Chapter Nineteen

Beautiful Bandit

Lucky Luciano had no love for the Communists. Near Mount Vesuvius in 1947, he gave money to assist a local priest battle against the Communist Party in his village. ‘From what I could see later’, he recalled, ‘it helped, and I was proud that he was knockin’ the shit outa the Communists up there.’ His summing up of post-war politics in Sicily was that Communism posed the biggest threat to the Italian government and that the Americans were propping them up. He was not too far from the truth.

In 1947, the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with responsibility for co-ordinating all US intelligence activity abroad. In its report on the situation in Italy that year, its main concern was Communism:

It is of vital strategic importance to prevent Italy from falling under Communist control. In particular, it would greatly facilitate Communist penetration in France, Spain and North Africa. Militarily, the availability to the USSR of bases in Sicily and southern Italy would pose a direct threat to the security of communications through the Mediterranean.

Italy was struggling. The CIA considered it on the edge of economic and political collapse. It could not call upon Western Europe for help. Britain imported Italian fruit and vegetables, but could neither pay for them with money or coal. Italy remained financially dependent on the US. The dire economic situation also encouraged crime, with the Italian government failing to curb inflation or the flourishing black market. For the moment US and British forces remained in Italy but they would be withdrawn in December 1947. The CIA did not have much confidence in the Italian Army:

The Italian armed forces are incapable of major military operations. They are considered to be generally capable of maintaining internal order, but would be hard pressed if required simultaneously to defend the frontier and to suppress internal insurrection.

In this situation, with Italian national elections due in 1948, the US felt fully justified in exerting its influence though massive injections of economic aid:

The outcome of the April elections will depend not only on the results of interim aid, but also on the prospects for the success of the European recovery program . . . Adverse developments and the consequent disillusionment would enhance the possibility of a Communist electoral victory.

In local elections in Sicily in April 1947, Communists and Socialists won 30 percent of the vote, against 21 percent won by the Christian Democrats. It was a surprising set-back for conservative forces on the island and reflected the fact that the economic situation did not seem to be getting any better for the average Sicilian. The Separatists did little better than they had the year before and it marked the end of their political presence. The next year, following more election failures, Finocchiaro Aprile resigned as leader of the party. For him, the beautiful dream of Sicilian independence was over. Lucio Tasca and some of his associates soldiered on, but only a few people remained dedicated to the idea.

Christian Democrat regional autonomy had outflanked the Separatists and the Mafia were happy with that. But with the rise of the left at the ballot box, it looked as though the Christian Democrats were in danger. The Mafia swung into action and their most potent weapon was the bandit leader Salvatore Giuliano. Since the demise of EVIS, Giuliano had shifted the focus of his political campaigning to the anti-Communist cause and was a willing executioner for the Mafia.

On 1 May 1947, left-wing peasants living in three villages outside Palermo gathered on hills near Portella delle Ginestre to celebrate May Day. They spread out picnics of bread, cheese and broad beans and waited for politicians from Palermo to give speeches. But none arrived, so after hours sitting in the baking sun, a Socialist shoemaker stood on a rock to give a speech. When he did so, the crowd heard sharp cracks around him. Some thought they were fire-crackers and did nothing. In fact, they were bullets coming from the slopes of Monte Pizzuta. People and animals fell to the ground, bleeding. After three minutes of firing, eleven people were dead and fifty-six wounded. The shots had come from Salvatore Giuliano and his bandit soldiers. It was his declaration of war against the left in Sicily.

A campaign of terror followed in which Giuliano and his army of bandits – several hundred strong – raided peasant unions and left-wing party headquarters in the provinces of Palermo and Trapani. Armed with machine guns, hand grenades and petrol bombs, they killed several Communists. He made several attempts to assassinate Girolamo Li Causi, the leader of the Communist Party in Sicily, and the man Don Calogero Vizzini had tried to shoot in the piazza at Villalba.

