Lucky Luciano

• Born: November 24, 1897
• Birthplace: Lercara Friddi, Sicily, Italy
• Died: January 26, 1962
• Place of death: Naples, Italy

Mafia kingpin

Major offenses: After eliminating the old crime bosses in New York, Luciano turned an archaic secret society called the Mafia into a modern international business conglomerate.

Active: 1916-1936

Locale: United States, mainly New York

Sentence: Fifty years for operating houses of prostitution; pardoned after ten years and deported

Early Life

Salvatore Luciano (lew-chee-AH-noh) came to New York at the age of eight years, not knowing a word of English. Unhappy in school, he made pennies a day by protecting schoolchildren from bullies who robbed them.

Angered by the flashy clothes he bought with such money, his father beat him, so he ran away from home. Confined to a truant school for four months, Luciano dropped out of school and teamed up with an Italian, Frank Costello, and two Jews, Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, to form a street gang from the lower East Side, which would transform the nature of crime in the United States.

As a delivery boy for a hatmaker, Luciano was caught stashing heroin in the hatbands of ladies’ bonnets. On June 25, 1916, he pleaded guilty to possession of narcotics and served a six-month sentence at Hampton Farms Penitentiary. He would not be convicted of another crime for twenty years.

Criminal Career

The advent of Prohibition in 1920 enabled bootleggers to make big profits by selling alcohol illegally. A case of liquor costing twenty-five dollars could bring one thousand dollars. Luciano and his gang negotiated big deals for high-quality liquor from Philadelphia, Canada, and Europe. Bootlegging went beyond buying and selling. Ships anchored at sea dispensed liquor to smaller boats that sped it to warehouses for distribution to retail outlets, called speakeasies, of which there were thirty-two thousand in New York City alone. Violence was used to prevent hijacking along the way. Luciano organized bootlegging in the New York area and made a fortune.

His immense profits brought him to the attention of two major Mafia gangs, headed by Joe “the Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, deeply sunk in internecine warfare which Luciano thought useless. After being abducted, tortured, and left for dead by Maranzano’s goons, Luciano decided to kill both bosses. He lured Masseria to a restaurant to be killed by four gunmen. Maranzano was murdered in his Manhattan office by Luciano’s men posing as federal agents.

Then, to make peace and money, Luciano reorganized crime. Remaining first among equals, he selected a high council that would replace rule by one man. Nine heads of the nation’s twenty-four Mafia families rotated membership, meeting periodically to adjudicate disputes, approve murders, make major business decisions, and enforce Luciano’s rules.

From his suite in the Waldorf Towers, Luciano directed supervisors of diversified businesses in his empire: among others, Costello, over gambling and political corruption; Arthur Flegenheimer, called Dutch Schultz, over liquor and lottery rackets; Lansky, over banking and casinos; Albert Anastasia, over the docks and an enforcement unit called Murder, Incorporated.

In 1936, Luciano was sent to jail by an enterprising prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and Republican presidential candidate, who made the first use of wiretaps and a new law against racketeering. After serving ten years of an unprecedented fifty-year sentence for operating houses of prostitution, Luciano was pardoned by Dewey for helping the war effort. To protect Allied shipping from Nazi submarines during World War II, the Navy had enlisted Luciano to thwart sabotage on the docks and to secure intelligence from townspeople in Sicily to facilitate the military invasion that liberated Europe.

Luciano claimed credit for the loss of the American ship Normandie, which, sixty days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, caught fire and capsized at its dock before the eyes of millions of New Yorkers. The press blamed the fire on Nazi sabotage, and tempers flared for war on Germany.

Although commended for aiding the war effort, Luciano was deported on February 10, 1946. The extent of his criminal career in exile remains a mystery. He visited syndicate chieftains in Cuba later that year, ostensibly to fete Frank Sinatra on his show business success or, as some say, to organize narcotics smuggling. Though arrested in his youth for possession of narcotics, Luciano denied later links with the trade. Government agents in the United States and Italy hounded him for years without making a narcotics case against him. Once he even volunteered to organize the trade and stop the flow of drugs to the United States, but his offer received no reply. The day he died, Italian officials were ready to charge him with smuggling 150 million dollars’ worth of narcotics into the United States over a ten-year period.

Impact

Lucky Luciano had an enormous impact on crime, criminal justice, labor unions, the entertainment industry, and American society itself. By making the noble experiment called Prohibition fail, Luciano affected laws, lawmakers, and the citizenry at large. His criminal syndicate was made a permanent feature of the national landscape, and, on a deeper level, the faith of ordinary people in their established institutions was weakened.

Under Luciano’s leadership, organized crime became the biggest business in the United States, with revenues greater than that of any legitimate corporation. Those funds were used to corrupt the government to an extent never known before. The criminal justice system itself had to mature to meet his challenge. Law books were rewritten to enable prosecutors to combat his sophisticated operations.

Ironically, Luciano’s influence is still felt in the industries of tourism and entertainment, which he encouraged through far-flung investments in regional vice centers, most notably Las Vegas. His insights into organizing labor, first implemented in the garment district of New York, enabled the labor movement to succeed in the United States. The nation’s commitment to diversity owes much to Luciano’s acceptance of Jews and other minorities. He hated the old Mafia bosses for excluding non-Italians, and his political allies made such ideas about mutual respect and equality part of their agenda for the United States.

Bibliography

Gosch, Martin A., with Richard Hammer. The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. New York: Dell, 1978. Based on confessions to the biographer in whose arms he died, this book documents Luciano’s denials of implication in prostitution and narcotics. Useful index.

Raab, Selwyn. Five Families. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Definitive history of the rise and fall of New York’s most powerful mobs. Photographs. Index. Bibliography.

Reppetto, Thomas. American Mafia. New York: Holt, 2004. Detailed chronicle of the rise of the Mafia in the United States from 1890 to 1951. Photographs. Excellent bibliography.