by Tim Newark
Siragusa’s informer—who put the finger on Pici—was later revealed as Eugene Giannini, a drug dealer for the New York Tommy Lucchese family, who was arrested in Naples in 1950. He had been turned by the FBN in 1942 when he received fifteen months in jail for trafficking heroin. In 1950, Giannini was tasked with smuggling penicillin and other medical supplies into the Italian black market, along with counterfeit U.S. currency. He met Luciano in Naples and fed little bits of information to Siragusa. When he was arrested by the Italian police for dealing in fake dollars, he despaired at the filthy conditions in prison and elaborated on his knowledge about Luciano’s connections with drug trafficking—anything to get him out. He made the fatal error of putting his thoughts in writing.
“I’ve given you a lot of information,” he wrote in a letter to the FBN. “I gathered all this information the same way that got me into the jail that I am in now—by just mingling with people who are doing these things.”
He mentioned linking Pici and Callace with Luciano but denied his own involvement with narcotics smuggling.
“I was being investigated for being mixed up with junk,” he said. “Well, you can look until doomsday. All you find is talk, talk—what I spread around to make friends—but actual facts you will never find because there aren’t any.”
Giannini was right there. The problem for him was that he was trying to be too clever, trying to use Luciano’s reputation to his own advantage. Finally put on trial in Italy, Giannini was acquitted for lack of evidence and flown back to the United States.
But word got out that Giannini had been squealing. Tony Bender, faithful lieutenant to Vito Genovese, summoned veteran Mafia hit man Joe Valachi to a meeting in Greenwich Village in September 1952.
“Gene [Giannini] has been talking to the junk agents,” said Bender. “The old man [Genovese] has got the word personally from Charley Lucky. Charley says Gene is the smartest stool pigeon that ever lived. He has been talking to the junk agents for years. He has got to be hit, him and anybody with him.”
Valachi subcontracted the hit to three East Harlem gunmen, and a few days later Giannini was shot in the head, his body found in a gutter outside 221 East Tenth Street. At the time he was planning to import six kilograms of heroin into the United States from his brother-in-law in Italy. Giannini’s death was no great loss to the FBN, as his supposed inside information was far less important than the heroin he was smuggling into the country.
Despite all these stories, no definite link could be made with Luciano. Certainly, his notoriety attracted the attention of people who wanted to deal in drugs. During the time he lived in Naples, he met a cigarette-smuggling countess who wanted to progress to narcotics and a rich Englishman with a yacht who volunteered his boat for drug-smuggling purposes. Luciano dropped them both once he learned of their ambitions. An Associated Press release from Naples said Luciano was under constant surveillance by Italian police and was interviewed by them on November 29, 1952. With attention like this, Luciano probably suspected everyone of trying to set him up as a narcotics dealer.
An indication as to how desperate Siragusa was getting to pin something on Luciano came with the disappearance of Lorenzo Rago, mayor of Battipaglia, on the evening of January 20, 1953. Ostensibly a wealthy landowner with his own canning factory, Rago also led a double life as a backer of cigarette smuggling and possibly other substances. One theory was that a delivery of contraband cigarettes had been intercepted by the Italian Coast Guard and been jettisoned into the sea, resulting in the loss of 20 million lire for the mayor. Rago had complained and been eliminated by the smuggling gang.
It seemed pretty straightforward, but Siragusa was convinced that Luciano had to be involved somehow and found an ally in Giovanni Florita, head of the local police in Naples. Florita was keen to remove Luciano from his vicinity and asked his superior in Rome for permission to expel the gangster from Naples and confine him to his home village of Lercara Friddi in Sicily. Rome refused, so Florita continued to harass Luciano by depriving him of his driving license and passport. The police chief also imposed an 8:00 P.M. curfew on the mobster. Luciano’s lawyers appealed against this measure to the Ministry of the Interior, but they were turned down on the grounds that Luciano was known to frequent racetracks and clubs with a view to resurrecting his contacts with the underworld and narcotics trafficking.
