The murder of Joe the Boss remained a mystery but it soon became clear that the chief beneficiary was Charlie Lucky, Charles Luciano, Joe’s erstwhile bodyguard and right-hand man. Charlie had been absent the night of the shooting in the Bronx when Joe’s bodyguards were shot down. On the afternoon when Joe was killed in Coney Island, it is said, Charlie had gone to the washroom just before the shooting began. From then on he mounted in power. He was a very lucky fellow. He also had foresight.
A bodyguard should not have too much brains, and Joe the Boss made a mistake when he picked Lucky. For years Charlie had been more than a bodyguard—more and more a privy councilor firmly located at the seat of power. Charlie had not confined his friendships to the Italian mobsters but had strong contacts outside the Unione Siciliana. I have been told that he was present at the Al Capone peace conference in Atlantic City. Whether that is actually true, I do not know. It is clear, however, that in later years he was close to Capone and closer still to others who were rising to succeed Capone in racket power. For leader of the Italian gangs, Lucky was the candidate of those who were out to “Americanize” the underworld.
Lucky’s real name was Salvatore Lucania. He was born in Sicily and brought to New York in 1907, when he was nine years old. He lived with his parents, two brothers, and a sister, on First Avenue just south of Fourteenth Street, enrolled in public school, and played truant with regularity. At fourteen he quit school and went to work at $5 a week as a shipping clerk in a hat factory, but soon found it more pleasant and profitable to hang around crap games.
He grew up on the rim of the lower east side, a black-eyed gamin ranging the streets of as fabulous a slum as the world has ever known. Never, I am sure, has there been such a city, such a conglomeration of vice, of virtue, of plain human energy, as that huddled mass of stinking tenements, that maze of crowded streets, roaring with elevated trains, jammed with pushcarts, bedraggled with washing on the line. We say very easily that the congested areas breed criminals. They also breed strong men to conquer, idealists to preach. From Lucky’s school came reformers and judges, artists and musicians, pickpockets and racketeers.
What immediate set of circumstances caused him to pick his set of ideals and associates, instead of others, we do not know. He might easily have wandered two blocks westward to Union Square and joined in with the Socialist movement which was so active there in his youth. The youngster very soon observed the people around his neighborhood. They did not look to him like downtrodden masses. They looked like crumbs.
They worked hard, for small money, when they could get work. They skimped and saved, but even then the wolf was near the door. Their only social security was the Tammany leader, who provided a basket of food when necessary, kept their children out of jail, and on election day collected their votes. But there were fellows hanging around the street corner and the pool room who were not crumbs. They wore flashy clothes, had money to spend, called the Tammany captain by his first name, and never did any work.
“I never wanted to be a crumb,” said the unregenerate Lucky in later years, when he had occasion to expound his philosophy of life. “If I had to be a crumb, I'd rather be dead.”
The neighborhood where young Lucky lived was in the territory which had been ruled by Monk Eastman. But it was at the other end of the Bowery, down around Mulberry Bend where the Five Points gang hung out, that the youngster found kindred spirits. He started wandering down there before he was wearing long pants. The leader of the Five Points gang in those days was Paul Kelly, an Italian, the first one ever to rise to real leadership in the gang world of New York.1 Among the tough boys of Mulberry Street he soon found ways of living without work.
Distinctions of race and nationality are necessary in any objective discussion of cosmopolitan New York life, for the city is organized along racial lines, in business, in politics, and also in the underworld. When the early English settlers came to America, they brought plenty of London riffraff with them who formed the early criminal class. It was poverty-stricken Irish, breeding in the unspeakable slums of the Old Brewery and Cow Bay, whose sons banded into the first rowdy, brawling street gangs of New York. Later the wave of Jewish immigration brought its own criminals, and so also the Italian. The most criminal class in the United States are the “native” Americans. Stemming from the old feudists and cattle rustlers, they predominate in the prisons. The most notorious desperado bands of recent years, such as those of Dillinger, the Barkers, the Barrows, came from the good old American stock of the western hills and plains. But the American of predatory disposition, if he has executive ability and dominating personality, is likely to end up in Wall Street. With the same qualifications, your son of more recent immigration, bred in the streets and educated in a reformatory, turns up as a racket man. This story happens to deal with an Italian.