For Giuliano it was a crusade and, on 24 June 1947, he made his intentions clear in an announcement to the press:

Sicilians! The decisive hour has sounded. Those who do not wish to be an easy prey of those Red gangsters who, after having betrayed, fooled and covered us with mud in international circles, are now attempting to destroy what is left us and what we will defend at all costs – the honour of our families – must make a decision. Those men who want, by hook or crook, to throw us into the lap of that terrible Russia where liberty is a chimera and democracy a legend must be fought.

It was the elaborate language of the Mafiosi, calling upon all Sicilians to defend the thing they held most dear – their honour.

Giuliano’s actions soon caught the attention of the world’s press. It certainly helped that he was a remarkably handsome young man. A photo of him widely published at the time showed a jet-haired strong-jawed bandit who looked more like a movie star. A London Foreign Office official was struck by a photo sent to him. ‘I have always wondered whether the photographs and interviews were genuine’, he mused. ‘I suspect that there are a number of young Sicilians who would be very glad to pose as Giuliano for any journalist or photographer.’ The Foreign Office appeared to have started a fan club for him. ‘Here,’ said the same official, ‘we put our money on Giuliano . . . ’

In Sicily, according to a British Embassy report from Rome, Giuliano passed through his realm like a medieval monarch:

He apparently does not even hesitate to inform householders that he proposes to borrow their beds on such and such future nights. When Giuliano announces where he proposes to pass the night, his host stocks up his larder and removes himself, his family and dependents elsewhere, knowing that he will find the house in order and an envelope on the chimney piece containing 10,000 lire.

Stories about Giuliano’s exploits grew in the telling.

We need only tell how, not long ago [said the same Embassy report] the chief of a country-town police station, who was hastening to Palermo in response to a radio despatch in cipher, was ambushed en route and lost five of his men killed. It was later discovered that Palermo headquarters had sent no such message, since Giuliano’s band had ciphered and despatched it themselves . . .

On another occasion, Giuliano banned a bus company from running routes through his territory until it paid him a tribute. His high-profile kidnappings included a prince, an ex-mayor, a rich businessman and two prominent landowners. He extorted from them ransoms varying from 20 to 50 million lire, doubling that of a local aristocrat when he was caught emerging from a brothel and wanted to keep it quiet.

The Italian government responded to Giuliano’s threats by posting a 3 million lire reward for his capture, but left-wing parties in Sicily were deeply unimpressed and wanted more action. Li Causi condemned the weakness of a government that had encouraged lawlessness. Another leading Communist wanted Giuliano’s victims avenged or else threatened that the workers’ anger would be hard to control. Labour unions called for a general strike.

Eventually the interior minister sent the head of the Carabinieri to Sicily with orders to capture Giuliano. Hundreds of troops swarmed across the island’s mountains, but the bandit eluded them all.

In November 1947, a wave of left-wing riots spread across Italy. In southern Italy, at Cerignola, armed gangs of Communists attacked Carabinieri barracks with automatic weapons and hand grenades. The chief of police was fatally wounded. In Rome, a general strike saw Carabinieri armed with rifles riding beside bus drivers. In Palermo, riots erupted under the newspaper headline ‘People of Palermo destroy the Lairs of the Enemies of Democracy’. For many Italians, it was all too reminiscent of the political clashes of the early 1920s, before Mussolini crushed the left and took over. In Sicily, the chaos only encouraged the supporters of Giuliano’s murderous campaign against left-wingers.

