the black market business, but there is little evidence that he did. The fact that Luciano disappeared to Cuba so soon after his arrival in Italy suggests that he did not have Genovese’s contacts or authority over a racket that was probably running pretty well under the control of local Camorra and Sicilian gangsters. He certainly did have contacts with Don Calo, but these may have been more political than commercial, as subsequent events would reveal. The whiff of collaboration with American government agents hung too strongly over Luciano for Don Calo to perhaps risk any criminal dealings with him.

  U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies stayed on in Sicily after the war had ended. In Palermo, agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had established close links with leading mafiosi on the island. At first, the OSS had been committed to undermining the Separatist movement, but curiously they believed it was the British who were behind it, as they suspected they wanted to continue their imperial dominance of the Mediterranean after the war. The British, however, were convinced it was some corrupt Americans, Poletti among them, who were helping the Separatist mafiosi by placing them in senior political positions.

  Into this maelstrom of politics and crime stepped the familiar figure of Nick Gentile. Cut out from a more senior role in the Mob in the United States, which he felt his status as fixer had deserved, he turned to dealing in narcotics. In 1937, he was arrested for heroin trafficking and broke bail to flee back to Sicily, where he became a senior mafioso. He was a key contact for Luciano when he arrived in Sicily and helped organize the island’s narcotics trade with America. He was also perceived to be a valued consigliere when it came to political matters, and Prince Umberto turned to him when the Italian royal family feared that the Separatist Mafia was anti-monarchy.

  A military intelligence report from January 1946 records a secret meeting in which Gentile was reluctant to tell them the “name of the American Colonel who allegedly informed him that the policy of the United States was to retain the monarchy in Italy.” It would be surprising if this American colonel was not Poletti. Shortly after this unofficial statement of American strategy, Poletti was released from his job in Rome and returned to the United States.

  But the Mafia could not fix everything. Despite Don Calo giving his considerable support to the bandit Giuliano and his armed campaign against the Italian government, national elections in June 1946 brought a shocking defeat for the Separatist party. Cleverly, the mainland government had outmaneuvered the Separatist appeal by granting autonomy to the island. While the Separatists received only 8 percent of the vote, right-wing support switched to the Christian Democrats.

  Many mafiosi now saw the Christian Democrats as the realistic opposition to the growing tide of Socialism in their country and shifted their patronage and influence toward them. A year later in April 1947, the Communists and Socialists won 30 percent of the Sicilian vote against 21 percent gained by the Christian Democrats. Suddenly, with the Separatist cause annihilated and the Christian Democrats looking like losers, rightwingers began to panic. It was a situation that the CIA, formerly the OSS, had already feared.

  “It is of vital strategic importance to prevent Italy from falling under Communist control,” said a CIA report of 1947. “Militarily, the availability to the USSR of bases in Sicily and southern Italy would pose a direct threat to the security of communications throughout the Mediterranean.”

  In the face of Cold War terror, U.S. agents abroad could see that their own interests coincided with those of the Mafia. Rather than viewing them as an irritation and hindrance to internal security, they now viewed the criminals as an international asset. For the first time—because it never happened in wartime Sicily—the Mafia were recruited to further American foreign policy in the Mediterranean. Their joint aim was to stop a Communist breakthrough in the Italian national elections in 1948.

  The bandit Giuliano rallied to the cause and announced his new adherence to the anti-Communist crusade in May 1947 by ordering his henchmen to open fire on a peaceful gathering of Socialists enjoying a picnic near the village of Portella delle Ginestra. After just three minutes of gunfire, eleven people lay dead, with fifty-six wounded. A month later, Giuliano published his call to arms in the Sicilian press and followed through with a campaign of terror. Socialist headquarters were bombed and several Communists killed.

  A month after that, rumor linked Luciano, residing in Palermo, to the anti-Communist cause. Considering his close relationship with Don Calo and other influential mafiosi such as Nick Gentile, it would not be surprising that Luciano should be expected to use every aspect of his high-level contacts within the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies to help support a campaign of murder against the Communist threat on the island.

  It would not be the first time the CIA deployed organized crime to help influence foreign politics. In the same year, their agents made contact with members of a Corsican syndicate in France. Their mission was to break a Communist-organized strike in the docks at Marseilles. The Corsican mobsters murdered a number of strikers and business returned to normal. The criminal alliance was repeated in 1950 when Marseilles dockworkers threatened the supply of war materials to Vietnam.

  In Sicily, the violence worked. By the time the 1948 general election came around, in the areas terrorized by Giuliano and his henchmen, the votes for the Christian Democrats more than doubled. The threat of a Communist takeover had been thwarted in Sicily. The CIA was delighted and so were the Mafia who had risked the wrath of the Communists by backing a right-wing party. It was the beginning of a long relationship between the Mafia and the Christian Democrat party. It resulted in decades of corruption at the very highest level of Italian politics, but it suited the Cold War concerns of America very well.

