Charles "Lucky" Luciano is often remembered as a criminal prophet who almost single-handedly built the most powerful organized crime syndicate in the United States and then led it. He is described as the man who reformed Cosa Nostra, created a private army of killers, and whose approval was necessary for anyone who wanted a place in American organized crime.
That image took shape under pressure, first during Luciano's life and then after his death. In reality, he was neither the greatest gangster nor a self-styled boss nor a polished deceiver. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between those extremes.
Salvatore Luciano, who later became Charles Luciano, was born on November 11, 1897, in a small village in Sicily to Antonio and Rosalia Luciano. His father grew tired of hard labor in the local mine and decided in 1906 to leave for the New World in search of a better life.
Like thousands of other immigrants, Antonio settled in New York City. Within a year he had saved enough for his family to join him. In 1907 his wife Rosalia arrived with Salvatore and his older brothers.
New York in those years was not the paradise the Lucianos were looking for. They came seeking a better life but found themselves mired in the same poverty they had known in Sicily, only in a very different form. Instead of the sulfur smell of the local mines, they breathed in the stench of rotting garbage.
When Salvatore arrived, a wave of strikes by street cleaners and garbage collectors had spread across New York. The streets of the Lower East Side, where the Lucianos settled, filled with trash.
The neighborhood where young Salvatore lived was not a separate ethnic enclave. It held people of different nationalities, with Jewish, Irish, and Italian families predominating. That fact matters greatly for understanding Luciano's character.
Growing up in such an environment would later enable Salvatore to avoid prejudice about cooperating with non-Italian gangsters, opening more opportunities to make money. It also made him more influenced by American culture than other Mafia bosses, which would benefit him later as well.
For now, nine-year-old Salvatore picked his way through trash-filled streets on his way to his first day at an American school. Beyond the garbage that disappeared after the strikes, the streets were full of gangs of every kind, from serious adults to small children.
The only difference between them was the scope of their business. Otherwise everything was much the same: looting, theft, robbery, and constant clashes over influence. Children clearly chose the second option between boring schoolwork and a tense street life.
What also pushed them into gangs was the impossibility of living apart from others, or more precisely, the impossibility of defending themselves alone against attacks by other children. All that awaited a lone child was constant beatings and robbery. It was a real stone jungle, very hard to survive without companions.
Salvatore had his own companions. They mostly carried out the same robberies as other gangs, but they also had a special service. Italian and Irish children often robbed Jewish children. Luciano decided to organize a private security service for those children.
He offered them protection in the streets for a small fee. Many agreed, and Luciano's gang had a relatively legal way to earn money. For this reason, a legend spread that Salvatore met his future partner in illegal work, Meyer Lansky, at that time.
Whether or not that is true, it is very likely the two knew each other, since Lansky and Luciano both lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is hard to determine exactly how Lansky and Luciano met, but it is entirely accurate to say that Salvatore enjoyed gang life at an early age more than attending school.
His attendance at classes gradually declined, and visits by truant officers to his home to notify his parents increased. He ended up spending four months in a closed detention center for juvenile delinquents. After his release in 1912 at the age of fourteen, he left school for good and got his first legal job, as a delivery boy at Max Goodman's hat store, earning a reported five to seven dollars a week.
Even so, his legal work did not stop him from leaving the criminal world behind. Salvatore reorganized a small gang with his acquaintances, and they engaged mainly in theft and drug dealing, acting as middlemen for a local drug dealer.
At the same time, Luciano left home after a fight with his father over a pistol found among his belongings. He rented a room with one of his partners at the time, Joe Bondo, who later became a senior gangster in the Gambino family.
Luciano lived that way until 1916, when he was arrested in the act of selling drugs. He gave a dose of heroin to a man who turned out to be a police informant. On June 27, 1916, eighteen-year-old Salvatore Luciano was sentenced to eight months at New Hampton Farms prison.
After his release, Luciano changed his name from Salvatore to Charles. The reason was that Salvatore was shortened to Sally, a female name, during his imprisonment. That gave other prisoners the chance to make repeated cutting jokes at Luciano. The stubborn Italian apparently grew so tired of it that he decided to change his name.
After leaving prison, Charles worked briefly for a shipping clerk, but soon quit, having earned close to his annual salary of 244 dollars. From then on he stopped illegal work and focused all his attention on building his criminal career.
The period from 1916 to 1920 is an obscure stretch of Luciano's biography with insufficient information. All that is known for certain is that he continued building his criminal career. Some sources indicate he resumed activities with the same gang he had worked with before prison, while others indicate he became increasingly close to Lansky and his partner Ben Siegel.
Considering that Luciano later worked for several criminal gangs at the same time and built his case in parallel, both things are probably true. Charles always put personal gain and profit first in his affairs. Belonging to a gang or loyalty were merely means to increase his personal wealth.
In 1920 he got his first real opportunity to increase his wealth, with the start of Prohibition in the United States. For Luciano, until the Castellammarese War, this period was marked by forming relationships and then joint dealings with all the future major figures of New York's criminal world.