The proof of his success came in the elections of 1948, deemed critical by the CIA. In the region where Giuliano’s bandits had terrorised the left, votes for the Christian Democrats more than doubled. Sicily was firmly in their control and the left had been soundly defeated. The Mafia – through Giuliano – were triumphant. Having delivered this electoral victory, Giuliano now expected a prize – a pardon and a political position perhaps. When this failed to arrive, he turned on some of his backers. Senior Christian Democrat politicians were gunned down. In July 1949, Giuliano became more brazen. Near his mountain hide-out in Montelepre, his men ambushed a police patrol and killed five officers. A report in the New York Times described an even more ambitious attack:

Sicilian bandits carried out under cover of darkness early this morning a surprise attack with hand grenades and machine guns against two Carabinieri barracks in the small town of Partinico, probably in an effort to replenish their supplies of weapons and ammunition. The attack failed as the Carabinieri kept the bandits at bay while reinforcements arrived in trucks from nearby points.

The tactics deployed by the police against the bandits reprised those of Cesare Mori. One newspaper report spoke of a mass round-up in which more than a thousand heavily armed police in armoured cars arrested 200 suspected members of Giuliano’s gang in the Montelepre area. The mass operations made the police vulnerable and, in August, Giuliano’s men launched an ambush on a police column at Bellolampo, not far from Palermo. They used anti-tank mines and hand grenades and killed seven Carabinieri and wounded many more. It sent a shudder through Italy.

Such acts of defiance embarrassed the government and turned many Sicilian conservatives against the bandit. Enough was enough. Even for the Mafia.

Newly elected Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi had to break his vacation in the mountain retreat of Sella di Borgo to give his comments on Salvatore Giuliano:

Nobody can deny that banditry in Sicily has developed in conjunction with special situations both political and social, and it is obvious that the government does not think that it can resolve such problems only with repressive measures. But today attacks are being carried out, there is shooting, there is killing. The first duty of the Ministry of the Interior is to blunt the offensive, to safeguard the security of the person, to impose on all people the power and dominion of the law.

The minster of the interior responded by creating a new 1,500-strong elite force of Carabinieri commanded by veterans of the fight against bandits. It was called the Armed Command for the Suppression of Banditry – CFRB – and was led by Colonel Ugo Luca. He too used Mori methods and indiscriminately swept up anyone with the least suspicion of being involved with Giuliano. An Englishman wandering around Montelepre was arrested and held in army barracks for several days.

This force hounded Giuliano, reducing his activities dramatically. Going beyond road patrols, which could be easily ambushed, Colonel Luca sent his men in groups of ten across the countryside, sweeping areas, and keeping in contact with field radios. In October 1949, Colonel Luca gave an interview to Messaggero about his pursuit of Giuliano:

In the past, owing to the troubled situation in Italy and especially in Sicily, Giuliano had some political contacts; some of Giuliano’s relations at times were seated in the distinguished persons stands at ‘separatist’ public ceremonies . . . [but] now he is isolated on every side. He now hates all parties; he is in a sanguinary psychological period . . . The hills about Palermo are a very difficult operating ground owing to the many natural grottoes and the artificial hiding places very ably prepared in past years by the bandits themselves . . .

Giuliano has two powerful allies, money and fear. It is difficult to say where fear ends and the conscious ‘omerta’ of the population begins. It is certain that Giuliano is much feared. One man said in public in the Piazza at Montelepre: ‘When will this affair end? What are they waiting for to arrest him?’ He was found murdered a few hours later in one of the village streets.

Luca was optimistic and believed his Carabinieri were becoming friendly with the local population who had so far sustained Giuliano and his bandits. The Messaggero journalist was not so sure. He quoted a priest asked to bless Luca’s Carabinieri. In an open air mass, the priest turned towards his congregation of policemen and delivered a chilling speech:

Dear boys, you are here in Sicily, on these barren hills in touch with danger and ambush. You are here for the good of this island . . . and in respect of the law, you are risking your lives. Well, in order that your task may be made easier, I must at once tell you an unpleasant truth . . . you are hated.

There was shocked silence among the congregation as the priest continued:

The people in the villages do not consider you as protectors, but as pitiless executors of laws which do not originate in the island. Your arrival in the towns will not be greeted as a liberation but as a cause for mourning: wherever you may go hundreds of people will be detained, arrested, searched, sent to jail. And should you arrest 10 persons in one town, you may be sure that you have struck the whole town. We are all compari [close associates] and to be a compare is something more than being a cousin or blood relative.

