Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  She also charmed Luciano, who considered her a “lady to the tip of her toes,” but he was too shy to make a move at their first meeting. Back in Rome, he arranged to attend the first night at a nightclub where she was dancing. He asked her on a date. She refused, but he persisted, and she eventually moved into his Rome apartment in June 1948.

  “She’s the only girl I ever loved,” said Luciano. “There was something about her that was special. If all broads were like her the world would be a terrific place.”

  It was her intelligence that beguiled him and he acted like the perfect gentleman around her—no swearing, no volcanic outbursts of anger at the persistent harassment of him by Anslinger and U.S. agents. She was blond when Luciano first met her, but in later photographs she is shown as a head-turning brunette. When Luciano was pulled in for questioning following the drug-smuggling arrest of Vincent Trupia at Rome airport, Lissoni wanted to visit him in jail and take him little cakes.

  “I’m lonely in this big apartment,” she told reporters, revealing an early talent for saying the right things in public. “Charley was always so gentle and kind. Why, oh, why don’t they stop this persecution?”

  When Luciano was kicked out of Rome, they moved to Naples. Lissoni wanted to have a family with Luciano, but the mobster was reluctant to bring children into a world overshadowed by his villainous reputation.

  “I didn’t want no son of mine to go through life as the son of Luciano, the gangster. That’s one thing I still hate Dewey for, making me a gangster in the eyes of the whole world.”

  Added to that was the fact that Luciano was never that close to his family. He had triumphed in the underworld away from them—unlike other mobsters who had a ready-made gang in their own brothers. He had kept his family life very separate from his criminal world, probably because his father disapproved so strongly of his ill-gotten gains. As a young man, his strength had been his friends—not his family—and he had no wish to surround himself with children and remind himself of a far from happy childhood.

  In Naples, they lived together in a penthouse apartment at Via Tasso 464 with a spectacular view across the bay toward Mount Vesuvius. Luciano had originally bought the block but sold off all the apartments, except for the penthouse—and he would have sold that for $16,000 if he’d got permission to go back to Rome. They exchanged wedding rings but did not get married. They both liked to dress stylishly and expensively and spent hours sitting in the best restaurants and bars. They regularly went to the races where Luciano invariably won. The races were usually fixed, and Luciano would settle up with bookies in town—never dealing in cash at the track. In the evening, after supper at home, they might go out to watch a movie.

  When Lissoni wasn’t around, Luciano still liked to flirt with other women—but God help him if she found out. On one occasion, she burst into their favorite haunt—the San Francisco Bar and Grill, which he owned—as he chatted with another woman and pulled a twenty-two caliber pistol from her handbag. Luciano was embarrassed and told her to stop making a scene.

  “If I ever see you even flirt with another girl,” she said, glowering, “you’ll get this.”

  An alternative version of this story came from an undercover FBN agent who had got friendly with Luciano. One evening they were at the Snake Pit nightclub in Naples when Lissoni walked in looking for him. Luciano told her that she had disobeyed his orders by coming into the low-life club and slapped her. This was probably his place to hang out with other women and he didn’t like her intruding. Later, Lissoni complained to the undercover agent, saying she was a civilized European, not a Sicilian, and was unaccustomed to being slapped. The next time Luciano beat her in public, she said, she would kill him with a pistol she kept in their apartment. Still, they stayed together.

  Luciano couldn’t help attracting attention. He was possibly the most famous gangster in the world. In Naples, he became something of a tourist destination for Americans on holiday. U.S. sailors coming into port would seek him out to sign autographs, while journalists were keen to get a scoop by interviewing him. One Italian-American merchant sailor regularly brought him cartons of his favorite brand of Viceroy cigarettes. Luigi Parigi, a New York labor union official on a holiday to Italy, gave him twenty-five tailor-made shirts, but they were the wrong size and he sent them back. Luciano liked to keep himself looking smart, and each day started with a visit to his favorite barbershop in Naples’s main railroad terminal.