To link Luciano with the Rago affair, Siragusa recruited another low-level drug peddler called Francesco Scibilia who had been deported from the United States. Scibilia claimed that Luciano was linked to Rago because the mobster had lent him 150 million lire to invest in his cigarette-smuggling racket. Rago, apparently, had pocketed most of the money and Luciano retaliated by having the mayor kidnapped in Tangiers. Scibilia supposedly proved the truth of all this by presenting a business card that belonged to Rago’s brother with 48,000 lire scribbled on the back—the sum presumably for his ransom.
This unlikely tale was enough for Siragusa and Florita to devote much police time and effort to following up and further harassing Luciano. In the end, it turned out that Scibilia had obtained the business card when he bumped into Rago’s brother on a train in Calabria—and the sum of money jotted down on the back of the card was the value of some stolen watches. It was no more sinister than that! A furious Luciano instructed his lawyers to sue Scibilia for libel.
The sad truth of this story, as far as Luciano was concerned, is that if he truly had the mafioso power claimed for him by Siragusa and Florita, he would not have been so easily targeted by the Italian police. His influence within the Italian government would have protected him. The same is true if he was making millions of dollars smuggling narcotics. He would have used this wealth to better protect himself from pretty minor harassment by the police. Florita was obviously finding it very easy to pick on Luciano. This alone proves that Luciano’s power during this period must have been greatly diminished and was nowhere near that ascribed to him. It served the purposes of everyone to make a bogeyman out of Luciano—because they knew very well he wasn’t that terrifying in reality.
Luciano’s criminal impotency was revealed in an anecdote told by local mafioso Antonio Calderone, who recalled an incident in the Agnano hippodrome in Naples toward the end of the 1950s. There, in full public view, a low-level Neapolitan hoodlum slapped Luciano. It was a gross insult to the veteran mobster and the disrespectful criminal was soon after murdered, but the moment was considered emblematic by Calderone as the end of American influence in his country. This scene was later dramatized in Franceso Rosi’s movie about Luciano. Clearly, the old gangster might still have powerful friends in America, but he lacked any serious respect among the Italian mafiosi.
Siragusa was delighted when an undercover agent revealed to him that Luciano was “so frightened of my influence with the Italian police that he never even drives through the city of Rome during his frequent trips from Naples to Santa Marinella, where he owns some property.” The mobster said that “rather than driving though Rome, he leaves the main highway and takes a detour.” This had little to do with Siragusa—if Luciano violated his ban from Rome, he faced six months in prison.
With so little to go on, when it came to making a connection between Luciano and the international drug trade, the FBI could only draw on the paltry evidence gathered by the FBN. In an FBI monograph on the Mafia written in July 1958, they quoted the FBN, saying “there exists a realm of cooperation and coordination between Mafiosi in the United States and the Mafia in Sicily in the illicit traffic of drugs.” They pointed the finger at Nick Gentile, who jumped bail in 1937 to flee to Italy and was closely linked to Luciano. They also mentioned Joseph Pici as an intimate of Luciano, who was known to smuggle heroin into the United States for the Kansas City Mob.
Nick Gentile was a senior narcotics dealer. He even admitted to his involvement in a major drug-smuggling ring in the United States. Back in the mid-1930s, he had contact with Charles La Gaipa, a supplier of narcotics from Sicily. La Gaipa proposed t
o Gentile that he organize drug handlers in Texas and Louisiana. In their first year working together, they would clear $100,000. At this stage, Gentile was part of the Mangano family, and he claimed that Albert Anastasia was a member of the drug syndicate he put together.
In 1937, Gentile suspected that his girlfriend was an undercover agent and soon after the FBN swooped on his organization. “In one night alone they arrested 75 narcotics dealers that were operating from New York to Texas,” he recalled. He fled to Sicily, where he reestablished his drug-smuggling business until he was turned by an FBN agent in 1958. Gentile would have been a prime candidate for Luciano to work with, but Luciano’s high profile in Naples discouraged Gentile, who was terrified of being arrested again.