Through outside alliances, young Lucania was to become the greatest leader of the Italian underworld. Like Mussolini, he was to cut the Italians in on rackets they had never touched before, and bring the Italian mobs to new stature among gangs led by men of other races.
Charlie Luciano never was a crumb after his first few weeks as a shipping clerk. From then on he was an apprentice in crime. He was first arrested when he was eighteen, after he had started peddling dope for Big Nose Charlie. He went to the reformatory for six months, and after that he was a certified, confirmed criminal. As he marched on toward the top in the underworld, he was frequently arrested, but it never amounted to more than a few days’ detention.
There are only occasional glimpses of him in his early years; He acquired a taste for-silk underwear, heavy gambling, and fine cars. He got a ticket several times a year for passing a red light or for other traffic violations. Every two or three years he would be picked up on some charge involving narcotics or a gun. In 1923 he made the mistake of selling morphine to a federal stool pigeon and was arrested, but he avoided prosecution by informing the narcotic agents of a trunk full of opium which was hidden on Mulberry Street. The men who owned that opium did not learn, until twelve years later, how it was they were detected. He always gave his name to the cops as Charles Lucania, but they knew him as Luciano.
Lucky’s specialties were narcotics and gambling. He was a gunman himself and, as he accumulated a bankroll, he gathered followers around him. He had qualities of leadership. He was of phlegmatic disposition, calm and firm in times of danger, never emotional or flighty as were so many of his Latin confreres. He spoke slowly and always thought before he spoke. Ruthless with his enemies, he was, like any good politician, one who would go down the line for his friends. He was never stingy with his money, but cultivated the free and easy generosity of the gambler. That made him popular.
As an up and coming young man in the Unione Siciliana, Lucky had a piece of the war in Chicago. And that is said to be what really put him up among the top men. Whether he actually went to Chicago and took part personally in the hostilities, I do not know. But New York City was a reservoir of trigger men and supplied them for the Chicago fighting.
One of the trigger men who went to Chicago was a youngster known as Little Davie Betillo, whom Lucky had known as a kid along Mulberry Street. This Little Davie had been first arrested in 1919 when at the age of eleven he stole a handbag containing $1,500 worth of jewelry from a store. Two years later he had been picked up trundling four bottles of liquor along the street in a pushcart. After that he had developed into a pickpocket, gambler, and gunman.
Little Davie spent four years in Chicago and came back to New York just before the murder of Joe the Boss, to cash in on a reputation of having been one of Al Capone’s most desperate torpedoes. He was an egocentric, vicious little fellow, though mild enough in appearance, and he spread fear wherever he went. People told Lucky that Little Davie ought to be knocked off, but Little Davie was useful and Lucky liked him.
Another of Lucky’s tie-ups with Chicago was a kinsman who was a boss out there; and the reason we know about that is through the matrimonial troubles of an Italian gunman named Tommy Ryan. Ryan was out fighting in the Chicago war and while there he secretly married the daughter of Lucky’s kinsman. But almost immediately thereafter he was ordered to go back East as the town was getting hot. Back home he forgot all about his war bride and settled down for the time being to a comparatively peaceful life. But the Chicago girl had not forgotten, and she rose to haunt him just about the time he was going to marry another girl in New York. Ryan was now one of the leaders of a small mob protecting houses of prostitution and other joints, and much to the dismay of his partners he got to taking mysterious airplane trips to Chicago. Frequently they had to call him up on the telephone and hurry him back to New York when there was trouble to be taken care of, and they got fed up with that. Finally, he confessed that he had been in Chicago getting married again. Lucky himself had reminded him of his old liaison and informed him that one of two things was going to happen to the Chicago wife. She either was going to be a real bride, with veil, flowers, cake, priest, and a bridegroom in a dress suit, or she was going to be a widow. Ryan was allowed to take his pick and had accepted the obvious alternative. He never regretted it, for he got in with influential people and now is said to be one of the bosses in Boston.
