Chapter Six

Death of the Normandie

At 2.30 p.m. on 9 February 1942, fire broke out on the Normandie, anchored at Pier 88 in New York Harbor. Emergency vehicles rushed to the pier at the end of West 48th Street. As more and more assembled to help extinguish the fire, it soon became the biggest gathering of emergency services on American soil since the war had begun. There was a lot at stake.

The Normandie had just been converted to a troop carrier and was ready to take 10,000 American troops at a time across the Atlantic to wartime Britain. This would be a major contribution to the war effort and there were many – especially the Nazis – who would like to see the ship destroyed.

The Normandie had been launched ten years earlier at St Nazaire in France as a luxury ocean liner. She was the first great ocean liner to exceed 1,000 feet in length and Pier 88 had been especially constructed to make room for her. Her remarkable dimensions were matched by the elegance and luxury of her Art Deco interior. The wealthy and famous chose to travel with her, including movie stars Mary Pickford and Bob Hope.

Not only was she beautiful, she was also fast. The Normandie won the Blue Riband for crossing the Atlantic in just four days and three hours. Her speed and capacity made the ship a useful maritime asset and when the war came her luxury voyages came to a halt. Her French-owners feared for her safety as German U-boats began to prowl the Atlantic and she was ‘mothballed’ at New York’s Pier 88. For over a year, the ship’s owners maintained a skeleton crew to look after her. But, following the fall of France in June 1940, as the new Vichy French government collaborated with Germany, President Roosevelt acted decisively. The Normandie was a key French asset in his hands. He ordered the US Coastguard to board the liner in May 1941 and placed her under protective custody.

Just seven months later, Japan launched the pre-emptive strike at Pearl Harbor. Four days after that, Hitler declared war on the United States, along with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Hitler stood up in the Reichstag and vowed: ‘We will always strike first! We will always deal the first blow!’ Hitler immediately began to select potential targets for attack along the East Coast. The Normandie was at the top of the list. If the Japanese could strike at Pearl Harbor, then Nazi Germany would hit New York.

With America at war, the US Navy took over the Normandie and renamed her the Lafayette, after the French hero who helped the Americans during the Revolutionary War. She was repainted naval grey and a small army of dockworkers was put to work converting her into a troopship. Completion was set for 28 February 1942, when she would set sail for Boston to pick up her first cargo of troops to take to Britain.

It was a tight deadline and naval workers worked around the clock to meet it – until fire broke out on board the ship on the 9th. Some 1,500 sailors and civilians were on board when the fire started but most were quickly evacuated. A least 128 were injured, many suffering from smoke inhalation, and one died from his injuries – 38-year-old Frank Trentacosta of Brooklyn. Many escaped thanks to a precarious 85-foot firemen’s extension ladder stretching from the West Side Express highway to the bow of the liner.

Thousands of New Yorkers came down to the dockside to watch the events unfold. A massive pall of smoke blew over Manhattan, leaving a smoke haze as far away as Times Square. Mayor La Guardia came down to the pier, stepping over the tangle of hoses, and said: ‘The chief ’s got his fire out and now the naval people will watch the ship. It’s very tender – see how she has listed – and now the job is to pump the water out and that’s what we’re doing.’

By 8.00 p.m. that evening, it was believed the emergency services had brought the fire under control. The fire had been restricted to the upper three decks and had caused only slight damage to the whole vessel. But fighting the flames had involved fireships pouring streams of water into the liner and this had caused her to list to one side. At first, it was not considered a problem, but by midnight, Rear Admiral Adolphus R. Andrews ordered the complete evacuation of the ship.

‘Admiral Andrews has ordered all hands to leave the ship’, blared loudspeakers on Pier 88. He then quickly issued a statement, lessening the dramatic impact of this order. ‘The Admiral has ordered all hands off the ship as a safety precaution’, it said. ‘It does not mean that the ship has been abandoned or hope given up but no one can be certain what the reaction of the ship will be to the flood tide.’

Two small gangways crashed into the water as the liner slowly tilted further. Sailors stood by with ropes to make any last-minute rescues. Observers could hear objects sliding inside the ship, clattering down the decks towards the rails.