  He was still a magnet for showbiz stars. Jimmy Durante sent him a check for $250 for undisclosed services. When Frank Sinatra was on tour in Italy, Luciano visited him at the Hotel Terminus in Naples. He later said he was tempted to tell the singer to go back to his first wife, Nancy, rather than chase after Ava Gardner, but considered it better not to interfere in Sinatra’s private affairs.

  Rumors abounded that he was still able to give authorities the slip. In February 1956, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was sent a clipping of Dorothy Kilgallen’s Broadway column. It cited underworld gossip that Luciano had been in the United States at least nine times and that it “cost him a cool $100,000 each time.” In December 1957, the Seattle office of the FBI received a message from a man with an Italian accent who said he was living in Tacoma, Washington.

  “Luciano came ashore from a boat somewhere on the West Coast,” said the Seattle report. The informer said “he hated Luciano’s guts. He had done some time for Luciano in the pen and wanted to see the s.o.b. get what was coming to him.” The agent was inclined to pay more attention to this because “there was no noise in the background and the caller did not sound incoherent or drunk,” but the director assured him that Luciano “was and has been continuously in Italy.”

  In 1956, Italian senator Lina Merlin accused Luciano of being involved in prostitution. She told a newspaper: “I have information showing that Lucky Luciano has shown more than just a passive interest in this highly lucrative operation. He still holds all the strings in Marseilles and New York and Naples.”

  The senator was the author of a law named after her that sought to outlaw government-licensed brothels in Italy. “There are 725 houses of ill repute between the Po Valley and Palermo,” she said, “and each one is inhabited by misery.” She estimated some two to three million Italian women lived by prostitution and that some of these were being trained in government-licensed brothels for export to the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, and Far East. “To make them more amenable,” she said, “the women are introduced to the dope habit.” The gangs who transported these women and the drugs were “among the world’s richest and most influential organizations” and even had tentacles behind the Iron Curtain.

  Throughout this period, Luciano was under constant surveillance and had to report regularly to the Italian police. He had to ask permission every time he left the city. In December 1958, the appellate court of Naples reviewed Luciano’s case at the request of the prosecuting attorney of Naples, who was requesting authority to continue police surveillance and investigation of Luciano, but the appellate court upheld an earlier decision by the Naples court denying police the authority to continue surveillance. It declared that insufficient evidence had been produced to indicate that Luciano was “engaged in illegal activities or activities inimical to the best interests of the Republic of Italy.”

  Despite this, an Italian police statement in 1958 maintained that “Luciano spends more money than he appears to earn here and that he has contact with shady characters who go back and forth between Italy and the United States.”

  Luciano’s happiness ended in October 1958 when Igea Lissoni died from breast cancer at the age of thirty-six. He accompanied her body back to Milan and was said to have wept at the funeral—the first time any of his friends had seen him cry. Shortly afterward, a magazine interview with him described the sixty-one-year-old mobster as a “tight lipped individual who is in the habit of answering the most searching question with a stonyfaced silence … . His life is a quiet one and his greatest desire
is to forget and be forgotten.”

  After the death of Lissoni, only the conviction of Vito Genovese lifted Luciano’s spirits. During this period, he was visited by Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent Sal Vizzini. Despite no evidence whatsoever to validate their continued interest in him, the FBN considered it well worth investing taxpayers’ money to keep the old mobster under close surveillance. Vizzini arrived in Naples in April 1959 pretending to be U.S. Air Force major Mike Cerra. He made it clear that his bosses still considered Luciano number one on their international list of criminals.

  “His tentacles were long and his influence powerful,” enthused Vizzini in his 1972 memoirs. “The Narcotics Bureau, and the Justice Department, knew he was still making decisions for the Mob, that he was still receiving large shipments of money from the States, and that he was still engaged in directing much of the world’s narcotics traffic.”