Charles began his Prohibition-era business with Lansky and his Jewish gang. They robbed liquor stores and then sold the goods to bars. That method soon lost its usefulness, because warehouses were easily emptied of the liquor that had accumulated before the law took effect.
Luciano then began looking for new ways to make money. Working with his partner Joe Bondo, who had recently been released from prison, he began converting licensed industrial alcohol into banned alcoholic beverages. This alcohol was later used to make drinks resembling known liquors and then sold to bars.
Another method was obtaining alcohol extracted from wine, buying it from perfume factories where it was used in perfume production. This alcohol was also packaged and sold to bars. Alongside direct liquor sales, Luciano also made money selling raw materials to those running unlicensed distilleries.
Gradually Luciano's capital grew, and he began opening his own distilleries. He also signed a contract to supply whiskey to one of the largest wholesalers at the start of Prohibition, Waxy Gordon.
Luciano's acquaintance with an eccentric businessman from the criminal world of those years, Arnold Rothstein, helped him connect with Lansky. Rothstein was an investor who during Prohibition invested in illegal operations of other gangs, influencing the formation of all the famous Jewish gangs of that period.
This acquaintance with Rothstein also allowed Luciano to join the gang of Jack Diamond, who ran bootlegging operations for Rothstein and was involved in all kinds of illegal activities, from robbing other bootleggers to armed robbery. Dutch Schultz, another notorious criminal, was a member of this gang as well.
While Luciano dealt with Jews and Irish, he did not forget to build relationships with his own countrymen. He had ties to the Gambino family through his former partner Joe Bondo, and worked with Willie Moretti, cousin of Frank Costello, to open distilleries.
Luciano's most important relationship during that period was his acquaintance with Joe Masseria, known as Joe the Boss. Masseria and his gang controlled the entire Lower East Side, the area where Luciano and Lansky ran their bootlegging operations.
Naturally their interests overlapped, and eventually Charles drew Masseria's attention. Joe the Boss recruited him as an outside contract killer in 1920. Luciano joined the Masseria family organization two years later.
In 1922 Masseria was assassinated by Umberto Valenti in a Mafia war, but Joe the Boss survived and took revenge three days later. He arranged a meeting with Valenti ostensibly to cover up the conflict, but in fact brought three gunmen with him, one of them Luciano.
Charles managed to kill Valenti in the exchange of fire, paving the way for his entry into the Masseria family. The war continued for another year, during which many prominent Masseria members were killed.
That fact, along with Luciano being a good source of income for the family, allowed Charles to take the position of capo in Joe Boss's organization in 1923 and control Masseria's gambling activities. Around the same period, Frank Costello, who would become a close partner of Luciano later, joined Joe Boss's family.
We cannot say for certain whether the two knew each other before Prohibition or whether they stayed in the same Mafia family, but during Prohibition they had business ties. In particular, they shared a whiskey smuggling line into New York with Irish gangster William Dwyer.
During Prohibition, Luciano also did business with many other gangsters who would later hold high positions in the criminal hierarchy. Prominent among them in Luciano's history was Vito Genovese.
Although Luciano was not the last man in the Masseria Mafia family, he continued to run his business on the side and had a close relationship with Lansky. They even rented a hotel room together to use as their headquarters.
Luciano dealt with Jack Diamond's gang, and most surprisingly he also dealt with Arnold Rothstein, who was then in a cold war with Luciano's direct boss. Rothstein was one of the largest wholesale heroin dealers in New York at the time, and Charles was still dealing drugs.
He was arrested again in 1923 while selling goods to an undercover officer. A second drug charge threatened Luciano with ten years in prison, so he agreed to a deal to have the charges dropped entirely. He told law enforcement where his own money was, containing goods worth 150,000 dollars.
From the Mafia's point of view he was innocent because he did not inform on anyone, only testified against himself. But on the other hand, he struck a deal with the investigation, which damaged his reputation in the criminal world.
After escaping punishment and avoiding prison in 1923, Charles spent the next six years in relative quiet. The only notable event in the criminal world during that period was the death of Arnold Rothstein, which did not affect Luciano directly. Otherwise there was nothing worth attention: minor raids, illegal alcohol trade, and some petty arrests. The usual daily gang routine of those years.
But that was only the calm before the storm, the storm that would eventually lead Charles Luciano to his main goals. The Castellammarese War was, for Luciano and for the Italian Mafia in the United States, a turning point that divided history into before and after.
With the end of that conflict, Cosa Nostra emerged in the form we all know, and Luciano led his Mafia family. But before discussing the Castellammarese War, another legend often told about Luciano's life must be addressed. It is, of course, the famous beating of Luciano, after which he miraculously survived and supposedly gained the nickname "Lucky."
On the evening of October 16, 1929, Luciano was invited to a meeting with Salvatore Maranzano, leader of a group opposed to Joe Masseria, the boss of Luciano's gang. At this meeting Maranzano proposed that Charles kill Joe. When Luciano refused, he resorted to torture to force him to do what he wanted.
