Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  It was in 1959, however, that Luciano met the film producer Barnett Glassman. Luciano had already spent some of his time in Naples writing a screenplay and showed it to the producer. It portrayed him as a middle-aged gambler who’d been set up by the corrupt Dewey, wrongfully sent to prison, and was now settled in Italy, where he was much respected for his charity work. He had been considering who should portray him.

  “Pity Humphrey Bogart is dead,” he said. “Boy, that would have been the man to play Luciano. Now, maybe, George Raft—he’s about the only tough type left”—or maybe Marlon Brando, who’d starred in the much revered gangland movie, On the Waterfront, to play a younger Luciano.

  Not surprisingly, Glassman was unimpressed by Luciano’s efforts and recommended a professional screenwriter. It took two drafts before Luciano realized he had to reveal more of the truth about his criminal career to make it an interesting project. The whole enterprise took on more urgency when Luciano visited his doctor later that year. He’d been complaining about pains in his chest and arms, and the doctor confirmed he had a dangerous heart condition.

  FBN agent Sal Vizzini, under his guise as Major Mike Cerra, visited Luciano during this period. He was told that Luciano had been ill and he was invited to see him at his apartment at 8 Strado Parco Comela Ricci, overlooking the harbor. He looked thinner than Vizzini remembered. He was living with a twenty-four-year-old shopgirl called Adriana Rizzo. His doctor had told him to take plenty of bed rest and give up smoking, drink, and sex. He could do all that but the last. He remembered something his old Sicilian associate Don Calogero Vizzini had told him.

  “He was over seventy and still had to have a girl every day. He knew what to do with them too. I told him he was about to kill himself. He looked me right in the eye and said … ‘pussy is a million times sweeter than honey and I want it till the day I die’—I agree with him.”

  Agent Vizzini was given a tour of the modern apartment and noted some of the books in Luciano’s library. They included The Traffic in Narcotics by Harry Anslinger, Brotherhood of Evil by Frederic Sondern, and The Luciano Story by Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten. The Luciano Story was the first major biography of Luciano and was cowritten by the author of Murder, Inc., the book that exposed the inside story of the hit men who worked for the Mob in the 1930s.

  The publisher of the The Luciano Story sent a copy to the FBI in January 1955. Because Murder, Inc., had “contained derogatory remarks concerning the FBI and attributed false statements to the Director,” the FBI decided not to acknowledge receipt of The Luciano Story until “we have had an opportunity to make a complete review of it in the Crime Records section.” The subsequent analysis described it as a “readable account,” which used much of the material contained in Murder, Inc. “Of the nine references to the Director or the FBI throughout the book, none appears to be of a derogatory nature.”

  In fact, the FBI took pride in the fact that the author said Luciano felt no antagonism toward the director, directly quoting the mobster as saying: “Hoover’s no friend of the hoodlums or the underworld. I like him because he never makes an announcement about what he’s gonna do. He never says a guy is tied up in a racket, and he’s gonna grab him for it. None of that yakity-yak. A guy does somethin’. Hoover grabs him. No announcements. He don’t shoot his mouth off. He’s got efficiency!”

  Luciano had also read Ed Reid’s Mafia, an exposé of the business dealings of the Cosa Nostra, first published in 1952, but he called it “a pack of lies.”

  As agent Vizzini looked in detail at some of the other objects in Luciano’s library, he noticed a painting of a beautiful dark-haired woman hung on the wall—it was Igea Lissoni. Later that evening, they talked about the rumored movie of his life. Luciano complained that he’d been offered only a “lousy” hundred grand plus 10 percent of the profits. Vizzini said Luciano hadn’t been very impressed by the Al Capone movie.

  “They made Capone look like an ignorant bum,” said Luciano. “Nobody knew Capone better than me and, believe me, he was no ignorant bum. Everything in that picture was phony, except maybe how he got rid of the competition.”

  While film producer Barnett Glassman was making a movie in Spain he met a wannabe producer called Martin Gosch. He only had one movie credit on Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, but Glassman took him on as his assistant. Gosch was keen to meet Luciano.