  It was a case of yet another law enforcement agent magnifying Luciano’s reputation to suit his own purpose—this time to tell a real-life adventure story. His arrival came shortly after a three-part series was broadcast by New York radio station WMCA profiling Luciano. It quoted the FBN saying that Luciano was “the guiding genius behind the expansion of the international dope traffic.” It also repeated Anslinger’s statement to Congress that Luciano was one of the top men in the Italian-American syndicate and that he bought opium in Turkey, had it refined in Italy, and then sold it on to the United States.

  Despite finding little evidence of this narcotics trafficking, Vizzini’s account of his time with Luciano is an interesting insight into how the old mobster spent his last few years. The Sicilian-born Vizzini got on well with Luciano, having been introduced to him by a waiter turned informer at the San Francisco Bar and Grill. Luciano was glad for the company. He took Vizzini to the races and chatted away with him in bars. He was still bitter about being exiled from New York.

  “Just six months, that’s all I want, three months in New York and three months in Miami. Then they could bury me,” he told Vizzini. “I’d still be there if it wasn’t for that son of a bitch Tom Dewey. He framed me, Mike, and that’s the God’s truth. I never took a dime from a woman in my life, let alone from a prostitute.”

  Luciano was constantly accompanied by a large bodyguard called “Momo,” armed with a nine millimeter Browning automatic, who took an instant dislike to Vizzini. In a nightclub, they ended up having a fight and the FBN agent disarmed the hulking giant with a karate chop to the throat. A little later, Vizzini got to the point of his mission and made a reference to a wad of $100 bills Luciano pulled out of his pocket in the San Francisco Bar and Grill.

  “Where do you get that kind of money around here?” he asked.

  “Not in Italy, that’s for sure,” snapped Luciano.

  Luciano wasn’t making a fortune in Italy from illicit heroin smuggling. He was still living off the money his friends continued to send him from the United States, and that was getting to be less and less as they came under pressure themselves. He was always thinking of little business projects, but these usually came to nothing. On one occasion he told another undercover agent he was considering buying up vacant lots and building public garages on them.

  The contrast in fortunes between Luciano and other mafiosi was shown when Joe Adonis, who ran rackets and gambling in New Jersey, agreed to accept deportation to Italy in 1956 rather than go to jail for perjury. He retired to Milan, where he lived in a grand style on his accumulated fortune. Adonis had been one of Luciano’s gunmen back in the late 1920s when he helped kill Joe the Boss. Occasionally, he met with Luciano in Naples, but the men fell out soon after, partly it seems because Adonis flaunted his wealth and never asked if he could help out his onetime boss.

  When Vizzini wasn’t visiting Luciano, he was on far more important business tracking the real narcotics traffickers from Turkey to Marseilles. They were the ones making the big money.

  That Luciano was still regarded as a menacing figure in Italy is revealed by a curious anecdote regarding the celebrated singer and movie star Mario Lanza. As a young man brought up in Philadelphia, Lanza developed a beautiful tenor voice. During the war, he toured with the U.S. Army’s Special Services unit when he got his first show business break singing at a party for Frank Sinatra. After a breathtaking performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1947, he starred in several musicals. But he was a difficult performer, plagued by weight problems and an unhealthy lifestyle, and he was eventually dropped by Hollywood. He resurfaced in Italy, where he toured and made movies. In 1959, he met Luciano in Naples.

  Ever mindful of good publicity, Luciano thought it would be a great idea if the golden tenor sang at a charity gala he was organizing in Naples. When the temperamental Lanza failed to appear for a rehearsal, it is said that two of Luciano’s henchmen visited him to ensure he would not back out from the concert.

  Unable to cope with this pressure and not wanting to perform at all, Lanza checked himself into a clinic in Rome, claiming he had to lose weight rapidly for the good of his health. Luciano was furious. A few days later, when Lanza’s chauffeur came to see him on October 7, Lanza was found in a coma with an empty intravenous tube pumping air into his arm. Attempts to revive him failed, and the thirty-eight-year-old Lanza was pronounced dead later that day. No official autopsy was performed, but it was said he died from a heart attack.