It was an astonishing expression of omerta – from a very unexpected source. But the priest knew he had to step back on to the right side of the law and encouraged the Carabinieri to act in a friendly way towards his compari:

You must prove by your action, that you are friends and not enemies of the people, you must make them forget your grey-green uniform, in order that the country people should feel you are their equals, mothers’ sons, and should show their trust in you. Only by this means will you succeed in overcoming the net of silence which will certainly surround your work.

It was good advice, but Luca already realised he was engaged in a guerrilla war he could only win if the people turned against the bandit leader. Most importantly, if Giuliano was ultimately protected by omerta then he could also fall to it. Sir Victor Mallet at the British Embassy in Rome underlined this connection in a letter to the Prime Minister Clement Attlee:

His Majesty’s Consul says that there are few Sicilian landlords who do not pay tribute to the Mafia or brigands’ agents and it would seem that many of the prominent families of Sicily are anxious lest the suppression of brigandage may also cut at the roots of the Mafia, from which so many of them benefit.

The situation had gone too far for that. Giuliano was an international embarrassment to Italy’s leaders. The failure of the minister of the interior to arrest his fellow Sicilian was an easy target for the government’s opponents. Such continued humiliation pushed the Italian government towards considering the re-introduction of the methods that had formerly proved successful but unpopular under the Fascists.

That Giuliano and his gang were feeling the heat and thinking of escaping abroad is revealed by a curious story from London’s Soho district. Harry Arduino was a small time crook, born in Malta, who worked as a kitchen porter in several Soho restaurants. He served in the Royal Air Force in India during World War II and when he came back he was restless. He got into trading forged passports and in December 1949 he believed he was on to something big.

‘Harry said to me one evening that he wished to tell me something’, said his girlfriend, Anne Braithwaite Young, in a police statement. ‘I told him not to tell me anything he might regret. He said, “Well, I will tell you. Do you know Giuliano?”’

‘I said “Who?” and he replied, “The Sicilian bandit. I have an appointment to see him this time.” I warned him to be careful and advised him to cut out whatever game he was up to, but he just laughed.’ Arduino began to prepare for his trip to Sicily. ‘Harry said he had to buy some heavy boots and a tunic for the trip as they had to go up in the mountains. I gave him the money to do this.’

On 8 December 1949, Anne Young accompanied Harry and his associate Edward Franette to Victoria Station where they caught the boat train. ‘That is the last time I saw or heard from him,’ she said.

In fact, the next time she would see him was in a police photograph of his half-naked corpse propped up outside a shed in Sicily with a massive black bullet hole in his neck. Franette was accused of killing Arduino and was to be extradited to Italy but a legal technicality saw him freed in London without facing charges.

A childhood friend of Arduino, Ernest Zahra, later gave a statement to the Maltese police on what Arduino was doing in Sicily:

Some time about 1949, Harry Arduino divulged to me that he was trafficking in illegal sale of passports and that he had acquired a number of British passports from Maltese in London and was proceeding to Sicily to sell them to Sicilians in the ‘Giuliano’ bandit gang. Later I learnt from him that he had been in fact to Sicily and sold the passports and was going there a second time for the same purpose. The next I heard of this man was that he was killed in Sicily.

Arduino’s deal had gone bad, but did Giuliano and his gang have the passports? Under Carabinieri pressure it certainly seems they were looking for a way out.