After the mysterious murder of Joe the Boss, life went on as usual in the speakeasies, the horse pool rooms, the clip joints, the crap games, and the race tracks. But in the cafes of Mulberry Street and the inner circles of the gambling, bootlegging world, word was passed that Lucky was the new boss.
Not much was said about it. The new boss was even more secretive than the old. In the past Lucky had always lived with one woman or another, but now he just took his girls where he found them though he did often have a show-girl that he was making a play for.
As a matter of fact, Charlie Lucky knew a lot of show-girls. The days of his eminence were the heyday of the gangster in the life of Broadway, for the depression had banished the big-spending business man who had been meat for gold-diggers. During the boom days it had been the custom for the more glorified show-girls to go out on parties every night with lavish spenders who liked to be seen with them. A girl might be paid $50, $100, or more, merely for the pleasure of her company in an expensive night club. No physical intimacy was necessarily involved in the transaction, if the girl knew her way around, and it made a very nice racket. After the stock market crash there were fewer stockbrokers who could afford this sort of display, and then the mobsters had their innings. They were the best pickings to be had.
Lucky often gave parties, by proxy. He would send liquor to a girl’s apartment and have her entertain a lot of visitors from out of town; or he would have one of his men rent a hotel suite and throw a party there. Show-girls would be invited, and would expect a large money present for “taxi-fare.” I have been told about these things by a girl who knew many gangsters. She tells me she knew Lucky well, and I believe her.
This girl did not like to tell me details of the gangsters’ parties, because she said they were not nice parties. Sometimes embarrassing things would happen. For instance, a girl who did not know the ropes might take a $100 bill from the wrong man, some visitor from the Middle West who did not know the proper inhibitions of Broadway. Then there would be misunderstanding in the bedroom. Usually no one interfered on such an occasion. Gunmen do not like to meddle in each other’s personal affairs; they prefer to let live and live. As for the girls, well—a girl has to take care of herself; she expects others to do the same.
My friend did tell me about one of Lucky’s parties, though, which he threw for members of the Purple Gang of Detroit. Overwhelmed by the charms of some of Broad-way’s most glamorous girls, certain of the mugs from Michigan were impetuously intent upon retiring to the bedrooms. It was getting pretty bad when Lucky spoke up.
“Listen,” he said, “these girls are show-girls. They work for a living.”
But Lucky could not fail in hospitality, so he had a couple of girls sent over from Polly Adler’s, to take care of the bedroom end of the entertainment. As the Adler girls mingled in the party (more beautiful than any of the show-girls, according to my friend) a strange thing happened. When one of them would put down her empty highball glass, a gangster would pick it up and throw it in the fireplace, so no one else could drink out of it. Don’t expect me to explain why a girl should be more poisonous while drinking highballs than while in a bedroom. I'm just telling it as it was told to me. The fireplace was filled with shattered glass.
Moralities and taboos are strange things, which appear in different forms in all levels of society. As we shall see later, racketeers scorn the pimps upon whom they are perfectly willing to prey. The combined chivalry and hospitality of Charlie Lucky on that night have sharp significance, in the light of things which were to be said about him later.
Girls liked Charlie. He had a flashing white smile, and a debonair manner, with a steely showing of harsh cruelty underneath. He was filled with a vitality, a joy in life. He liked to unbutton his vest, loosen his belt, and eat large plates of spaghetti, with red wine.
“You wouldn’t like me if you knew who I was,” he told a new girl once. She didn’t know who he was, but she sensed it. She knew he was underworld, and she saw that strong men, bad men, jumped to obey his slightest word.
Lucky kept his life in compartments. If he was playing with a girl, she wouldn’t even know where to call him on the telephone. He would call her, tell her to come where he was, or would drop in at her apartment late at night.
In a sense he was almost a recluse. He moved from one hotel to another where only his intimate vassals could find him. On outings at Hot Springs or Miami, he lived under his own name, and sometimes he was pointed out by insiders at race tracks and night clubs as Charlie Lucky. But back home in New York, he was Mr. Charles Lane of the Barbizon Plaza, Mr. Charles Ross of the Waldorf-Astoria; he was always under an assumed name in his hotel. The general public knew him not at all.