  The principal source of this story is Mario Lanza’s daughter, Colleen, who was eleven years old when her father died, but she recalled the accusation coming from the driver. When they lived in Rome, she suggested that Lanza had contact with some underworld figures.

  “Sometimes there were strange, unusual and shady people around the house who Daddy did not approve of,” she recalled, “and he tried to get them out of his home. Often it became quite a violent confrontation.”

  The day of her father’s death in the clinic in Rome was traumatic.

  “There were many questions about how my father died. I think he was murdered. The chauffeur was in his room—he disappeared and was never found again. He was so totally dedicated to my father that he slept on a cot beneath his bed while he was in the hospital. He awoke suddenly, he said before disappearing, and found Daddy with the intravenous still in his arms and nothing but air bubbles going into his vein. My grandmother forbade me to discuss such things while she lived, but now it really doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Later writers have blamed Luciano and his associates for this death as punishment for the severe embarrassment caused to the mobster by Lanza’s no-show in Naples.

  Toward the end of the 1950s, less money was coming through to Luciano. Castro coming to power in Cuba in 1959 put an end to his share of the Mafia casinos in Havana, which he reckoned cost him a quarter of his income. He depended very much on the money sent to him by his friends. Looking at alternative means of income, he saw there was possibly good money to be made from selling his own story. Movies were starting to appear about his contemporaries, and he began to think about his legacy. Al Capone, starring Rod Steiger as the Chicago gangster, appeared in 1959, twelve years after Capone’s death. It was made in a semi-documentary style, telling of the real rise and fall of the mobster, ending with his conviction for income tax evasion. A year later came The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, with Ray Danton as the New York hoodlum. In the same year appeared Murder, Inc., based on the book by Burton Turkus and Sid Feder, with actors playing Anastasia and Lepke.

  Previous gangster movies had been based on Capone and other leading mobsters, such as Luciano, but had avoided using their real names, creating characters loosely based on them and their crimes. No one wanted to stir up the rage of the Mob. Ben Hecht wrote the story for Scarface, the movie modeled on Capone in Chicago in 1932, and he remembered being approached by two of Capone’s henchmen holding a copy of the script.

  “Is this stuff about Al Capone?” asked one of the heavies.

  “God, no,” said Hecht. “I don’t even know Al.”

  “Never
met him, huh?”

  Hecht insisted that he had left Chicago before Capone came to power.

  “If this stuff ain’t about Al Capone, why are you callin’ it Scarface?” reasoned the gangster. “Everybody’ll think it’s him.”

  “That’s the reason,” struggled Hecht. “Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If we call the movie Scarface, everybody will want to see it, figuring it’s about Al. That’s part of the racket we call showmanship.”

  In the event, it was very clearly based on him—even featuring a re-creation of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Bamboozled by Hecht’s answer, the gangster said he’d pass it on to Al. He then wondered about the motive of the the film producer Howard Hughes.

  “He’s got nothing to do with anything,” said Hecht. “He’s the sucker with the money.”

  “OK. The hell with him.”

  In the wake of the Kefauver hearings at the beginning of the 1950s, there was a public taste for more realistic renditions of how the Mob worked, stories that pulled fewer punches and weren’t afraid to name names. After all, despite what the FBN thought, Luciano was now crime history—not a contemporary criminal mastermind. In 1953, in the organized crime thriller The Big Heat, Luciano is even mentioned as an example of how not to conduct underworld business. The Mob boss in the movie is called Mike Lagana, and he talks to one of his gangsters about how crime has changed since the 1930s.

  “We’ve stirred up enough headlines. Things are changing in this country,” says Lagana. “Never get the people steamed up—they start doing things. Grand juries, election investigations, deportation proceedings, I don’t want to land in the same ditch with the Lucky Lucianos.”

  Luciano probably thought it was time to tell his own version of events. An early reference to him wanting to make a movie about his life came in an issue of the Havana daily newspaper Alerta, November 25, 1952, which said that the gangster was going to spend $300,000 on the project.