  “Gosch saw Charlie a number of times in the next couple of years,” said Glassman, “but Charlie never talked to him about his Mob activities or anything like that. You couldn’t get twenty words out of Charlie unless he really trusted you, and he didn’t care much for Gosch.”

  They just chatted about the script, but all the time Gosch was keen to take on the project himself. According to Glassman, Luciano phoned his brother in Christmas 1961 to say that Gosch wanted to cut out Glassman and he didn’t like it.

  “Tell Gosch, I want to see him,” Luciano is supposed to have said. “Tell him I’m going to lay it on the line to him, that I don’t want to ever have anything to do with him, I never want to see him after I tell him what I think of him.”

  Gosch saw his relationship with Luciano somewhat differently. In February 1961, he showed Luciano a final version of the script they had been working on and he approved it, signing a contract for $100,000 and a percentage of the profits. Shortly afterward, however, Thomas Eboli, lieutenant for Vito Genovese while he was in jail, arrived in Naples. Despite several movies about every other mobster being made, Eboli supposedly told Luciano that the Mob back in New York did not want to see his film get made.

  “I’m as good as dead,” Luciano then told Gosch. “And maybe you too.”

  Supposedly, Meyer Lansky was the key figure behind this request. This seems odd, as Lansky hated Genovese and Eboli would never have spoken for him. According to Gosch, it was then that Luciano softened his disappointment at ending the film deal by telling him that he could take down his life story and turn it into a book to be published ten years after his death.

  Almost a year later, Eboli’s brother Pat arrived in Naples to tell Luciano that the movie project had so upset the ruling mafiosi that they had ordered his execution. The only thing that could save his life was if he sent the original script, with his signature of approval on it, to New York so that the bosses had this in their possession. This is Gosch’s story and seems more like a fairy tale. Why did the Mob bosses think that possession of an easily copied script would stop the film being made? But apparently, Luciano agreed to the deal and this was why he set up a meeting with Gosch at the Naples airport in January 1962.

  According to Glassman, the meeting was called so that Luciano could sack Gosch from the project and give him a piece of his mind about betraying his colleague. Luciano’s phone was being tapped at the time and, shortly after he arranged for Gosch to fly in from Madrid, his apartment was raided by Italian police who suspected he might be seeing a narcotics smuggler from Spain. Gosch dressed up this story by saying that Luciano was being set up in a fake drug bust by associates of Genovese looking for vengeance. The source for much of this tale was investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who wrote an article for the Washington Post in early 1962 entitled “The Last Days of Lucky Luciano.”

  Anderson was fed a story by FBN agents that went like this: Eight months before his final meeting with Gosch, in May 1961, a Miami couple called Henry and Theresa Rubino arrived at Luciano’s apartment in Naples. They were looking for a restaurant to buy and Luciano was their adviser, having invested in a few over the years. They visited several nightspots together with Luciano and his girlfriend, Adriana Rizzo. A month later they went back to Miami to sell their own restaurant to raise some money. Luciano wrote a letter to them that was intercepted by the police.

  Luciano’s letter thanked Henry Rubino for sending him letters and photographs and for “what you did at the cemetery.” The police suspected this was code for some criminal service. Luciano then asked Rubino to give his best regards to Tony B., Pat R., a
nd Tommy. These were Tony Bender, Pat and Tommy Eboli—who also used the name Ryan—and all lieutenants for Vito Genovese, but in the case of Bender, he had changed sides to help Luciano, Lansky, Costello, and Gambino nail his boss. Rubino later claimed that the service he did for Luciano was to lay a wreath on his mother’s grave—a highly plausible explanation—but the FBN weren’t satisfied with that.

  The FBN linked the Rubinos to three narcotics-smuggling fugitives called Vincent Mauro, Frank Caruso, and Salvatore Maneri. They had jumped bail in New York to spend their money in various Caribbean islands, before finally ending up in Barcelona, Spain. In the meantime, the Rubinos had returned to Naples in November 1961. After spending a week with Luciano, the Miami couple received a phone call from Spain and hurried to Barcelona, where they supposedly met the three narcotics smugglers. After a few days in Spain, the Rubinos flew back to Naples and carried on their socializing with Luciano and Rizzo.