The general scene was one of a war catastrophe [said the New York Herald Tribune]. The American Women’s Voluntary Services and the Red Cross each rushed two large mobile kitchens to the scene to serve hot coffee to the rescued and the rescuers, many of whom were chilled to the bone from the ice-cold spray from fire hoses.

Then, at 2.35 a.m., as searchlights shone on her great hulk, the Normandie slid over in fifty feet of water and mud, with remarkably little noise, on to her port side. The great funnels of the ship halted just three feet above the surface of the water. At 3.00 a.m., a second fire was seen to leap from a point behind the rear funnel. A fireboat pressed forward to pour yet more water into the ship and extinguished it within an hour.

As the sun rose on the grey hulk, it was a sad sight for all to see. The New York Times reporter on the scene noted that where the navy grey paint had ‘cracked and blistered away, it revealed the black and red of the pre-war Normandie – the only touch of the ship that was, in a setting for which she never had been built.’ Less than two months after Hitler declared he would strike first against America, one of the Allies’ biggest troopships was wrecked. It seemed the Nazis had claimed a major victory – but any talk of sabotage was immediately dismissed.

The following day, the naval authorities seemed pretty clear about what had caused the disastrous fire. Edward J. Sullivan of Greenwich Village was on board as a friend of a carpet manufacturer given a contract for refitting the ship. He saw the fire start:

It happened in the grand salon on the promenade deck. One of the men had an acetylene torch. He was cutting down some decorative steel work. Another fellow was holding a shield for the sparks – it was about two by three feet. In the background were stacked some bales of what appeared to be excelsior [wood shavings used for packing]. The sparks were flying but they’d hit the shield and bounced back.

The workman then turned off the torch, but some of the sparks from the last shower got round the shield. One of the men yelled ‘fire’ as the flames ignited the bales. In a flash, the fire leapt up the stack to the ceiling.

Navy Lieutenant Henry Wood took charge of extinguishing the fire, but he did not have any water hose to hand. It was a full eleven minutes before the emergency services were called. By then, none of the crew or workmen could do anything about putting out the fire. Along with the fire-fighters and police, FBI agents and a sabotage investigation squad were on the scene. Rear Admiral Andrews backed up Sullivan’s view of what started the fire:

The fire was started by sparks from a blowtorch of a worker in the grand salon. The sparks ignited the wrapping of a life preserver. The hoses were let out but the fire spread rapidly and within a few minutes there was so much smoke that the men in the compartments had to get out.

Due to the list of the ship it was thought better at first to sink her, that is, to open the sluice valves and let the seawater in. She was not very far from the bottom and it was thought best to give her enough weight to put her on the bottom. It was later decided, on the advice of technical experts, not to sink her. Instead water was pumped into the starboard side amidships.

Despite the appearance of having controlled the destruction of the liner, the result was that America’s greatest troopship was out of action – and would remain so for the rest of the war. She was sold for scrap in 1946. That was a $56 million naval asset wiped out.

Journalists asked Andrews whether the fire was the result of sabotage. ‘I can only repeat’, he said, ‘that, as far as I know, the fire started in the grand salon and I have no knowledge that it broke out, as has been reported by newspaper men, in three or four places at once.’

The government investigation that followed reinforced the official navy version of events. The FBI and New York District Attorney Frank S. Hogan worked with a team of twenty assistants to question over seventy witnesses. A navy court of inquiry was established under Rear Admiral Lamar R. Leahy. The final report concluded that the burning of the Normandie was caused by civilian incompetence. It pointed the finger at a stray spark from a workman’s acetylene torch setting alight a nearby pile of life preservers. But it was the action of the fireboats that was the fatal error. So much water was poured into the top decks that it made the ship top-heavy. Pumping machines could not remove the water quickly enough and the ship rolled over onto her port side. Frank Hogan put it succinctly: ‘Carelessness has served the enemy with equal effectiveness.’

That was the official government report, but many people refused to believe it. The fire was too intense to be an accident. The Normandie was a major target for enemy action. Many suspected it was the work of Nazi saboteurs. But could they achieve such a blow against the US?