“During the talks between my lawyer and the judge of New Orleans [where he was arrested],” recalled Gentile, “the judge said, thinking I did not understand English, ‘What’s the use of reducing bail when once in New York the court will throw the book at him—by adding tax evasion, and white slavery that will bring such a sentence that he will never be able to get out of prison, as was the case with Lucky Luciano and for the same reason Lucky was condemned for 30 to 50 years?’”
With such a reputation for being framed up, it is understandable if Gentile had wanted to steer well clear of doing business with Luciano in Italy.
Meyer Lansky visited Luciano in Rome during the early part of this period, although he later denied he had planned any such meeting. He was on a general vacation, touring southern Italy with his new wife in June and July 1949, in which he visited Palermo, Capri, Naples, and Pompeii. At the Kefauver hearings in 1951, he was asked to explain exactly what happened in Rome. He said his meeting with Luciano had come about by accident thanks to the Italian press.
“He called me when I was about to ready to leave Rome,” Lansky said. “As far as I knew, he was in jail. And I said ‘How the hell did you know where I am staying?’ He says ‘Well, I got it from the paper, and I traced you through Naples, Hotel Excelsior. ’ Because I had my itinerary made up with Cook’s Tours.”
Luciano went to Lansky’s hotel.
“He came up to see me and he says ‘Do you want to have dinner with me?’ He invited me to dinner, and I said ‘OK.’ I couldn’t very well refuse him.”
Over dinner, Lansky claimed nothing was said about business in America.
“Just he told me how he was being crucified, and what happened to him. And I told him, I says ‘You have nothing to kick about; look at the way I am being crucified.’” Both were suffering from too much attention from the authorities.
Lansky was then asked if he had any knowledge of any money or assets of any kind that were given or sent to Luciano since he left the United States.
“Not that I know of,” said Lansky.
Lansky was very aware of the increased interest shown in him and Luciano by Anslinger’s agents. That summer just before he sailed to Italy, they burst into Lansky’s penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.
“I invited them in,” he recalled, “but the way they behaved I had the impression they were going to smash the place to pieces. They cross-examined me about my trip to Europe. For some reason they had it in their heads that I was involved in narcotics.”
Lansky understood that this was part of a publicity campaign by Anslinger to win positive headlines for the FBN.
“It was a game,” said Lansky, “but a nasty one for Teddy [his new wife] and me. It gave the authorities a lot of publicity, but I was outraged. They knew I never touched drugs in my life.”
But Lansky was playing a publicity game of his own. As his friend Doc Stacher revealed: “Meyer knew that Charlie felt out of things in Italy, and there were some signs that his influence wasn’t as strong as it used to be. That was unbearable for a man like Charlie. Meyer decided to demonstrate his friendship for Lucky by planning a trip to Italy, and for once he let it be known that he wouldn’t mind if the news got out.”
Lansky claimed that FBN agents followed him throughout his European trip and even tried to bug his hotel rooms, but all that attention suited him just fine as it demonstrated to the criminal fraternity back home in the United States that Luciano was still worth visiting. Maybe this also explains why the continuing FBN harassment of Luciano had its upside for the mobster because it made him still look like a Mr. Big.
In 1950, the New York Police Department reported that Luciano was receiving transatlantic telephone calls several times a week from leading mafiosi, including Frank Costello, Vincent Mangano, and Joe Adonis. The calls were made early morning, discussed various areas of criminal administration, and lasted roughly twenty minutes. In 1956, Joe Biondo—his old friend from the East Fourteenth Street days—was identified as the Mob’s go-between, traveling back and forth to Italy to keep Luciano informed on Mob matters and to pay him his slice of the profits. At the beginning of Luciano’s exile, this is said to have amounted to $25,000 a month. Frank Costello was said to keep him well supplied with cash as well, and one delivery from him amounted to $70,000.