  At Christmas, the two couples went to Taormina, the resort on the east coast of Sicily near Mount Etna. Photographs show Luciano posing on the beach in shorts with both women in twopiece swimwear. After their holiday, Luciano returned to Naples and the Rubinos went back to Spain. They were accompanied by a Sicilian called Francesco Scimone and met the three drug-smuggling fugitives at the Palace Hotel in Madrid. Trailing the Rubinos back and forth across the Mediterranean, the FBN and their Italian police associates were convinced this indicated that some smuggling ring was being formed with Luciano at the center of it. Caruso and Mauro were arrested in Barcelona and Maneri in Majorca.

  On the morning of January 26, the Italian police picked up Luciano and questioned him about this sequence of events. Luciano shrugged and smiled wearily, saying there was no conspiracy behind it. It was all merely social, purely coincidence, and his biggest concern was his meeting with Martin Gosch later that day about his movie script. Yes, Gosch was flying in from Spain, but that’s where he lived. To prove his innocence, he invited an Italian officer, Cesare Resta, to accompany him to the airport.

  On the afternoon of January 26, 1962, Luciano drove his Alfa Romeo car to Capodichino Airport, four miles northeast from the center of Naples. It would be the last meeting he would ever make.

  18

  DEATH IN NAPLES

  The aircraft landed at Capodichino Airport in Naples about 4:00 P.M. on January 26, 1962. Luciano was waiting in the terminal for the connecting flight from Rome. He’d had an irritating morning answering pointless questions from the Italian police and had one of them next to him when Martin Gosch stepped off the aircraft and made his way toward the pair. Once Luciano got the script off Gosch, he could finish with the whole damned mess of the movie. He was wearing smartly pressed gray flannel slacks with a navy blue blazer. He introduced Gosch to the police officer and they both walked off toward his car. A few steps outside the terminal, Luciano stumbled, putting an arm around Gosch.

  “Charlie, what’s wrong with you?” said the producer.

  Luciano said nothing and slumped to the floor.

  An airport doctor was called and felt his pulse. He shook his head.

  “This man is dead.”

  A green canvas sheet was placed over the body. It was 5:25 P.M. One of the most famous gangsters in the world had suddenly passed away. He was sixty-four years old.

  The news flashed around the world. The next day, the London Times said “Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the immigrant boy who became undisputed boss of a multi-million dollar New York vice racket, collapsed and died.” The article said Luciano “owned a fashionable apartment in Naples and sold electrical medical appliances” but that Senator Kefauver claimed that he “still directed the American underworld by remote control from Italy.”

  Lucky’s death made the front page of the New York Times. He was still big news in his home city. They led on the story that Luciano was about to be arrested for his part in an international narcotics ring. “We were ready to move against him with the Italian authorities,” said Henry Giordano, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau in Washington. The ring was alleged to have smuggled heroin worth up to $150,000,000 into the country over the previous ten years. Three smugglers had already been taken down in Spain, and Luciano was to be next—the legend lived on.

  An FBI memorandum sent to J. Edgar Hoover on March 21, 1962, revealed the truth of the matter. It said that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was “still following leads in an attempt to prove Luciano’s involvement in international narcotics but all indications are that the case will be closed with no startling developments.”

  As soon as they heard of Luciano’s death, his younger brother, Bartolo Lucania, and two nephews, Salvatore and Gino, children of his sister, flew to Naples to arrange the funeral. On January 29, violent scuffles marred the funeral service as crowds of reporters tried to take pictures of the mourners. It started during the requiem mass held at the Holy Trinity Church, where photographers clambered over a statue above the altar to take shots of the service from behind the crucifix.

  Some three hundred people were present, including Bart Lucania, Luciano’s girlfriend, Adriana Rizzo, and some minor Mob associates, including the Fischetti brothers, Joe “Cock-Eyed John” Raimondo, Nick di Marzo, and Joe di Giorgio. Joe Adonis was the most senior mobster to attend the funeral, although he turned up late just before the service ended. He had ordered a large floral tribute in the style of the old mobster funerals, inscribed with the farewell “So long, Pal.” Lansky also, reputedly, sent flowers, though he had nothing to say in public about the death of his good friend; neither did Costello.