  In the wake of the Christian Democrat victory, Luciano was on the winning side and should have thrived in Italy, but with little more to contribute to U.S. foreign policy, it appears that he was rapidly dropped by any friendly government agents and, instead, became a bogeyman for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

  As for Giuliano—the hero of the moment, the frontline warrior of the Mafia with film-star good looks—he, too, was betrayed. Expecting his prize for securing victory over the Communists—such as a pardon or some kind of involvement with the new establishment—he got nothing. He had served his purpose and was left out in the cold. Feeling double-crossed, Giuliano returned to looting and kidnapping, but as he grew more brazen, he launched assaults on the barracks of the carabinieri. This was too embarrassing for the government and they sent a military force to hunt him down.

  In the end, it was the Mafia that got Giuliano. Tired of his headlining atrocities, they wanted to sink back into the shadows no
w that they had the access to the power they craved. Two years later, in July 1950, Giuliano was hiding out in small town in southwest Sicily called Castelvetrano. As he emerged from a brothel in the early morning, he was confronted by vengeful carabinieri.

  “He at once opened fire on them,” reported the London Times, “but fell riddled by bullets from police tommy-guns. Beside his body was found a submachine-gun, a German revolver, and a telescope. On one of his fingers was a large diamond ring and his belt was fastened with a gold clasp.”

  The carabinieri had been tipped off by the local Mafia. No one person was bigger than the Mob—a lesson that even Luciano would have to learn.

  15

  NARCOTICS OVERLORD

  War stimulated the illicit trade in drugs. Throughout World War II, Japan and Japanese-occupied Korea became a major base for producing heroin. Nazi Germany devised many new synthetic drugs. Wounded soldiers needed painkillers and both during the war and immediately afterward, there was a lively trade in black market drugs. The last flight of popular bandleader Glenn Miller, which disappeared midair in late 1944, was organized by Lieutenant Colonel Norman F. Baesell and reputedly involved the smuggling of ampoules of military-use morphine to newly liberated France.

  As Nazi Germany collapsed, Wehrmacht supplies of drugs entered an extensive underground network where even concentration camp survivors were caught with pilfered narcotics. The chaos that followed the end of war shielded the activities of criminals. Added to this was new technology that allowed the extraction of opium from the whole plant rather than just the flower, and morphine could now be produced directly from dried poppy plants rather than from opium. All this saw output increase dramatically.

  Before the war it had been the job of the discredited League of Nations to coordinate international action against drug barons, but in 1945 a new institution took over this role—the United Nations. Early UN reports portrayed a world on the brink of a drug addiction epidemic. Amidone was identified as one of the new synthetic drugs that offered morphinelike euphoria. “An able but unscrupulous chemist,” said one report, “with equipment and materials available in the open market, could undoubtedly produce substantial amounts of these drugs secretly. One factory alone could flood the whole world with these toxic substances.”

  It was a potential gold mine for criminal gangs with a massively enlarged market desperate for new and old highs. Lucky Luciano was well aware of this, particularly as he now resided in a country recovering from the ravages of war and with a heady mix of administrative chaos, Allied occupation, and efficient black market suppliers. And yet, if Luciano thought he could dominate the demand for postwar drugs, he was in for a surprise. Many other suppliers were already in charge of large chunks of the market.

  The UN identified four main sources of opium production: Mexico, Iran, India, and Turkey. Of those, Mexico was by far the most important, with at least 50 percent of the farmed opium turned into morphine or heroin. An investigation by the Mexican government in spring 1947 found that 4,500 fields of opium were being cultivated and that thirty to forty landing strips had been built to handle the illicit movement of narcotics into the United States and elsewhere. Clearly, this was the main conduit of opium-derived drugs into the United States, and it dwarfed any imports from Europe. There is no known link between Luciano and the Mexican drug traffickers.

  The international flow of drugs received an extra boost in 1949 when the Communists won control of China. They inherited a drug empire that had been cynically exploited by the Nationalists to raise money for their cause. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) estimated that some 670 tons of raw opium was being produced and stored in southern China with at least four tons of it passing every month through Hong Kong on to the Pacific Rim with a good portion of it entering the United States.

  Harry Jacob Anslinger was commissioner of the FBN at this crucial time, and had been its boss since its inception in 1930, when he was appointed to the post at the age of thirty-eight. Like his crime-busting colleague J. Edgar Hoover, he dominated his organization for more than three decades, finally giving up the office in 1962. He became a relentless foe of Lucky Luciano—who dubbed him “Ass-linger”—and hounded him throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Anslinger was behind the U.S. government operation to get him thrown out of Cuba.

  In 1953, Anslinger’s biggest concern was how Communist China was using its stash of opium as a Cold War weapon. When he addressed the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in April of that year, he said, “There can be little doubt of the true purposes of Communist China in the organized sale of narcotics. Their purposes include monetary gain, financing political activities in various countries, and sabotage. The Communists have planned well and know a well-trained soldier becomes a liability and a security risk from the moment he first takes a shot of heroin.”