This was the money that Luciano actually lived on in Italy—not the profits of any mythical drug dealing. He lived on the dividends of his previous decades of racketeering, when he was a real gangster chief and not the fake mobster he had now become.
Although it suited Anslinger’s political purposes to cast Luciano as a narcotics overlord in Italy, the truth of the situation reveals a more complex network of criminality. Turkey was the nearest source of opium into the Mediterranean region and this entered Italy via Yugoslavia. Much of it then passed through north Italian cities such as Milan and Genoa and continued to Marseilles in the south of France. Luciano’s supposed associate, Joe Pici, got his heroin from Milan. The other big seizure of 1951 comparable to that grabbed from the Callaces was a raid on a secret laboratory run by a Frenchman in which three kilograms of basic morphine was discovered. Further investigation showed that he was connected to heads of the Marseilles underworld already renowned for dealing in drugs and American cigarettes—the notorious French Connection.
Only one major drug seizure was linked to Sicily: 5.8 kilograms of heroin found at Alcamo in March 1952, just south of Castellammare del Golfo in the northwest of the island. It had arrived by train from Rome and was intended to be sent on to the United States. This was, undoubtedly, a Mafia organized trade. The four other major heroin seizures of that year were all in the north of Italy.
More significant than all these cases was the illicit trade in drugs from legitimate wholesale chemists in Turin, Genoa, and Milan, which between 1948 and 1952 amounted to a staggering 1,100 kilograms in total—900 kilograms of which was heroin—and led to the arrest of seven Italian businessmen. An ICPC report of May 1952 declared that “since the close of hostilities, hundredweights of kilos of morphine and of heroin were diverted in Italy from lawful manufacture, and that the distribution of these constituted the principal source of supply to the French black markets in drugs, and more especially the American ones.” This was known as the Schiapparelli case, after the name of the Turin-based pharmaceutical company.
FBN agent Siragusa reported that it was these corrupt factory bosses who had supplied known associates of Luciano with heroin, but, again, nothing stuck to him. Siragusa spent most of his time dealing with the really important suppliers in Turkey and the Middle East.
In 1956, the ICPC revealed that the Italian police had been working with the FBN to break a major drug-smuggling ring that operated across several Mediterranean countries, including Lebanon, Egypt, Italy, France, and then on to the United States. In Italy, the network was run by a Jerusalem-born Italian called Giorgio Morcos who ran his operations from a villa in Rome. He converted base morphine into heroin. When his villa was raided, he was found to have forty-seven kilograms of hashish, one kilogram of morphine, fifty grams of cocaine, and thousands of travelers’ checks stolen from American tourists in Rome.
None of the ICPC reports for this period credit Luciano with more tha
n peripheral involvement in heroin trading—he’s certainly not portrayed as the master crook of the drugs business. And yet the illusion persisted that somehow he was the shadowy presence behind all narcotics smuggling in Italy.
In 1954, the Italians accused the American and British military authorities in Trieste of allowing their territory to be used as a transit point between Yugoslavia and Italy for illicit drug trading. From 1947 to 1954, Trieste had been declared an independent city under the protection of the United Nations.
The British Home Office dismissed the accusations by saying “In view of the notorious Schiapparelli case, it seems incredible that the Italian government would be so foolish as to take such a brazen line …” It then concluded its letter to the British embassy in Washington, D.C., by saying “there is abundant evidence of organised and wide-spread illicit trafficking in Italy itself and some reason for suspecting that it is controlled, partly at any rate, by Italians expelled from the United States, eg ‘Lucky’ Luciano, a notorious racketeer and trafficker.”
As the British disputed the role of their military authorities in the supposed drug trade in Trieste, they called upon the head of the Venezia Giulia Police Force to give his candid version of the battle against drugs in Italy. He said that the FBN agent based in Rome was most useful and that, contrary to the critical comments of the Italians, who liked to shift the blame for their failures in drug policing to an alleged conspiracy based in Trieste, it was the Italian police force that was dragging its feet.