After a severe beating, and without getting the answer he wanted, Maranzano's men threw Luciano into a ditch. After a while Luciano regained consciousness, and by one in the morning he reached Highland Boulevard on Staten Island, where a police officer took him to the hospital. There Meyer Lansky visited him and gave him the famous nickname "Lucky."
The story first appeared in "The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano," written based on the memoirs of Martin Gosch, who spoke to Luciano shortly before his death. First, no one saw those memoirs except Richard Hammer, the book's author, because Gosch's widow burned them, and Gosch died just before publication. Second, much of the book was refuted by people who took part in the events directly.
Hammer said Gosch's memoirs were closer to a gangster action movie script than to a biography. That is true, because Gosch was preparing a film about Lucky. In fact the story was refuted not only by some participants in those events, but even by Luciano himself, who told the real story to Salvesini, the undercover narcotics agent who was close to Luciano in the 1950s and part of his circle.
There was no crime wave, and Maranzano had nothing to do with the beating. That day Luciano was kidnapped by police investigating a murder at the Hot Totsy club. They wanted to know the whereabouts of his friend Jack Diamond, the main suspect in the crime. Something went wrong, and the police overstepped the bounds in the violent interrogation. Thinking Luciano was dead, they threw him on Staten Island and left. As we know, a police officer later found him and took him to the hospital.
Visini told this story in his reports in the late 1950s, but Luciano's final testimony in the 1970s did include the story of being tortured by Maranzano. The theory of criminal disputes also does not hold up to the usual local logic. Luciano was then a prominent member of the Masseria faction, which means it was impossible for Maranzano to leave him alive after a severe beating. That would inevitably have created a bitter enemy.
If the story of Maranzano beating Luciano were true, this account would now be discussing his lavish funeral. Luciano had not yet gained the nickname "Lucky" at that moment, and Lansky had nothing to do with his appearance. Newspapers gave him the nickname "Lucky" a few years before that unfortunate incident. Most likely the nickname came from his childhood, a shortening of his family name Luciano, from which the word luck is derived.
But even if Maranzano had nothing to do with the beating story, he is at the forefront of the history of the Castellammarese War. Maranzano arrived in the United States in 1925, leaving his homeland because of the rise of Mussolini's fascist regime.
In America he quickly gained respect among his countrymen from Castellammare del Golfo thanks to support from Italy, specifically from a prominent Mafia figure, Don Vito Cascioferro. Maranzano, like many others, became involved in bootlegging.
The main reason for the first outbreak of conflict with Joe Masseria, who had by then taken the title Boss of Bosses, was this. The situation began to escalate. Maranzano's and Masseria's men launched scattered attacks on each other's liquor convoys, increasing tension.
The second factor was Masseria's support for Al Capone in his conflict with one of the surviving men of Joe Aiello in Chicago. Masseria also sought to eliminate Gaspera Milazzo from his operations in Detroit. The third factor grew out of the second, as Masseria wanted to seize everything under his hand, which pleased no one.
The open conflict began with two murders. In February 1930 Gaetano Reina, who had defected from the Masseria faction and begun cooperating with Maranzano, was killed. Then in May of the same year Gaspera Milazzo was assassinated on Masseria's orders. After that, losses mounted on both sides.
In the context of Luciano's story, it is not important to determine who killed whom and when during this war, so that point will be set aside. What matters is understanding that Lucky himself tried to stay as far as possible from this conflict. He even accompanied Jack Diamond to Germany in late August 1930 to establish his own drug smuggling network.
But by then the confrontation had reached its peak. Luciano was not interested in this war at all. The continuous murders drew law enforcement attention to illegal activities, causing financial losses. Gradually many other participants in the conflict reached the same conclusion.
By that time the Masseria organization was clearly in a losing position, and suspicions began to swirl around the murder of its chief. In addition, Maranzano was declaring at the same time that he wanted only Masseria's death and would not pursue other participants in the conflict.
In the spring of 1931 Maranzano's offer was accepted. Luciano met with Maranzano and confirmed their readiness to organize Masseria's assassination. On April 15 of that year, Joe the Boss was killed in a restaurant on Coney Island, ending the Castellammarese War.
By killing Masseria, Luciano declared his responsibility for the crime. As Nick Gentile recalls in his autobiography, Luciano sent a message to Maranzano that the killing of Joe the Boss was for his own personal benefit, Charles Luciano's, not for Maranzano's desire. He added at the end that any continued pursuit of any member of the former Masseria faction would immediately lead to renewed conflict.
Maranzano accepted the terms of his victory. Shortly after Joe Boss's death and the end of the war, he called a general meeting of Sicilian gangs in the Bronx, where he celebrated his victory and also took the first step in creating the known structure of the New York Mafia.
At this meeting it was decided to unite all Sicilian gangs from that moment into five families led by a boss and his deputy. Luciano became head of the former Masseria family, now known as the Genovese family, with Vito Genovese as his deputy. Joseph Bonanno became head of the Bonanno family, Joe Profaci head of today's Colombo family, Tom Gagliano head of today's Lucchese family, and Vincent Mangano head of the new Gambino family.
