by Tim Newark
“On May 8, ’53, a certain Pertusi was engaged in a drug transaction in Trieste,” said the British police report. “Upon hearing that his two accomplices had been arrested, he fled to Rome. We made constant efforts to obtain the return of Pertusi to Trieste, but all was in vain. Rome Police replied that he could not be located. However, reliable sources advised us that Pertusi was physically in Rome and had been in contact with the Guardia di Finanza [a military police force charged with stopping drug trafficking]. Nevertheless, Pertusi was tried here in absentia, sentenced and later amnestied. Pertusi returned to Trieste when he learned the amnesty had been granted. So far as I am concerned, his crime went unpunished.”
From this incident, it seemed that the Italian police always preferred to blame outsiders for bringing illicit drugs to their shores. This view was solidly expressed by Luke Monzelli, a lieutenant in the carabinieri tasked with following foreign crooks.
“What is it that makes Americans think that the simple act of deportation will solve the problems of gangsters whose activities they cannot abolish because of ‘insufficient evidence’?” complained Monzelli. “When they unleashed Luciano in effect they appointed a clever man the Chairman of the Board of an international drug cartel … .”
When the Americans deported more gangsters in the 1950s, they merely provided Luciano with more soldiers, argued Monzelli.
“They could not be denied their cards of identity or Italian passports. So they fanned out, under Luciano’s direction, to Marseilles, to Munich, to Tunis, to Hamburg, to Frankfurt, to London. A couple stayed at home, travelling constantly as Luciano spun his spider’s web with the help of these fellow-Mafiosi who set themselves up in their cities as merchants and importers.”
It was all Italian mythmaking. In reality, it was their own homegrown crooks that proved to be the biggest operators. In March 1956, after coming under sustained international pressure, Italy finally banned heroin production on its own soil.
In 1973, FBN agent Charles Siragusa played himself in Italian film director Francesco Rosi’s movie Lucky Luciano, an impressive film biography of the mobster. In this, Rosi refers to Luciano buying his heroin from Schiapparelli and selling it on to the United States via Marseilles. One scene shows Anslinger at the UN blaming an Italian delegate for allowing his country’s legally manufactured heroin to pass into the mobster’s hands. Rosi wrote the screenplay himself, based on Siragusa’s comments, and this has undoubtedly added to the legend of Luciano as the narcotics overlord of postwar Italy.
Joseph Bonanno returned to Sicily in October 1957. It had been thirty-seven years since the Fascists had chased him out of the island, but in that time he had survived the Castellammarese War and risen to become head of one of the five main Mafia families in New York. He adored his Sicilian background—conducted much of his business in the dialect at home—and delighted in his return visit.
“I don’t mean to degrade the United States,” he said. “I am an American citizen and it’s a great country. But when I revisited Italy I felt as if I had returned to high civilization.”
The Christian Democrat minister for trade had a red carpet rolled out for Bonanno at Rome airport. It didn’t come better than that. The cabinet minister was a childhood friend of Bonanno from Castellammare and had ridden the wave of Christian Democrat success—thanks in part to the electoral influence of the Mafia who helped put them in power. Bonanno stayed in a grand hotel in Rome overlooking the fashionable Via Veneto. From there, he traveled directly to Palermo in Sicily. He makes no reference at all to meeting Luciano—obviously, not sharing Lansky’s desire to add to the old mobster’s luster by paying homage to him in Naples.
In the Sicilian capital, Bonanno admitted to meeting “men of honor,” who showed him around a city being disfigured by corrupt Mafia-backed building projects. According to his own memoirs, the only incident that disturbed him was a clash with a disrespectful waiter. He ended that by smashing a glass jug of water over the man’s head.