German spy penetration of the New York docks went back to World War I and Franz von Rintelen’s string of attacks. The FBI’s round-up of the Duquesne spy ring demonstrated that German saboteurs were back in town just months before the burning of the Normandie. It is possible that a renegade spy could have escaped the mass arrests and set fire to the troopship as a final act of defiance in line with Nazi wishes. It is also possible that there were other unidentified spy rings operating in New York. Maybe FBI surveillance was not as perfect as it was represented and it had missed some vital agents. Certainly, the breaking of the Duquesne spy ring was not the end of German spy activity in America.

In May 1942, less than four months after the burning of the Normandie, two German U-boats set sail from France to America. On board were two teams of highly trained saboteurs – Germans who had lived in America before the war. Their mission was to strike at crucial American industrial infrastructure. It was Operation Pastorius, named after Franz Daniel Pastorius, the sixteenth-century leader of the first immigrant Germans to the United States.

The chief instigator of this operation was Adolf Hitler himself. He was furious at the arrest of the Duquesne spy ring and his anger rose when he was told by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, that there were no other Nazi secret service agents operating in the United States. Hitler’s response was to order another immediate sabotage mission to the US. Canaris personally did not favour such an operation, preferring his agents to carry out espionage, but Hitler insisted on sabotage.

Colonel Erwin von Lahousen oversaw the operation. ‘The German Admiralty staff’, wrote Lahousen in his war diary for the middle of April 1942, ‘had indicated that it is prepared to land our agents from U-boats on the eastern coast of the United States. The aim of the operation is to strike at one of the main bottlenecks in the American war economy, to sabotage the US production of aluminum.’

Later, the targets were widened to include factories, railways and the Hell’s Gate Bridge across New York harbour. Eight agents were recruited for the mission. One team of four saboteurs was led by Georg Dasch, a German-American who had served briefly in the US Army, and the other was headed by Eduard Kerling, a keen member of the Bund.

The first U-boat to reach the American coast was U-202 on 13 June. Its team of Nazi saboteurs came ashore three miles east of its target beach on Long Island at Amagansett. While three of them began burying their crates of explosive, their leader, Dasch, bumped into a US coastguard. Dasch kept his cool and the US coastguard presumed he had stumbled on a secret American operation. Dasch handed him a $100 note. The coastguard took the money, saluted, and disappeared into the mist.

The second German submarine, U-584, landed four more saboteurs on 17 June near Jacksonville, Florida. Dasch planned to rendezvous with their leader, Kerling, in Cincinnati, at the beginning of July and start their campaign. They were going to blow up factories, railways, and bridges from the East Coast to the Mid West.

The saboteurs managed to evade discovery until they reached New York. But when Dasch arrived in the city, he had a change of heart and decided to betray his colleagues. It may be that he had always intended to do this from the very beginning of the plot. He had contacts with left-wing groups in Germany who had suffered under the Gestapo. On 18 June 1942, Dasch confessed all to the FBI. They had already heard from the surprised coastguard and quickly swooped on the rest of the saboteurs.

It was another success for the FBI – but it clearly showed that the Eastern seaboard was still vulnerable to enemy action. Coming so soon after the Duquesne spy ring and the burning of the Normandie, public suspicion linked the sinking of the liner with German sabotage. It was a link that suited the government and the FBI just fine – serving to remind Americans of the ever-present threat posed by spies in their homeland. Hoover made just this point in a public announcement. ‘Other saboteurs may try to come to our shores’, he said. ‘They must be stopped. We ask every citizen to immediately report any information regarding espionage, sabotage or Un-American activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

Hitler was even more furious when he heard of the failure of Pastorius. He summoned both Canaris and Lahousen to his headquarters on the Russian Front on 30 June 1942. ‘I want to know’, said Hitler, ‘how it is possible for such an appalling catastrophe as this to happen. We had the same awful mess a year ago, when treachery led to the arrest of thirty of your agents in America. Now it has happened again. I demand an explanation.’ At first, Canaris said nothing in front of Hitler’s tirade, but then he pointed the finger at the Nazi party members on the mission.

For a moment, Hitler was speechless. ‘All right; if that’s so, it’s all the worse’, he raged. ‘You must never send loyal members on such an expedition again. Next time you can send Jews and criminals.’

But there were no more German sabotage operations against the United States. Hitler’s own statement that the only two missions sent were intercepted by the FBI means that it cannot have been German saboteurs who attacked the Normandie.