Above the heads of the five families was Maranzano, who took the title Boss of Bosses. But Maranzano did not last long in this high position, as he aspired to absolute power like Masseria's, power that could not be threatened.
This ambition displeased not only his former opponents in the Castellammarese War, but also began to irritate his allies. Gentile, one of Maranzano's supporters, later recalled that by granting him the title Boss of Bosses, they had shown everyone an organizational style that did not suit the generation of Sicilians raised in America.
Maranzano wanted to begin entrenching his dictatorship by eliminating everyone who had opposed him in the Castellammarese War. The elimination list included names such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Willie Moretti, and some prominent Jewish gangsters, among others.
Luciano was the first to be eliminated. To achieve this, Maranzano managed to hire an Irish gangster named Vincent Cole. However, he did not have time to carry out the order. Luciano learned of the elimination list and the assassination attempt and struck first.
First, Charles proved the existence of the elimination list to those at its top, as well as to those who might oppose Maranzano. Then he rallied support from gangsters across the country and began preparing an assassination attempt on the Boss of Bosses.
In September 1931 Maranzano faced problems with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which Luciano learned of. Because of these legal problems, the Mafia boss was forced to disarm the guards in his office to avoid any additional questioning in case of a surprise search.
Luciano decided to exploit this situation and sent killers to Maranzano's office, who identified themselves as IRS agents. The killers entered the office easily, killed Maranzano, and left before police arrived. Thus the killing of the last boss of the Italian Mafia in America was simple and quiet.
On the same day and the following night after Maranzano's assassination, according to a popular account, dozens of other murders took place targeting followers of the Mafia boss across the United States. That night was even called the Night of the Sicilian Vespers.
Yet it is nearly impossible to find a single person who can name at least ten of Maranzano's supporters killed that day. This legend is fabricated, and it is now hard to determine who first spread it among the people. Everyone who worked on the archives of those years denies the events of the Night of the Sicilian Vespers. Even Lucky Luciano's long last testament denies the story and describes it as pure fantasy.
First, as mentioned earlier, many were dissatisfied with their bosses at the time of Maranzano's assassination. Second, Luciano made clear that the death of the Boss of Bosses was only a preventive measure, for fear that Maranzano would attack first, thereby denying the promise he had made at the end of the Castellammarese War. So it made no sense for Luciano or Maranzano's former supporters to continue the conflict.
In the future each of them would go about his business quietly without invoking the old conflict. The abolition of the title Boss of Bosses and the formation of an investigative commission would also contribute to this.
This organizational change is attributed to Lucky alone, and it is said he nurtured the idea for many years and was its main supporter. That is not true, as the idea emerged from Lucky Luciano's last testament. A commission had been formed during the Castellammarese War to resolve that dispute. But the victorious Maranzano declared himself Boss of Bosses, and the idea was not pursued, though it did not disappear.
In the memoirs of gangsters of those years, Nick Gentile also confirms that the commission idea was not Luciano's personal initiative. Charles was one of many who supported abolishing the Boss of Bosses position and creating the commission. The commission was a governing body tasked with settling disputes between families by vote.
The commission included the heads of the five New York families, plus Al Capone of Chicago and Frank Milano of Cleveland. One of the controversial facts about the commission is that Luciano was its first chairman. As Joe Bonanno wrote in his book "A Man of Honor," Luciano never held that position on the commission. Vincent Mangano was its first chairman until his death.
But even assuming Luciano was elected chairman of the first commission, his vote carried the same weight as other members. The chairman was not equal to the Boss of Bosses. Especially on the commission, there were at least three people who were not Luciano's supporters. This body was by no means a gathering of Charles's friends through whom he could pursue any of his interests.
Yet Luciano was entirely satisfied with the situation. Now he could run his business with his family as he wished and cooperate with whomever he needed. There was no longer anyone above him who could influence his organization at any moment with a single word. Finally Luciano had what he wanted. He gained his independence and his independence in making money.
The end of the Castellammarese War and the creation of the commission restored peace and order to the Italian Mafia. We can even say this event finally restored order to Cosa Nostra. Although skirmishes and conflicts continued in New York's criminal world, and Luciano was directly involved in some of them, the period from 1931 to 1936 was Lucky's golden age.
At that time he had established a smuggling network to bring drugs into the United States, and he soon created a wide network of brothels. These two activities formed most of his income after Prohibition was repealed, helping him build a vast fortune worth millions of dollars and allowing him to live in complete luxury.
But before discussing Luciano's life and how his organization worked at its peak, the so-called National Crime Syndicate must be discussed. The crime syndicate, as commonly understood, was a huge criminal enterprise covering most of the United States. It consisted of many gangs, each a branch with clear boundaries in its area of influence. These branches were run by a special council headed by Luciano.
The reality was somewhat different. First, and this may be a good starting point, researchers have never reached consensus on whether the syndicate existed at all. Second, if it existed, it was most likely not a centrally managed corporation but a syndicate, an association of businessmen engaged in joint ventures, where each individual maintained his independence.