In truth, this was no vacation. Bonanno was on a business trip and, according to Mafia legend, it was one of the most momentous of the postwar era. At the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes on Via Roma—Luciano’s favorite hotel in Palermo—he chaired a meeting of American gangsters and their Sicilian counterparts. Bonnano was backed up by his second-in-command, Frank Garofalo, and senior family members, Carmine Galante and John Bonventre, plus other key American mafiosi. The Sicilians were headed by Don Giuseppe Genco Russo, who had taken over after the death of Don Calogero Vizzini in 1954.
One of the minor Sicilian gangsters attending the meeting was Tommaso Buscetta. He later became a key informer against the Mafia and liked to talk up his status within the underworld. He denied there ever was a formal conference in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, but does say that he sat down with both Bonanno and Lucky Luciano at a dinner in October 1957, along the waterfront in Palermo. He further claimed that it was Luciano who set up the whole meeting. Buscetta is the only source for this, and Luciano’s role as fixer for the Mafia gathering is not attested by any other primary witness, least of all Bonanno.
It seems very unlikely that Luciano did in fact attend such a meeting in Palermo. His every movement was watched by the Italian police and American agents, and his presence in Palermo would only have attracted unwelcome attention. Also, in the light of previous incidents in Italy throughout the 1950s, it appears that Luciano’s power had been in serious decline ever since Lansky had felt it necessary to pay him a morale-boosting visit back in 1949. He was no longer a major player in the international Mafia and Bonanno would have put little value on seeing him. With the death of Don Calo three years earlier, Luciano had lost his most powerful contact in Sicily. Younger and more aggressive mafiosi were on the rise and they had no interest in old-timers.
It was at the Palermo meeting in 1957 that Bonanno forged a transatlantic alliance between the American Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia. They agreed that the Sicilians would organize the export of heroin to the United States. Much of this would pass through the little ports of northwest Sicily—such as Castellammare del Golfo, Bonanno’s birthplace—under the guise of food exports destined for America. The prime motive for this shifting of responsibility to the Sicilian Mafia for drug trafficking was the introduction of the draconian U.S. Narcotics Control Act of 1956. This threatened forty-year maximum prison sentences for anyone convicted of dealing with drugs.
By the time Bonanno arrived in Sicily, one in three of his crime family had been arrested on drug charges. If they carried on like that, there would be no one left to run their other criminal enterprises. Bonanno had little choice but to hand over the business to his Sicilian colleagues. It also underlined the point that if Luciano had truly been overlord of a narcotics smuggling network, as Anslinger and his FBN agents wished to portray him, then surely he would have been the obvious person to organize this. Instead, he was sidelined by Bonanno and the Sicilians who ran it themselves.
The truth is that Luciano’s power within the Mafia has been steadily draining away ever since he was kicked out of Cuba in 1947. His high profile made him useless within the organization as everything he did attracted too much heat. His New York friends still held him in high regard—because of the old times—none more so that Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, but that couldn’t make up for his real lack of authority. American government agents liked to ascribe tremendous power to Luciano because it suited their purposes—they knew where he was and could do something about him—but this was just a publicity game.
All that said, Luciano’s American friends still wielded considerable power within the United States, and when it came to a falling-out among the mafiosi, Luciano could still help to deliver a killing blow—especially when it involved his longtime rival, Vito Genovese.
16
GENOVESE’S GAME
In Washington, D.C., before a Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, Salvatore Moretti, a New Jersey racketeer and brother of W
illie Moretti, was asked to testify about his criminal associations.
“Do you know what the Mafia is?” asked Counsel Rudolph Halley.
“What?” said Moretti.
“The Mafia? M-A-F-I-A?”
“I am sorry, I don’t know what you are talking about … .”
“You never heard that word before in your life?” persisted Halley.
“No, sir, I did not.”
“Do you read?”
“Nah—as I says before, I don’t read very much on account of my eyes.”
By the end of what became known as the Kefauver Committee hearings, everyone in America knew what the Mafia was. It was the process that Luciano and Lansky had feared most—full nationwide coverage of their activities in every newspaper and on television. The chairman of the committee was the softspoken forty-seven-year-old Democrat senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver. What had concerned him was the corruption of political life by organized crime. Once many fellow Democrats in Chicago and New York caught a whiff of his investigation into their relationship with the Mob, they probably would have liked to order a hit on the six-foot-three-inch senator.