Of course, this was unknown in the United States and the belief that the Normandie was destroyed by accident or foreign sabotage remained prevalent for over thirty years after the disaster. But, curiously, after the burning of the liner, there were no more major fires on the New York waterfront. Over the next three years, hundreds of Allied ships safely left New York harbour. Had the FBI been totally successful, or could it be that some other factor was in operation?

In 1975, a controversial book was published – The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer. It purported to be based on the direct confessions of the chief mobster. In the book, Lucky Luciano made a sensational claim:

This big French luxury ship, the Normandie, was sittin’ at a pier on the West Side of Manhattan, and accordin’ to what Tony [Anastasio] and Albert [Anastasia] was told, the government was workin’ out a deal with that guy de Gaulle to take it over and turn it into a troopship. Albert figures that if somethin’ could happen to the Normandie, that would really make everybody crap in their pants.

It was a great idea and I didn’t figure it was really gonna hurt the war effort because the ship was nowhere near ready and, besides, no American soldiers or sailors would be involved because they wasn’t sendin’ ’em no place yet. So I sent back word to Albert to handle it.

A couple of days later, I heard on the radio where the Normandie was on fire and it didn’t look like they could save her. That goddam Anastasia – he really done a job. Later on, Albert told me not to feel too bad about what happened to the ship. He said that as a sergeant in the army he hated the fuckin’ Navy anyway.

Luciano was wrong that it would not have a big impact on the war effort – but he was right that it scared the government into making a pact with Luciano and the Mafiosi who controlled the New York docks. The deal had been in the making ever since 7 December 1941, or, as Luciano put it, ‘When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt declared war, I got my second break . . .’

Luciano got his lawyer Moses Polakoff to set up a meeting with Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello at his prison in Dannemora in December 1941. Luciano ran his plan past them. It centred on his nemesis Thomas Dewey becoming governor of New York. When Dewey got in, he would get Dewey to get him out of jail. How? He would do the government a big favour. He had read in the newspapers that the Navy Department was nervous about sabotage along the Eastern waterfront. With Luciano’s labour connections, he could promise to protect the docks from any sabotage. ‘I could see Lansky start to smile while I was layin’ it out’, remembered Luciano, ‘because he was the first one to see what I was getting at. He said, “Charlie, I get it, I get it. It’s terrific. How can Dewey turn down a patriotic hero?”’

Frank Costello said he had contacts with Naval Intelligence based at Church Street and could set up the whole deal. But Luciano knew that some front-page demonstration of naval vulnerability was needed to get the government coming to him for help.

For a month he brooded about what this could be, then one of his chief hit men came up with the scheme. Albert Anastasia was a prolific murderer for the mob. Early on, he worked in the Brooklyn docks and became a key figure in the International Longshoremen’s Association, the East Coast dock workers’ union – a position maintained by his brother Tony.

Anastasia liked killing and when it looked as though he might be put on trial for murder, he wiped out witnesses and their families to protect himself. When Luciano wanted to kill his rivals in the Castellammarese War, it was Anastasia who leapt at the chance of killing Joe the Boss – he was one of the four-strong murder squad. Later, in 1942, Anastasia was drafted into the US Army where he served as a technical sergeant teaching soldiers at a camp in Pennsylvania how to be longshoremen. He served with distinction and was even awarded US citizenship at the end of his stint in 1944. But before this, in January 1942, it was Anastasia who came up with the solution to Luciano’s problems.

Albert and his brother Tony knew that Naval Intelligence agents had been checking out the docks and talking to everyone about increased security. So, reasoned Anastasia, why not give them something to really worry about by torching the Normandie? Luciano thought it was a brilliant idea and gave his sanction to it.

In the 1979 book of his recollections – Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob by Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau – Meyer Lansky corroborated Luciano’s story that it was Anastasia who sabotaged the Normandie:

I told him face to face that he mustn’t burn any more ships. He was sorry – not sorry he had had the Normandie burned but sorry he couldn’t get at the Navy again. Apparently he had learned in the Army to hate the Navy. ‘Stuck-up bastards’ he called them.