All syndicate meetings were discussions about future investment plans. For example, they invested in gambling in Las Vegas and Cuba, or according to unconfirmed reports, invested in the election campaigns of some presidential candidates. But no one cared how the participants raised money for their joint investments. Each leader had the right to act as he wished. No council, not even Lucky Luciano himself, was responsible.
It would be strange for Luciano, who was not the leader of all Italian Mafia bosses but merely one of them, to suddenly become the leader of American organized crime. Luciano at the time was more interested in his own affairs than in seeking control over the entire country.
Prohibition was about to be repealed, and he was working hard to find new ways to make money. Luciano began building his own heroin smuggling network when he was not the Mafia's leader. Although his 1930 trip to Germany was not successful, an old companion from the Lower East Side named Delgrazio completed the network for Charles.
By the end of 1931 Luciano had his own heroin smuggling line into New York. Within a few years Luciano's market expanded beyond the Lower East Side, and by 1934 it extended to the West Coast, where Charles found a gold mine for drug dealers called Hollywood.
Yet the available information about Luciano the drug dealer is far less than the information about Luciano the bootlegger, and certainly the information about Luciano the pimp is far less still.
Charles devised a tight working mechanism for managing brothels in New York, where every part was precisely organized. This mechanism worked smoothly, generating huge money for its owner, but at the same time it destroyed the lives of hundreds of young girls. The system Charles devised was the embodiment of sexual slavery in its ugliest form.
After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, gangsters began looking for new ways to enrich themselves. Frank Costello turned to slot machines. Criminals like Dutch Schultz opened illegal lotteries. A fair number, like Lucky, became drug dealers, but no one paid attention to the brothels spread throughout New York.
Lucky was the first to realize how radically this situation could be changed. Through threats and intimidation, Charles managed in a short period to control the prostitution trade in all of New York. This criminal prostitution network was known as "the Combine." Lucky himself was at its head.
Below him in the hierarchy was an organized criminal gang called the Mafia of Moff Street, represented by its leaders Abi Heller, Dave Patillo, Jim Frederick, and Tommy Pennino. Then came the madams and the middlemen. At the bottom of the pyramid were the prostitutes.
The system worked as follows: prostitutes provided their services to clients and paid a percentage to the madams. The madams paid a fixed amount to the middleman for each girl he brought to the brothel. At the same time, both madams and middlemen paid a percentage that went to Luciano. The Moff Street Mafia was responsible for collecting money and maintaining order, and received a percentage of Luciano's share.
The only flaw in this system was the fate of the prostitutes. Girls entered the brothel in different ways, but rarely by their own will. They were lured from other cities with promises of good jobs in New York. They were lent money and then could not repay. Sometimes attractive middlemen seduced naive girls.
Despite the variety of methods used to lure them into brothels, the fate was the same. First they were repeatedly raped to break their morals, then addicted to drugs. Once addicted, a girl returned everything she earned to Luciano's pocket by buying drugs from him, and second, she could not escape the brothel because it was the only way to get the drugs she desperately needed.
Under this system, prostitutes were stripped of all their money. Once the girls lost their beauty, they were thrown into the street to meet their fate, and others came to replace them. This business brought Luciano about two million dollars a year in net income.
Add to that his income from drug sales, plus the money he earned during Prohibition, and he had a vast fortune exceeding a million dollars, allowing Charles to live without deprivation. But Luciano's life was not like Al Capone's, who held lavish parties costing tens of thousands of dollars and made every public appearance a spectacle.
Luciano seemed to prefer staying out of sight, believing that too much attention to his affairs would do him no good. He had no permanent residence, preferring his own home and rooms and hotels he stayed in under assumed names. He had no wife or children, and preferred fleeting relationships with them without commitment. He gave no interviews and tried to make his name rarely mentioned.
Yet soon a man appeared in his life who would make all of America call the name Charles Luciano. Until 1931, the major criminals of New York City lived without fear of prison, as the authorities were mostly corrupt and tolerated a great deal.
But after that, the honest prosecutor Thomas Dewey appeared and launched his campaign against organized crime. The first to fall under the harsh sword of justice were small criminals. Dewey exposed illegal lottery operations in Harlem and arrested Henry Miro, a gangster, on tax evasion charges.
The prosecutor realized he had arrested only an ordinary person and that there were dozens more like him throughout Harlem. But the income Miro managed to make revealed to him the true scale of organized crime. If a mid-level gangster earns at least a million dollars a year, how much does the man responsible for the whole operation own?
Realizing this, Dewey began investigating with doubled seriousness. By early 1933 he had enough evidence against two major gangsters. He closed in on Waxy Gordon and Dutch Schultz. Gordon was arrested and convicted of tax evasion the same year, but Schultz escaped for a while.
In addition to investigating and gathering evidence, Dewey also tried to influence the general public. He gave radio lectures about how powerful organized crime was in the country and how deeply it penetrated all social institutions. Through these lectures Dewey planted in people's minds the image of a huge octopus with tentacles reaching anyone.