The committee of five Democrat and Republican senators sat from May 10, 1950 to May 1, 1951, and examined more than six hundred witnesses, including mobsters, politicians, and policemen. Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello were the most senior gangsters interviewed. Costello famously refused to have his face televised, so the camera focused lower down on his anxious fingers in what became known as the “hand ballet.” Many of the witnesses took the Fifth on the grounds that their answers would incriminate them, but the quiet, insistent questioning of Kefauver mesmerized many into letting slip nuggets of information.
By the end of the process, Kefauver concluded, “A nationwide crime syndicate does exist in the United States of America, despite the protestations of a strangely assorted company of criminals, self-serving politicians, plain blind fools, and others who may be honestly misguided, that there is no such combine.”
Among the “plain blind fools,” the senator probably meant J. Edgar Hoover, who had consistently downplayed the existence of the Mafia. Kefauver identified it as “a shadowy, international criminal organization” and said that there were two main factions in New York and Chicago, with the East Coast Mob led by Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Joe Adonis.
Kefauver reserved his praise for the crime-busting activities of Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and it is a little surprising to see that he took their angle on the importance of Luciano to the syndicate.
“The Mafia today actually is a secret international government-within-a-government,” said Kefauver. “It has an international head in Italy—believed by United States authorities to be Charles (Lucky) Luciano.”
It was a breathtaking statement that relied mainly on Anslinger’s questionable evidence. Unable to talk to Luciano, the committee spoke to many of the key players involved with him. They wanted to know more about his rumored secret deal with the government during World War II, but Governor Dewey refused to testify before them. They spoke instead to Moses Polakoff, his attorney, who confirmed some of the details regarding the prevention of sabotage in the New York docks. FBN agent George White contributed his information about narcotics smuggler August Del Grazio offering to act as go-between with Luciano to help make Sicily “a much softer target than it might otherwise be.” The full details of Luciano’s wartime deal came out four years later in the Herlands Report, which thoroughly investigated the alliance between U.S. Naval Intelligence and organized crime.
Lansky admitted to maintaining links with Luciano, seeing him off at Ellis Island, then meeting again in Havana and Rome. Costello let slip that he bumped into Luciano, sharing a car ride with him to the airport in Cuba.
“What did you talk about?” asked Counsel Halley.
“Just his health and what not,” said Costello, “and that is about all.”
Lower-level mobster Mike Lescari revealed a little more, saying he had taken $2,500 in cash to Luciano in Italy. “I just thought he might need it,” he added.
It all really amounted to nothing, but still the committee liked to persist with its notion of Luciano as a criminal mastermind.
Bizarrely, Senator Charles W. Tobey berated Moses Polakoff for doing his job as Luciano’s defense lawyer.
“How did you become counsel for such a dirty rat as that?” said Tobey. “Aren’t there some ethics in the legal profession?”
“Minorities and undesirables and persons with bad reputations are more entitled to the protection of the law than are the so-called honorable people,” said Polakoff. “I don’t have to apologize to you.”
“I look upon you in amazement,” sneered Tobey.
“I look upon you in amazement,” said Polakoff, “a Senator of the United States, for making such a statement.”
The smart retort had little effect on Tobey, who concluded: “There are some men who by their conduct in their life become a stench in the nostrils of decent American citizens, and in my judgment Lucky Luciano stands at the head of the list.”
Lansky was later dismissive of the legal attacks on him.
“Committees like the Kefauver Committee,” he said, “pointed the finger at me. Yet why is it that with the great power of the United States behind them, they were never able, or willing, to put me up in a court of law and accuse me with the proof that I was a so-called master-criminal?”