Charlie’s daily life was the routine of the sporting man. He represented himself to be a gambler, as indeed he was. At times he ran gambling clubs in Miami and Saratoga. His joint at Saratoga was The Chicago Club, a popular resort which had every gambling device from a bird cage to roulette, and was equipped with an armored machine gun nest over the front door. He had a piece of Fred Bachman’s big horse room syndicate. His followers and supporters controlled territories and had a finger in gambling and alcohol everywhere.
You would never have thought that Charlie was a man of affairs. He slept until noon or later, had conferences with lieutenants in his hotel room, then went to the race track. There he would often meet other big shots and presumably transact business with them between races. Evenings were spent in restaurants and night clubs. Often Lucky hung out in the Villanova Restaurant on Forty-sixth Street, or Celano’s Garden on Kenmare Street, down near Mulberry Bend. The hot spots would see him at night, and often he would wind up before bedtime at Dave’s Blue Room.
A similar, sleek, well-tailored, sporting existence seems to have been routine for all the big racket men except Dutch Schultz. The Dutchman had a frugal personality all his own. He always kept close track of his money; indeed he died while studying a detailed accounting sheet of the policy racket. He was always rushing around, stirring up his executives and nosing into the details of the racket business. The Dutchman paid $35 for his suits and they looked it. But Lucky and most of the others, got theirs from the same Fifth Avenue tailor at $190 apiece.
Lucky usually had someone staying with him. One of his roommates was a stupid fellow called Chappie Brescia, who strutted around the hotel in riding breeches. Chappie did not know the first thing about the beer business, but he was president of a beer distributing company and could prove it. He had a pistol permit.
Lucky was not going to repeat Capone’s mistakes. He did not need a conspicuous bodyguard. He passed the word that he was not to be talked about. People in the underworld said he could pick up a telephone and get quick action anywhere in America. But the talk was in whispers.
A night club doorman, taking his ease in a bar one evening in 1932, started to tell an anecdote about Charlie Lucky. Suddenly he was interrupted by a dark, hard man who broke into the conversation.
“Pipe down,” said the dark man. “That name isn’t talked about.”
And that night club doorman quit talking in the middle of a sentence.
Little things showed the change in Lucky’s status. Instead of being part of a retinue at the race track, he now had his own sleekly-tailored retinue. In June, 1932, when Tammany Hall went to Chicago for its last stand fight against the nomination of Roosevelt for President, Lucky went along with Albert Marinelli, leader of the downtown Italian district, the new rising power in Tammany. He neglected to register at the Drake Hotel, or if he did so it was under a phoney name. But he was there, around Marinelli’s suite, with seemingly inexhaustible supplies of liquor at his command. Some of the delegates had neglected to supply themselves with sufficient to drink, but Lucky took care of them.
Lucky’s police record shows his rise as plainly as anything. Before Joe’s murder Lucky was being arrested every now and then on charges of felonious assault, robbery, and various matters involving guns. Only a month or so before Joe’s murder, Lucky was accused of participating in a vulgar street brawl, beating up two Jersey City policemen who had ventured across the river into Manhattan. In the five years after Joe’s death, Lucky was picked up in Cleveland for investigation, in Chicago for investigation, and in Miami he registered voluntarily with the police, in accordance with the law. But in New York City he was not arrested at all.
Lucky had plenty of money, but that did not mean that he was the proprietor of all the various enterprises over which he held sway. He was partners with others in various things, but as a big shot his status was less that of an owner than that of a feudal ruler, a man whose leadership was accepted by other barons of the underworld and who represented his own Italian element in the councils with leaders of other mobs.
The rigidity of the control maintained by the top men is astonishing to contemplate. For instance, everybody who goes into an enterprise in the racket world is supposed to have the O.K. from the right people, and if the matter is sufficiently important, the O.K. has to come from the top. A few years ago, there was a boss around Mulberry Bend known as Don Cheech. Cheech had a small mob working for him, shaking people down, protecting houses of prostitution and that sort of thing; and he stood in well with the bosses. That is why he was called Don, meaning lieutenant. One day it was discovered that Don Cheech had been running a joint in Westchester, a roadhouse which was also a house of prostitution, without having an O.K. for it. This was a bad offense for a member of the organization. The ordinary penalty would have been death but Cheech stood in well with his bosses and they merely chased him. He went into exile, back to Italy. The mobsters who were working for him bade him a merry good-by and never knew until later that he had been kicked out of the country. Don Cheech’s offense was a mild one. If he had killed anybody without getting the O.K., there would have been no forgiveness. That is one thing people in mobs have to remember—unless you are a big shot, you have got to get the O.K. before you kill.