The burning of the Normandie sent a chill wind through the corridors of Washington. The Port of New York handled nearly half of all US foreign trade. Two hundred cargo docks, warehouses and piers in Manhattan, Queens, New Jersey and Brooklyn covered nearly eighty miles of coastal frontage. It had to be protected – whatever the cost.

The story of how the US government struck a deal with Lucky Luciano and his criminal associates to defend America’s East Coast against sabotage is recorded in the Herlands Report of 1954. This was an investigation carried out at the direction of Thomas E. Dewey to record the exact detail of the contacts between US Naval Intelligence and New York’s Mafia mobsters. The US Navy was not happy with its findings and the report remained secret for many decades afterwards. It is still unpublished.

Just twelve years after the events it records, William B. Herlands, Commissioner of Investigation, made the case for the US government talking to top criminals:

The Intelligence authorities were greatly concerned with the problems of sabotage and espionage. Suspicions were rife with respect to the leaking of information about convoy movements. The Normandie, which was being converted to war use as the Navy auxiliary Lafayette, had burned at the pier in the North River, New York City. Sabotage was suspected.

The burning of the Normandie is mentioned several more times in the Herlands Report as a pivotal point in US domestic naval strategy, but only in the context of foreign sabotage. There is no suggestion that the Mafia torched it to provoke negotiations. Herlands went on to say:

Commercial fishing fleets were suspected as sources of fuel and supplies for enemy submarines. While our Intelligence authorities had most of the suspected pro-Nazis spotted, they were not as well prepared with respect to certain elements who were sympathizers of Mussolini and pro-fascists.

Later in the report, Herlands mentioned Operation Pastorius:

These fears became more acute when in June of that year, German agents trained in sabotage techniques, were actually landed at Amagansett, Long Island. They carried quantities of explosives and maps and plans for the destruction of strategic installations.

Captain Roscoe C. MacFall was Chief Intelligence Officer of the Third Naval District, which included New York and New Jersey. It was his idea for naval agents to talk to underworld contacts who might be able to help him secure the docks. MacFall got the backing of Rear Admiral Carl F. Espe, Director of Naval Intelligence.

The outcome of the war appeared extremely grave [said Espe]. In addition, there was the most serious concern over possible sabotage in the ports. It was necessary to use every possible means to prevent and forestall sabotage and to prevent the possible supplying of and contact with enemy submarines.

But did Naval Intelligence not have any doubts about the morality of dealing with known criminals? Lieutenant Anthony J. Marsloe, who was assigned to the Third Naval District Intelligence Office, was clear on this:

The exploitation of informants, irrespective of their backgrounds, is not only desirous [sic], but necessary when the nation is struggling for its existence.

Intelligence, as such, is not a police agency. Its function is to prevent. In order to prevent, you must have a system; and the system, in its scope and latitude must encompass any and all means which will prevent the enemy from securing aid and comfort from others . . .

By any and all means I include the so-called underworld.

Marsloe claimed that this process began as early as December 1941 – before the burning of the Normandie:

The discussion was a continuing one. It started in December and carried on throughout the course of the first quarter of 1942 implemented specifically with the names of so-called underworld personalities as well as District Intelligence personnel assigned by Commander Haffenden to the implementation of this mission.

Commander Charles R. Haffenden was Marsloe’s commanding officer and would be the dominant personality running the project in the Third Naval District Intelligence Office. Before being called up for duty, Marsloe had been attached to the District Attorney’s Office, New York County, under the direction of Governor Dewey. During his discussions from December 1941 onwards, Marsloe said:

Commander Haffenden, in general terms, outlined to me a plan of action which he was then contemplating putting into execution involving the enlisting of the so-called underworld as a means of obtaining information in a counter-intelligence sense and also as a means of preventing espionage and sabotage within the jurisdiction of the Third Naval District . . .

At first, Marsloe was not so sure it was such a good idea. ‘I felt a certain amount of skepticism’, he recalled, ‘because I felt that since they had not been good citizens it was doubtful as to whether they would be of constructive service to our war effort.’ He then discussed the plan with a senior colleague who had served in the FBI and he convinced Marsloe that every means available to the armed forces and the government should be used to protect US installations. In the meantime, Haffenden’s superiors were already taking the project further.