Shortly after that, Dewey named Luciano as the head of his organization, and this step was the first in cementing the legend of Charles Luciano as the greatest gangster boss and chief of chiefs. Meanwhile, after Gordon's imprisonment, Dewey turned his full attention to Schultz.
Under this close scrutiny, Schultz began losing control of his organization, which other gang bosses coveted, especially Charles Luciano. The longer Schultz was under pressure, the more his anger and violence grew. In the end he could no longer bear the situation and decided to get rid of his pursuer in the usual way. The Dutchman decided to kill Dewey.
This decision soon spread among other gang bosses, who considered his plan justification to kill Schultz and divide his areas of influence. On October 23, 1935, a contract killer shot the Dutchman and his men in a New Jersey diner. Without realizing it, Luciano made things worse by writing Schultz's execution order.
After the Dutchman's murder, Dewey lost the prey he had almost hunted down, and now he needed a new target. He would soon bring Luciano fully out of the shadows he had carefully hidden in and put him under endless spotlights, under which Charles would remain for the rest of his life.
In fact, to be precise, Dewey had taken up Luciano's case months before Schultz's murder. But the prosecutor did not yet know that the threads of the brothels would lead him to Luciano. In July 1935, concerned citizens asked Dewey to pay attention to the rise of homosexual prostitution in New York streets.
The prosecutor responded to the request, and when he began investigating in that direction, it turned out that homosexual prostitution was only a drop in the ocean of heterosexual prostitution. The deeper Dewey went into this investigation, the more certain he became that an organized group stood behind it all.
To reach a precise understanding of who stood behind the prostitution trade in New York, Dewey organized a raid on a brothel in February 1936, during which 125 people were arrested, including prostitutes, managers, and middlemen. Through these interrogations, investigators were able to uncover the full structure of Luciano's network.
All Dewey had to do was gather evidence and file charges against Luciano. But the difficulty was that the trial would not be held without the defendant, who had fled New York to the town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. After learning of this, Dewey ordered Luciano's arrest there and set bail at 200,000 dollars.
But by divine will, or perhaps the will of someone else, the local judge did not listen to Dewey and set bail at 5,000 dollars, which Luciano paid immediately after his release. In April 1936 Charles intended to flee to Mexico. But Dewey's assistant, who had reached Hot Springs and persuaded a local judge to issue an arrest warrant for Luciano without bail, foiled his plans.
Luciano was returned to the local jail, where the local administration provided him with comfortable accommodation. Dewey's assistant then demanded Luciano's extradition to New York. His request was refused based on an alleged local court conviction preventing Luciano from leaving Arkansas.
In response, Dewey, through the governor of Arkansas, took over the jail where Luciano was being held by local guards. From there Charles was transferred to a prison in the state capital where conditions were less suitable. After that Luciano was transferred to New York, as his lawyers did not have enough time to appeal the extradition decision from Arkansas.
In a later trial, Luciano was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest sentence handed down to anyone in that case. It was also the first time a criminal of this level was sentenced to prison for a reason other than tax evasion.
Dewey made Luciano a symbol of organized crime and made this trial a cover by which the whole book would be judged. In the future many would talk about the book without looking beyond its cover, giving the misleading impression that the cover was not the basis of the book, but was written for the cover.
When Luciano was imprisoned, authority over his family first passed to Vito Genovese, which cast doubt on how much influence Charles had over family affairs, because Vito aspired to absolute power, as he later confirmed. But Genovese fell into Dewey's crosshairs right after Luciano and was forced to flee to Italy in 1937.
At that point Frank Costello was visiting Luciano in prison regularly and managing the family's affairs. It can be said that even in prison, Charles continued to run the Mafia family through Costello. Luciano assigned the management of his assets and personal money to his friend and old partner Meyer Lansky.
Likewise, Luciano did not lose hope of appealing his conviction and having his case reviewed. Luciano's lawyers fought for his release for many years, but without success. The only thing that helped Charles get out of prison was the outbreak of World War II and the offer of assistance to the U.S. Navy.
Organized crime gangs in the United States had been helping American authorities fight fascist tendencies since the 1930s, not formally but out of their own convictions. The Italian Mafia, persecuted by Mussolini in its homeland, opposed his supporters in the United States. Jewish gangsters fought American fascists who supported Hitler because of their treatment of Jews. So it is not surprising that the authorities later made a formal offer of cooperation.
From the end of 1941, when the United States formally entered World War II, it suffered severely from German submarines that attacked almost all ships leaving New York harbor, as well as from increasing numbers of Third Reich saboteurs operating directly on local docks.
The turning point at which U.S. Navy leaders realized they were losing on their own soil was the February 9, 1942 fire that put the cruiser Normandie, worth 56 million dollars and capable of carrying up to 10,000 soldiers at a time, out of service.
There are at least two accounts of this disaster describing what happened. According to one, German saboteurs started the fire, while the other claims the Italian Mafia did it on Luciano's orders to push the government to ask the gangs for help as quickly as possible. In this case it does not matter which account is true, as both lead to the same result.