As a leader and a ruler, Charlie Lucky discouraged bloodshed. He was a peacemaker and that was one reason why he was so popular. Take, for instance, the case of Ciro Terranova, the Artichoke King. In his later years, Terranova seemed an obstacle to the ambitions of younger men. He was also greedy and they :thought he took too much of the profits for himself. Terranova was a partner with Dutch Schultz and he also had the monopoly in the policy game in Westchester. One day a number of the young bucks got together with Trigger Mike Copolla and decided that Trigger Mike should take over. So they went to see Charlie Lucky and get the O.K. Lucky told them to lay off, that he would handle the matter himself.
Lucky called in Ciro and told him he was through; it was time for him to get out of the racket. He thereby made two friends—one by gratifying Trigger Mike’s ambition, another by saving Terranova’s life.
Trigger Mike took over. Later, after the death of Dutch Schultz, he was to take over the Schultz enterprises.
The Artichoke King lived to distinguish himself in yet another way. In 1937, with the Schultz mob broken up and Lucky gone, Terranova could not meet the payments on his oil burner. Creditors moved in and took away his pink stucco villa on Peace Street and everything with it. But Terranova lived to the ripe age of forty-nine and died in February, 1938, of natural causes, in bed, practically penniless.
As has been indicated, the rise of Lucky as the leader of those who wanted to “Americanize” the underworld was not a purely individual accomplishment. He had not only his strong backing in the Unione Siciliana but was allied with powerful and desperate mobs outside. Through the Artichoke King, he had strong diplomatic relations with Dutch Schultz, racket overlord of the Bronx and upper Manhattan. Personally, he tied up with the great industrial racket team of Lepke and Gurrah.
When Herbert Asbury wrote his excellent history, “The Gangs of New York,” he wound it up with the murder in 1927 of Jacob Orgen, Little Augie, whom he called the last of the gangsters. But he wrote the obituary of the gangster a bit too soon. Little Augie had been at that time the chief exponent of strong-arming in labor disputes, successor to the tradition of Kid Dropper and of Dopey Benny Fein. Augie’s successors were to be bigger than he.
Suspected and arrested for murdering Augie were a loft burglar named Louis Buchalter and a tough gorilla named Jacob Shapiro who, as soon as they were released, proceeded to take over and develop his power. These men were to become known as Lepke and Gurrah, a terror to industry in New York. In the succeeding eight years, they established hegemony over the painter’s union, bakery and flour trucking, fur industry and garment trades. The time came when their terror was so great that a gorilla no longer needed to mention their names when he went on an errand. All he needed to say was he came from “the boys” and his word was law. Lepke and Gurrah had developed the industrial racket to unprecedented power over business.
Up until this period, the Italian mobs had never taken any part in the bigger industrial racketeering in New York. From now on Charlie Lucky had his hand in all of it through Lepke. Lepke was an ally of Lucky’s, supported by Lucky’s military strength, and for years he never did anything of importance without consultation with the Italian boss.
Also allied with Charlie Lucky was a mob of quick shooters organized by the team of Bug Siegel and Meyer Lansky, which was to become known everywhere as the Bug and Meyer mob. Bug Siegel was a young terror; Meyer, as he is generally known in the underworld, is a quiet, brainy fellow, an advocate of peace for which the mob gets a good price. While Dutch Schultz was obtaining notoriety by taking over the policy racket in Harlem, the Bug and Meyer mob was quietly establishing contacts and dominations over mobs in other cities and getting control of the policy rackets and other rackets everywhere.
Allied also with these men was Abe “Longie” Zwillman of Newark, New Jersey, dominant boss of the industrial region west of the Hudson. His chief interests were centered in the heavy construction industries.