  It is very interesting to note that when this statement came to the attention of the British embassy in Washington, D.C., they were less than impressed by Anslinger’s warning. In a departmental comment attached to the front of the statement, they made the candid remark that much of his statement was based on Chinese Nationalist propaganda and they understood that “Mr Anslinger is under pressure in Washington and having to fight to keep his job, partly because of his lack of success in combating juvenile delinquency in the US and partly for domestic political reasons.”

  Like all veteran bureaucrats, Anslinger knew he had to maintain the appearance of master criminal enemies of the state in order to justify his budget and departmental existence. This may help to explain why Anslinger directed part of his anger at Lucky Luciano in Italy—a high-profile mobster whom the public had heard of and could fully appreciate why the FBN might be concerned about his activities.

  There are some references in contemporary newspapers to Luciano being involved in smuggling narcotics from Europe to America, but it is certainly not on the massive scale of either the Communist Chinese or the Mexicans.

  In January 1948, the New York Daily Mirror reported that federal authorities seized the biggest cache of contraband opium since 1941—fifty pounds of opium in raw gum form and ten pounds of opium with a value of $300,000, but with a street value when cut of more than $1 million. It was discovered when customs agents boarded the French freighter Bastia at Pier 28 in the East River. The ship had called at North African and southern European ports, including Naples, before it arrived in New York.

  The drugs were found hidden in three burlap sacks in heavy tar-paper wrappings floating in a lubricating oil tank beneath the floor plates of the engine room. Their smell had been disguised by the inclusion of twelve bottles of French perfume. The link to the exiled Sicilian mobster was made by Deputy Surveyor Herman Lipski, head of the customs enforcement division. “We have positive information in our files that Luciano is involved directly or indirectly in all transportation of dope from Italian and French ports,” he said. In the two years since Luciano’s deportation, they had been searching all ships from the Mediterranean and had seized some $10 million worth of drugs in just the previous year.

  Anslinger’s conviction that Luciano was masterminding drug trafficking from Italy was based on pretty flimsy evidence. On June 25, 1949, Italian-American Vincent Trupia was stopped at Ciampino airport just outside Rome. He had arrived from Germany—Luciano’s old drug-smuggling territory—and was catching a plane to New York. One piece of his luggage had a false bottom and it was found to contain 6.8 kilograms of cocaine, worth 15 million lire ($50,000). The FBI was informed, but no one was caught waiting for Trupia in New York. U.S. authorities suspected Luciano of involvement and under their pressure the Rome police searched his apartment and he was jailed for nine days.

  “If somebody slips on a banana peel,” he complained to the press, “the cops call me in to find out if I’m selling bananas.”

  The Italian police wanted him to give up his associates and suggested a whole raft of local criminals they linked him with.

  “The way they tal
k about my ‘lieutenants,’” he snapped, “I got more than the army.”

  Such wisecracking did not endear him to Rome’s police force, but one of their police chiefs shortly afterward admitted to a journalist that charges against Luciano were “pure inventions.”

  Luciano agreed.

  “Italy has one of the best police forces in the world,” he said, “and if they had anything on me they’d arrest me.”

  They didn’t have anything on him, but they banned him from Rome for three years and he moved to Naples. Luciano hated the southern city, calling its inhabitants “dirty Neapolitans,” and did everything he could to get back to Rome, where he had several properties.

  An FBI investigation into the criminal activities of Longy Zwillman—a longtime Jewish associate of Luciano—quoted the Newark News when it reported a raid on the Casablanca Club on May 16, 1950, for handling heroin. Thirty-one federal indictments were handed down prior to the raid. Small-time hoodlum William Margo, arrested in the raid, was reported to have contacted Luciano in Italy through his girlfriend. Zwillman opened the Casablanca Club with his own money but ownership was passed on to Zwillman’s former chauffeur.

  In 1951, Giuseppe Dosi was the agent at the Italian Ministry of the Interior charged with the Luciano case. He looked at all the evidence gathered by his police force and could see there was very little to act on. When he wrote a memorandum to Anslinger he had to admit that “in spite of the strict and continual surveillance of which [Luiciano] is the object, nothing has been found against him.”

  Anslinger declined to believe Dosi and dispatched FBN Special Agent Charles Siragusa to Rome to further investigate Luciano’s activities. A former wartime OSS agent born to Sicilian immigrant parents, Siragusa was an accomplished investigator. He discovered that Joe Pici was Luciano’s criminal lieutenant. An underworld informer told Siragusa that Pici had made several drug deliveries to the United States and had supplied trafficker Frank Callace, who, with his uncle, was arrested with three kilograms of heroin in Rome on April 6, 1951. This was confirmed in an International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) report of June 1952 in which it said that Pici and Callace had been sentenced several times previously for drug trafficking and had been deported from the United States. “Furthermore,” said the report, “among the accomplices of these persons were a certain ‘Lucky’ Luciano and others.”