The Navy later turned to the gangs controlling the port for help, specifically to Joe Lanza, one of their members, who extorted port workers' unions and controlled the entire fish trade. Lanza was under investigation at the time and agreed to help naval intelligence even without explicit promises to drop the charges.
Meyer Lansky, who had known Lanza for many years like Luciano, soon learned of Lanza's cooperation with the authorities, which benefited him more than once. Combining this information with Luciano's imprisonment, Lansky had a perfect opportunity to get his old friend out of prison.
At Lansky's request, Lanza told fleet representatives he had done his best. If they needed more help, they should turn to a man with far greater influence. Thus Lanza referred the Navy to Lucky Lano. Navy officials were impressed by the result of their cooperation with Lanza, so they took his advice and immediately contacted Luciano's lawyer, Moses Polikoff, who in turn referred them to Meyer Lansky, who had already linked naval intelligence with the head of the Genovese family.
Luciano's conditions for cooperation were exactly the same as Lansky's, as he was promised nothing in return except the chance to boast of helping his country. Yet Charles accepted the offer with only one condition: that no one know of this cooperation, as it could have ended badly for him in Italy, where he would be deported at the end of his term.
The deal with the Navy was profitable for both the state and Lucky. Finally the former achieved victory over the German saboteurs, and Luciano could now participate more in affairs and enjoy greater freedom, as Lansky and Costello, who were the link in the deal and managed his affairs, were no longer restricted in their visits to him.
Another result of this cooperation was cementing the legend of Luciano as king of the underworld. This misconception first appeared thanks to Dewey's efforts during the trial, then Lanza expressed it at Lansky's request in negotiations with the government, increasing the likelihood that it would turn to Luciano.
The moment this deal began to bear fruit, government institutions believed his claims without scrutiny and considered them fact for a long time. When the German saboteur case was settled and American forces prepared to land in Italy, Luciano's role emerged again.
He provided intelligence agencies with comprehensive information about everything related to his homeland. The Americans knew where to land, who were the people to talk to for important strategic information, and most importantly, how to win those people over to their side. This information also contributed to the successful American attack that helped the Allies achieve final victory.
Although Luciano was promised nothing in return for his help, he received his reward after the war ended. In February 1946 Charles was released from custody and immediately deported to Italy. From then on he never returned to the country that had become his home.
At the age of forty-eight, Charles Luciano regained his freedom, but he remained in exile forever. After his release, Luciano was accompanied to Ellis Island, where he stayed for some time waiting to travel to Italy. There, the day before his departure, some gangsters he had long dealt with visited him. Among those at the farewell were Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello.
After bidding farewell to his colleagues and friends, Luciano left the United States on a cargo ship and arrived in Naples after 17 days, on February 28, 1946. There he was taken directly from the ship's gangway to a police station for questioning about the reasons for his presence in the area.
After a short interview, Luciano was released and headed to Sicily, to his parents' birthplace, Lercara Friddi. After staying with relatives for a few months, Luciano began devising a plan to return to the United States. Nothing deterred him from this desire, even the threat that entering the United States would mean re-imprisonment to serve the remaining 25 years of his sentence.
The main motive for Luciano's return was, of course, money. While in Italy he was too far from the business he had built for many years, which he had never reaped the fruits of because of his imprisonment. In addition, around the same period, Vito Genovese, who had previously tried to control the family, returned to the United States. It would be foolish to assume he would not try to do so again.
Mexico was the first option Luciano planned to use to return to the United States. The FBI received reports from July to September 1946 indicating that Charles was planning to move to America via Tijuana. The Bureau worked with local authorities to search the city and the entire county, but Luciano was not arrested. So either Luciano managed to infiltrate, or it was a deliberate planting operation to test the situation.
The second option, officially confirmed, was Cuba, the island of freedom, which was then considered an unofficial state of the United States. From there to Miami the flight took only one hour, allowing Luciano to follow his business in America closely without crossing the border or risking prison.
In addition, Meyer Lansky, Luciano's close friend, was planning to build a gambling empire in Cuba, and Charles intended to invest his money there. In other words, Cuba was the ideal place for Luciano.
Luciano arrived on the island of freedom in late 1946. According to some sources he arrived by air from Mexico, while other sources indicate he arrived directly from Italy. At that time, thanks to Lansky's connections, who had been courting Cuban authorities since the early 1930s, Charles had already obtained an official entry visa.
Shortly after Luciano's arrival in Cuba, the famous Havana Mafia conference was held, gathering almost all the major crime bosses. The main issue of the conference centered on investment in Cuba's gambling industry. After lengthy discussions, it was decided to support the idea, which was largely led by Meyer Lansky.
The fate of Ben Siegel, who was building the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas, was no less important and was a topic of discussion at the conference. Many gangsters had invested money in this gambling venue and were not pleased that Siegel's girlfriend, Virginia Hill, had transferred part of the construction funds to her Swiss bank account. Although Lansky defended Bugsy, Siegel was sentenced to death by a vote of the conference.