After Charlie Lucky had been convicted, after Lepke and Gurrah had fled from the law, Longie Zwillman and Bug and Meyer remained powerful in the vast, rich territories beyond the confines of Manhattan Island. Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles are localities in point.
A great change had come over the underworld. Where once there had been small and isolated neighborhood gangs, now the major interests of the underworld were really all one mob. Underworld people began to talk about the Combination.
Now, every mob is a combination or every racket is a combination, and the word is commonly used by men in the gangster business. It has been our habit to talk of this big gangster and that big gangster as the ruler of vast underworld enterprises. But actually every important mob is an alliance of diverse elements who work together because that pays better than fighting. Gradually, out of all the small combinations there now had evolved one big Combination which, for a time at least, laid down the law for the underworld.
From several sources, underworld sources, comes the story of a meeting held late in 1931 or early in 1932, in a Brooklyn hotel, at which these various big underworld leaders formed the Combination. Doubtless many meetings occurred. These men saw a great deal of each other, socially as well as in a business way. Whether any single, outstanding meeting actually took place, I have not been able to determine. But it is clear that the big shots had got together. The power of Charlie Lucky had a lot to do with that. Through the underworld he and his allies spread the Pax Siciliano.
The value of such alliances in the movement to “Americanize” and modernize the underworld became apparent soon after the rise of Charlie Lucky to leadership in the U nione Siciliana, for his election was not unanimous. The “greasers” were fighting men, cold, hard, Sicilian gunmen. They would not give up without a struggle. In July, 1931, their leaders got together at Coney Island and elected their own chief, one Salvatore Maranzano.
Maranzano was a newcomer in the country. He had been here a couple of years, become a naturalized citizen almost immediately,2 done a bit of bootlegging, and set out to recruit for himself an army of trigger men from abroad through a system of alien smuggling.
There were plenty of recruits. In Italy, the Mafia was hard pressed by Mussolini. To obtain a plentiful supply of death-defying gunmen, it was necessary only to get them past the United States Immigration authorities. They were a strange type. Bred in the tradition of secrecy and assassination—small, swart men with stupid eyes—they did not know the language, they did not know much of anything. But if you put the right man on the spot and gave the nod, they would drill him without batting an eyelash. Very good men for mob purposes.
Maranzano had his headquarters for alien smuggling in a luxurious office high in the gilded tower of the New York Central Building, 230 Park Avenue, Manhattan.
Maranzano set about challenging the power of the Combination. One incident that we know about involved an effort by certain union leaders in the garment industry to get out from under the pressure of Lepke and Gurrah. They went to Charlie Lucky, and he turned a deaf ear. They went to Maranzano and he was glad to cut himself into the industrial racket business.
Soon after this, on September 10. 1931, Maranzano was having a busy day in the office at the New York Central Building. There were twelve other men in the office with him. Suddenly three men entered with drawn guns and ordered them all to face the wall. All obeyed, whereupon Maranzano alone was thoroughly riddled with bullets and stabbed with a knife until dead. The others were spared.
The leader of this assassination crew was Bo Weinberg, an ugly thug who was Dutch Schultz’s right-hand man. Bo was one of the town’s most accomplished murderers. Often Bo would kill a man, mutilating him in strange fashion, then plant the body in the precinct of a police captain that he did not like. Bo was not entirely a heartless fellow, however. Among the dozen in Maranzano’s office that day was a friend of his named Tommy Brown whom he was also supposed to kill. Bo let him off and got bawled out for it when he arrived back to report. But since he had done the main job, he was not seriously blamed.
Getting out of the New York Central Building was not easy after that murder. Bo got separated from his companions and spent an uncomfortable hour before he made his escape. He would run up and down stairs, meet people on the stairway, and turn around and run away again. Part of the time he hid in the women’s toilet, which he happened to find unlocked. He kept his gun because it looked for a while as though he might have to shoot his way to freedom. And when he finally emerged he still had the incriminating weapon concealed in his right-hand coat pocket. He boasted later of the way in which he got rid of the gun. Elbowing his way through a thick crowd, he quietly dropped the pistol into the coat pocket of an unsuspecting stranger and quickly made his escape.