  The fact that the majority of the crowd was Italian police, government agents, and journalists underlined the extent to which Luciano had become a creature of law enforcement agencies rather than being a genuine criminal mastermind at the heart of the Cosa Nostra. Among the U.S. agents present were two officers of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, three agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence from the U.S. Navy headquarters in Naples—Luciano’s old wartime allies—and officers from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, but no one, apparently, from the FBI. Adriana wore a long black veil and sobbed dramatically throughout the service into a white silk handkerchief. As the photographers surged toward the mourners after the church service, some of the mobsters grew angry and swiped at them. “Somebody is going to get hurt,” growled one of them.

  “A lensman was punched, knocked down and kicked outside the church,” said a reporter for the New York Daily News, “and his camera was smashed by Luciano henchmen.” He had been trying to take a photograph of Adriana. “Two of Adriana’s girl friends kicked and slapped the photographer as he lay on the ground.”

  Eight plumed black horses pulled a silver and polished black wooden funeral carriage carrying Luciano’s coffin to a chapel at the English Cemetery in Poggio Reale on the outskirts of Naples. The U.S. consulate said it could stay there for two or three days while a decision was made on whether Luciano’s body could be returned to the United States. Bartolo Lucania made the request, saying that his brother had wished to be buried alongside his mother and father in the family tomb he had bought in New York.

  Before Bartolo left Naples, he quickly sold Luciano’s penthouse apartment for less than half its value. This meant throwing out his grieving girlfriend. Only after the intervention of Pat Eboli did Bartolo relent and give her $3,000, plus allowing her to take her clothes and personal possessions. Some land belonging to Luciano was also sold for a reduced price, while the only bank account that could be located contained the sum of $16,000. Only the Mob knew where the rest of Luciano’s money was, and they quietly absorbed that for themselves.

  Two weeks after Luciano had dropped dead, his body was returned to America. On February 7, a Pan American World Airways cargo plane delivered the body to Idlewild Airport in Queens, New York, where it was met by his two brothers, Bartolo and Joseph, and a large contingent of FBN agents and city police. The large wooden crate containing the casket was place
d in a hearse and driven eight miles to St. John’s Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. It was accompanied by one car containing the mourners and two dozen containing police and reporters. There was no ceremony at the cemetery as the coffin was placed in the family vault.

  Luciano had bought the vault, adorned with bronze doors and Greek columns, for $25,000 in 1935—the year before he went to prison. His mother, father, an aunt, and uncle were buried there, with space for sixteen more family members. A small stained-glass window at the rear of the vault bore a representation of a bearded saint leaning on a shepherd’s staff. One of the reporters asked Bartolo who the saint was in the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not acquainted with saints.”

  The family tomb of Vito Genovese stood only a hundred feet away from Luciano’s vault. Seven years later he would be placed in there.

  An obituary published in the New York Herald Tribune quoted an interview with Luciano from a couple of years earlier. If he had his life to lead again, would he do it all the same?

  “I would do the same things all over again,” he said, “only I’d do it legal. I learned too late that you need just as good a brain to make a crooked million as an honest million. These days you apply for a license to steal from the public.

  “If I had my time again I’d make sure I got that license first.”

  It did not take long before rumors of murder and conspiracy arose around Luciano’s death. One newspaper story claimed that he had been assassinated at the airport by underworld rivals who gave him potassium cyanide. This seems to have derived from witnesses seeing the dying mobster being given a tablet. An FBI report clarified what they thought happened at the airport.

  “A few minutes after meeting Gosch in the Naples airport,” said the FBI, “Luciano collapsed and Gosch, who knew that Luciano suffered from a bad heart, frantically searched Luciano’s pockets for pills that he knew Luciano took. He did find the pill box, removed one of the pills and placed it in Luciano’s mouth. This activity was observed by a number of the people who had witnessed Luciano’s collapse and is believed to be the source of the story to the effect that Luciano was poisoned.”