As expected, this conference drew the attention of American authorities, who believed at the time that Luciano was the leader of the American criminal underworld. It was decided to expel him from American territory no matter the cost. Two bodies were involved in the case: the FBI and the drug enforcement administration.
America pressured Cuban authorities heavily on the matter, and at the end of February the latter agreed to expel Luciano from the country. On March 20, 1947, Charles Luciano was again handed over to Italy thanks to the efforts of American authorities.
To ensure Charles did not approach the United States again, FBI director Hoover personally sent letters to all Latin American countries that could receive Lucky, urging them not to do so. Upon arriving in Italy, Lucky was first imprisoned for nine days in Genoa, then transferred to Palermo, where he spent the same period in detention.
After eighteen days of detention, he was finally released and allowed to go to Rome, where he rented an apartment and could finally think about his next steps under normal conditions. American authorities had made clear they would not allow him near the country, making management of his New York business nearly impossible.
Of course he could get money from his investments in Lansky's companies. He also received some money from the New York Mafia for past services, and Frank Costello sent him money on behalf of his family when he was the head. But all this was not even a tenth of what he could have earned through direct involvement in the business.
Luciano needed his own project in Italy that would generate income equivalent to his losses. This might point to drug trafficking, but it appears to be another of the Luciano legends. It is commonly believed that Charles was a central figure in Italy in organizing heroin smuggling to the United States. What do the facts tell us about that?
Shortly after his expulsion from Cuba, Luciano visited heroin-producing countries. These movements did not escape the attention of the American drug enforcement agency, which intensified its surveillance of Luciano and pressured Italian law enforcement on the matter.
Throughout the 1950s Charles operated secretly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted intensive investigations into him, and Italian authorities arrested Luciano at the slightest suspicion of involvement in drug trafficking. His passport was withdrawn to prevent him from leaving Italy, his movements within the country were restricted, and a curfew was even imposed on him.
This intense scrutiny by the authorities led local Mafiosi to avoid any illegal business with Luciano. Rumors that Charles had cooperated with the authorities during the war did not help encourage such willingness. In general he still enjoyed a prestigious status in Italy, mostly due to his friendship with an influential local boss named Calogero Vizzini.
If Luciano had indeed been a central figure in drug trafficking in those years, considering the corruption of police and authorities in Italy, as well as the vast money drugs generate, he would not have faced such widespread pressure from law enforcement. Likewise, running a large-scale drug smuggling network would have given Luciano far more credibility in the Italian criminal world than he actually had.
His real position in the Mafia at the time is shown by the story of Antonio Calderon, a local Mafioso, who claimed that a Neapolitan thug slapped Luciano in the face in front of everyone. Although this man was later killed, the incident shows how Luciano was treated.
The fact that Charles was not responsible for smuggling and had little influence among the Mafia is confirmed by the fact that Joe Bonanno negotiated a cooperation deal in 1957 to smuggle drugs into the United States not with him, but with the Sicilian Mafia boss Gipp Gen Russo, and Luciano was not even invited to the meeting.
I would add that despite all the attention paid by the American drug enforcement administration and Italian police, with all the repeated arrests of Luciano, and with the many arrests and interrogations of people involved in drug trafficking, the case of Charles's involvement in drug trafficking did not go beyond theories and speculation for more than a decade.
Despite Luciano's desire, after his expulsion from Cuba, to own a project in Italy that would earn him a lot of money, he was forced to live on what his friends in America sent him. This income began to decline gradually. At first Luciano's friend Frank Costello resigned from the head of the family under pressure from Vito Genovese, so payments stopped. Then a revolution erupted in Cuba, causing Luciano to lose a large part of his gambling investments.
Charles wanted to improve his financial situation by producing a film about his life. He even began writing his own script and met film producer Barnett Glassman. But while Glassman was not interested in the idea, his assistant Martin Gosch was the exact opposite. Gosch spent a long time working on the film's plot with Luciano.
In February 1961 the final script was completed and approved by Luciano. The contract was signed, under which Charles was supposed to receive 100,000 dollars and a share of the revenues, but old acquaintances from New York suddenly intervened and hinted decisively that they did not want to see this film. The warning could not be interpreted ambiguously, and in January 1962 Luciano arranged a meeting with Gosch to tell him the film would not be produced.
Gosch was going to fly to see Luciano in Naples, and Charles drove to the airport to meet him. After waiting for the producer and walking out with him from the arrivals hall, Luciano suddenly fell to the ground. He had recently been suffering from heart problems. On January 26, 1962, Charles suffered the heart attack that had troubled him for years and that took his life.
On January 29 a memorial service was held in Naples, attended by his close relatives, a number of small-time gangsters, and dozens of police officers. Among the major gangsters, only Joe Adonis came to bid Luciano farewell. His old friend Meyer Lansky sent only a bouquet of flowers.
Two weeks later Luciano's body was transferred to America and buried in the family plot in Queens, where he rests to this day. That was the story of Charles Lucky Luciano, the most legendary gangster in American history, whose role in the underworld was inflated on paper compared with reality.