Nothing illustrates better than Bo’s activities that day the spirit of peaceful co-operation which the major mobs of the underworld had undertaken to establish. They were all helping each other now and they no longer had to commit their own murders.
There were plenty more gunmen abroad that day. Maranzano was only one of the victims marked for slaughter. I get the story from two men, one of whom was associated with Lepke in these years, and another of whom was an intimate of Bo Weinberg’s. The more conservative version is that thirty of Maranzano’s followers were murdered within the next few days. The other one, probably nearer the truth, is that ninety of Maranzano’s recruits and old-line “greaser” leaders were wiped out in cities all over the country, most of them within the same hour as that in which Maranzano was killed. It would take a great deal of research to check up on this precisely but the truth probably lies somewhere between the two versions. At any rate, the Maranzano minority was exterminated. It was a purge. The underworld had been “Americanized.”
During these years while Lucky had been building his secret power and keeping himself out of the newspapers,3 the best known of New York City’s racketeers had been Dutch Schultz. He had won public attention first by getting shot by Chink Sherman in a brawl early in 1931 at the Club Abbey; later by fighting a war of extermination with his former lieutenant, Vincent Coli; then through the misfortune of being prosecuted by the federal government on income tax charges.
In the autumn of 1935, having finally won an acquittal after two income tax trials, the Dutchman took refuge in New Jersey where he fought the attempts of the federal authorities to continue prosecuting him in New York. But the Dutchman’s number was up. His own mob was sick of him. His own men were sore because of all the publicity he had been getting; because he had ordered the death of his old pal, Bo Weinberg; and the big shots generally. had decided he was no longer an asset to the underworld. The Dutchman had been out of his mind, practically crazy, for several months, and had killed too many people for anyone to like him very much.
One night in October, as the Dutchman and three of his henchmen were sitting in the backroom of a Newark saloon studying a balance sheet of the policy racket, gunners entered and shot them all down. At almost the same instant two other Schultz lieutenants were shot down in a barber shop in Times Square, New York.
Remnants of the Schultz mob carried on his enterprises for a while, but eventually all were taken over by the Italians.
The Schultz murder is important in this tale because for the first time it brought to the general knowledge of the public a group of men whom the police listed as the Big Six. These included Lepke and Gurrah, Bug and Meyer, Longie Zwillman and Charlie Lucky, who was called the biggest of them all. The police wanted these men for questioning and there were hints in the papers of a secret syndicate of crime, a set-up so fabulous that it was hard for anyone to believe in it.
For twenty-four hours before the Schultz murder and five days thereafter, Charlie Lucky did not stir from the Waldorf-Astoria Tower where he occupied an apartment on the thirty-ninth floor under the name of Charles Ross. On the fifth day after the murder, Lucky gave up his apartment and quietly left town.
He had given the slip to the police but he was not happy. For more than four years he had been the secret boss. Now for the first time he had been unmasked. He was front page news. That is bad news for any big gangster.
1 Italian gangsters and prizefighters have long had a custom of adopting Irish names. Why, I do not know. Perhaps it was because in the early days of the gangs around Mulberry Bend, the Italians were only a slight sprinkling among many Irish, and the adoption of Irish names was an attempt to compensate the numerical inferiority of their race.
2 Two days after Maranzano’s death, it was discovered that all the papers relating to his naturalization had been stolen from the files of the Federal Immigration office in New York, and where the data concerning him bad been written in books, the pages had been cut out with a knife.
3 Printed references to Luciano were extremely rare. The New York Times report of Maranzano’s murder in 1931 noted briefly that he was reported to be a rival of Lucky’s for leadership of the Unione Siciliana. Stanley Walker, in “The Night Club Era,” in 1933, mentioned Luciano briefly. John O'Donnell, star reporter of the New York Daily News, ran across Lucky’s name and printed it a couple of times. This had a significant sequel; O'Donnell relates that about January, 1933, he was invited to a betting commissioner’s office, where it was proposed that he might, without risk, win a large bet on a fixed hockey game, if he would just forget about Lucky and give him no more publicity. Naturally he refused and resolved to find out more about Lucky; but shortly after he was transferred to Washington and had no further occasion to write about the mobs. The incident shows that there were positive efforts to keep Luciano’s name quiet.