The Kefauver Committee was more successful in establishing the links among mobsters, corrupt politicians, and policemen. Former New York mayor William O’Dwyer was shown to have a close working relationships with Frank Costello and Joe Adonis and as a result of this failed to tackle the rampant racketeering within his city. Costello was the real casualty of the hearings. He talked too much and looked nervous. The national exposure he received meant he could no longer enjoy his cozy relations with senior politicians and his era as powerbroker for the Mob was over. Kefauver, on the other hand, came out of the hearings as a political star and was selected as a presidential running mate in 1956.
In retrospect, it all started to go wrong for Luciano and his associates in 1947 in Cuba. Intended as a grand reunion of all the great gangsters from the 1930s with Luciano as their honored leader, it turned out to be a disaster for the chief mobster. Not only did it expose the limits of his power and his inability to outsmart the U.S. government—Anslinger’s FBN in particular—it also demonstrated that the cohesion of the top bosses that had served them so well for the better part of two decades was breaking down.
Although their businesses were based on close friendship since the 1920s on the Lower East Side, the pressures of their multimillion-dollar businesses superseded their amity. Bugsy Siegel was the first to go. Neither Meyer Lansky nor Lucky Luciano could do anything to protect him. Sure, he was the author of his own fate, but if Lansky and Luciano had been at the top of their game—as they were in the early 1930s—they could have fended off the demands for his blood, but the other heads of the Five Families no longer deferred to their old capo.
Frank Costello, also close to Siegel, took some of the blame for losing so much Mob money in Las Vegas, and Luciano did his best to shield him from the wrath of the other families. Costello’s lawyer, George Wolf, was given the gist of the conversation between the two in Havana.
“You got to get the money up somehow,” Luciano told Costello. “Otherwise I can’t hold them back.”
“I’ll get it,” said Costello.
“Meanwhile, you retire as head of the Commission. Genovese takes over.”
Costello agreed.
“But I told the boys—and they agree—as soon as you get the money back, you take over again,” said Luciano. “I want you there.”
“What happens to Bugsy?” asked Costello.
“Him I can’t help.”
On the evening of June 20, 1947, Siegel was sitting on a chintz-patterned sofa in his Beverly Hills mansion reading the Los An
geles Times when the glass of the large picture window shattered under the impact of seven bullets from a thirty-caliber army carbine. One smashed his nose and a second ripped out his right eye, flinging it fifteen feet across the floor. The dead body of the once Hollywood-handsome hoodlum looked a bloody mess.
With Luciano back in Italy and both Costello and Lansky cowed by the assault on their close friend, it was clear that there was a new dominant figure in the American underworld. That was Vito Genovese—the man who Luciano said should take over from Costello while he sorted out the money problems.
Ever since the forty-eight-year-old Genovese had come back to America from Italy in 1945—courtesy of the U.S. government—he had been determined to reassert himself and take over what his old boss Luciano left behind. Even among other mafiosi, Genovese had a mean reputation. He fell in love with a married woman, Anna Petillo, in 1932. Her husband was later found strangled. The two men who killed him also disappeared. Genovese never liked to leave loose ends to any crime and was renowned as a dependable hit man.
Luciano chose him as one of his top four henchmen to kill Joe the Boss. In an anecdote told in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, the mobster was musing in jail how best to end World War II when he came up with the idea of assassinating the Nazi leader. His associates looked at each other—then laughed.
“What the hell are you laughin’ at?” snaps Luciano. “We’ve got the best hit man in the world over there—Vito Genovese. That dirty little pig owes his life to me and now it’s time for him to make good on it. He’s so fuckin’ friendly with Mussolini and that punk son-in-law of his, that Count Ciano, he oughta be able to get close enough to Hitler to do it.”
It was not such a farfetched idea. Bugsy Siegel was rumored to have visited Rome in 1938 with his girlfriend—the Countess di Frasso—and shared a villa with top Nazis Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. The Jewish gangster was just itching to finish off the strutting Nazis as they walked around the garden of the villa but held back because of the potential repercussions for his lover.