On 7 March 1942, just a month after the burning of the Normandie, Captain MacFall of Naval Intelligence met with Frank Hogan, the District Attorney, in his office. Hogan was currently involved in investigating organised crime on the waterfront and introduced MacFall to Murray Gurfein, in charge of the District Attorney’s Rackets Bureau. Gurfein had been one of Thomas Dewey’s most able investigators and was part of the original team that put Luciano behind bars. During the war, he led a double life. Aside from his civilian work for the District Attorney, he was also a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and was later chief of the Psychological Warfare Division at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Normandy in 1944.

In the DA’s office, MacFall outlined the problems faced by Naval Intelligence. His specific fear was that enemy submarines might be refuelled by fishing boats or former rum-running ships owned by ex-bootleggers whose loyalty might be bought. Hogan replied that it was true that the underworld had advance information of many illegal activities and thought this might be useful.

‘But can these people be trusted?’ wondered MacFall.

‘Many of these racketeers are loyal to America’, said Hogan, ‘and are not pro-Mussolini.’

The meeting ended with Hogan and Gurfein pledging to do everything in their power to help MacFall and Naval Intelligence. It was also agreed that Gurfein would act as representative of the District Attorney’s Office and that Commander Haffenden, who was not present at the first meeting, would be the representative for MacFall and Naval Intelligence.

At a second meeting on 25 March, Haffenden met Hogan and Gurfein. Haffenden was a navy veteran of World War I. Just turned fifty, he was a tough, fearless figure who enjoyed dealing with underworld figures. He would later demonstrate his physical bravery by volunteering to be a beachmaster during the invasion of Iwo Jima, where he was wounded by enemy shellfire. In 1942, he was in charge of B-3, the investigations section of the District Intelligence Office.

Haffenden suggested the possibility that underworld leaders might be willing to cooperate in the war effort by helping to gather information useful to Naval Intelligence. Hogan agreed the idea was worth pursuing and Gurfein recommended they get the operation moving by contacting Joseph ‘Socks’ Lanza.

This was in line with Marsloe’s view that Haffenden had been considering this since the start of the year. Marsloe soon after went to Hogan’s office where:

. . . in general terms the plan was outlined; and to the best of my belief, Mr Hogan stated that he would place the facilities of his office at the disposal of the Navy in order to gain maximum benefit from any information or intelligence that such characters might possess or have the means to ascertain.

At the top of their list of useful ‘characters’ was Socks Lanza. He was the Mafioso who ran the Fulton Fish Market. Not one fishing boat landed in New York without paying him a $10 tribute, not one truck left without paying him $50. He got his nickname from ‘socking’ anyone who got in his way. He was a powerful and brutal mobster who made even tough union representatives think twice about crossing him. He was also a close ally of Luciano.

Murray Gurfein suggested contacting Lanza through his attorney, Joseph K. Guerin. They met the following day at Guerin’s Wall Street office. He was currently representing Lanza on a charge of extortion and conspiracy, a case being prosecuted by the District Attorney. Guerin suggested meeting Lanza later that day. At 11.30 p.m., Gurfein picked up Guerin and Lanza at 103rd Street and Broadway. The taxi drove to Riverside Park where Gurfein talked to Lanza and Guerin on a bench at midnight. The secrecy of the meeting was Lanza’s idea. He did not want people to see him talking to someone from the District Attorney’s office, in case they thought he had turned informer.

Gurfein told Lanza what he had said to his attorney:

It’s a matter of great urgency. Many of our ships are being sunk along the Atlantic coast. We suspect German U-boats are being refuelled and getting fresh supplies off our coast. We think it’s fishing smacks that are a source of resupply. You know the people engaged in commercial fishing. You can find out how and where the submarines are being refuelled.

Lanza nodded and said he would try to secure the desired information. Gurfein asked Lanza if he would help Naval Intelligence. ‘Sure’, he said, ‘I’ll help the war effort. I got contacts in the fish market and fishing boat and barge captains and seamen all along the Atlantic Coast.’

A week later, Lanza and Gurfein had a second secret meeting, but this time it was in the more luxurious surroundings of the Hotel Astor. Their contact wore a naval uniform – it was Commander Haffenden. He had three hotel rooms as his office. Before the meeting got underway, Gurfein made it clear that Lanza was volunteering his help to the Navy and that no promise had been made by the District Attorney’s Office in exchange for such cooperation. Everyone agreed. They got straight to the point.

‘I hear you’re willing to help us’, said Haffenden. He then went over his fears of enemy submarines and suspicious waterfront activities. Lanza said he had no problem with helping the government and would be ‘glad to ferret out the information about the suspected refuelling and resupplying of submarines and to ascertain whether fishing smacks were involved.’

‘You let me know where you want the contacts made’, said Lanza, ‘or what you want, and I’ll carry on.’

The meeting lasted only thirty-five minutes and Lanza gave Haffenden a series of telephone numbers where he could be reached. Several days after this, Lanza got a call to see Haffenden at his Church Street office and went there by himself, without his attorney. He signed in the visitors’ book and was given a security badge allowing him to enter Haffenden’s office. ‘I want to get some of our men on some of the fishing smacks’, said Haffenden. This meant getting fishermen’s union cards for Naval Intelligence agents. Lanza said he could do this. From then on, Haffenden and Lanza met on a regular weekly basis.

Captain MacFall, Chief of Naval Intelligence in this area, later commented on this project:

Some of the larger fishing fleets had their own ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore telephones, including codes used to guide the ships of one fleet to places where the catch was good. Utilizing these ships and their equipment and installing similar telephone equipment on fishing ships that did not themselves install such equipment, Naval Intelligence worked out a confidential cooperative arrangement and code with them as part of the submarine look-out system.

Inasmuch as many Italians worked in such commercial fishing fleets and in the waterfront districts in the fish markets, their cooperation with Naval Intelligence was considered valuable. Haffenden told me that he was active in this phase of our work and that the underworld contacts he had developed were helpful in that regard.

The operation went further. Lanza spoke to Hiram Swezey – blind since the age of seven – who ran a fleet of trucks moving fish from Long Island to the Fulton Fish Market. Haffenden wanted civilian agents on some of these trucks picking up information. Lanza got union books for the agents and they went to work for Swezey. Swezey also introduced naval personnel to groups of fishermen and asked them to report any unusual sightings. Sometimes these fishing boats picked up maritime wreckage or parts of aeroplanes – even human remains. All this was reported to Naval Intelligence. Lanza also placed civilian agents as observers on fishing boats operating from Long Island, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia and Maine.

To help him with his naval business, Lanza recruited a mobster friend called Ben Espy. Together, they took a ‘fishing trip’ in the summer of 1942 from Maine to North Carolina. They stopped off at Boston, New Bedford, Nantucket, Block Island and Virginia Beach, gathering a list of names and addresses of people who might be useful to Haffenden and his agents. Lanza was enjoying himself. The secret mission kept his mind off the criminal charges hanging over him.

Lanza was not only talking to Naval Intelligence. He was clever enough to know that he had to keep his Mafia overlords informed as well, as Meyer Lansky recalled:

Joe Socks did the right thing by coming to me. He knew I’d give him the right advice. Both of us went to see Frank Costello, who had been best man at Joe’s wedding . . . Gurfein’s move had been even shrewder than he realized, because Lucky and I were close to Lanza ourselves. We got him out of a lot of trouble when he was a boy, and he never forgot how we helped him.

Lanza was coming to the same conclusion. If Naval Intelligence was going to score a real victory on the Eastern waterfront, than the king of the fish market could not supply it by himself. On 16 April 1942, Lanza went to his attorney and told him he was having difficulty in getting information from certain Italian-born figures in the New York underworld. He suspected he was not getting their whole-hearted cooperation because they knew he had an indictment pending against him. With all the questions he was asking, they figured maybe he was working as an informer for the DA. It was then that Lanza came up with the big idea:

Luciano could be of great assistance. If he came into this picture, I’d get all the cooperation from various people in the City of New York. He’d send some word out to Joe Adonis or Frank [Costello]. The word of Charlie [Luciano] would give me the right of way.

The message was clear. Get Luciano on board and the whole Eastern seaboard would be protected for good. It was a tall order.

Luciano had been New York’s Public Enemy No. 1 and his 30 – 50 year sentence in jail was Thomas Dewey’s greatest triumph. Could the US government really put this to one side and strike an alliance with the chief of America’s Mafia?