Eight months later, Colonel Luca’s cunning and patience finally paid off. He was given a tip-off that Giuliano was in Castelvetrano, a small town in south-west Sicily, far away from his stronghold in the north of the island. It was thought that he might be trying to flee the country. Colonel Luca led the operation and his elite Carabinieri unit approached Castelvetrano in an army truck disguised as a loud-hailer vehicle. The bandit leader was tracked to a brothel where they allowed him to stay until 3.00 a.m. on 5 July 1950. When he left the brothel and moved on to the home of a friend, the Carabinieri followed him until he entered the courtyard of the house. The police then moved in, reported the London Times:

He at once opened fire on them, but fell, riddled by bullets from police tommy-guns. Beside his body was found a submachine-gun, a German revolver, and a telescope. On one of his fingers was a large diamond ring and his belt was fastened with a gold clasp.

The bandit was surrounded as he stepped into a courtyard before dawn, said a New York Herald Tribune reporter, who had spoken to Colonel Luca by telephone. The police claimed Giuliano fired wildly, forcing them to reply with a fusillade of bullets that struck him in the chest and head. After official examination to guarantee identification, the bandit was buried at noon.

At the age of just twenty-seven, Giuliano was dead. His criminal reign had lasted seven years, making him the most famous bandit of the period. His rise to power paralleled that of the Separatist movement and when he died, it was the last nail in the coffin of this Mafia-backed project.

‘Sicilian romanticism was Giuliano’s major asset in his long evasion of justice’, said the New York Herald Tribune, quoting Colonel Luca:

Many Sicilians considered the youth a sort of Robin Hood . . . On [one] occasion, the bandit offered to settle his grievances by duelling with the top ten officials of the government. He specified that his only condition was that foreign observers be present in order to guarantee that he receive fair treatment.

‘The bandit king will take his place’, said an editorial comment, ‘in the puppet shows around which the children tirelessly gather; his painted image will stand on Sicilian donkey carts.’

Michele Pantaleone and others tell a story in which Giuliano was shot in the head in his bed in Castelvetrano by one of his own bandits on the orders of Benedetto Minasola, Mafioso of Monreale. That it might have been the Mafia themselves that fingered Giuliano is suggested in a later newspaper story covering the death of two of his gang-members:

Salvatore Passatempo, the last member of Giuliano’s notorious gang, was found dead on Friday night at a deserted spot about forty miles south-west of Palermo. Near him lay the body of Emanuele De Maria, a man with a minor criminal record, and both had been shot in the back by tommy-gun fire.

Who killed the men was a mystery, but the news was received with relief by the surrounding landowners and farmers. ‘Some of them, it is conjectured’, said the report, ‘finding his impositions intolerable, may have employed members of the Mafia to get rid of the bandit and his accomplice. It is believed that the men were killed elsewhere and the corpses taken to the spot where they were found.’ It was a classic Mafia execution intended to send a message to the local population. Having for years been intimidated by Giuliano and his bandit army, functioning in its shadow, the Mafia were now back in direct control of crime in their region.

In 1955, a high-ranking Italian judge, Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, declared that the police and the Mafia were working hand in hand. ‘People say the Mafia does not respect the police and judiciary’, said the judge. ‘It’s untrue. The Mafia has always respected the judiciary and justice . . . In the prosecution of bandits and outlaws . . . it has actually joined together with the police.’

It was a chilling prospect for the country.

Exactly thirty-three years after he was chased away by the Fascists, Joseph Bonanno was back in Sicily. In the autumn of 1957, he savoured the view from a fancy restaurant on the Piazza Politeama in old Palermo.

It had been a long time since he had walked these streets and many things had changed. Mussolini, Mori and the Black Shirts were long gone. A world war had been fought – his island invaded – tanks rumbling along its roads. Some gangster friends had died. But Bonanno survived and prospered. He was now the head of a Mafia family in New York and had ambitions to take his franchise around the world. Sicily was a key base in this global market.

At first, as he tells the story, Bonanno did not want to go back. He was going to take his wife to Italy the following year, but a friend, a publisher, persuaded him to join him on a trip in October 1957 to open an orphanage.

When Bonanno landed at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, he was greeted by an old friend from Castellammare – Bernardo Mattarella. He was now minister of foreign trade for the ruling Christian Democrat party.

In Palermo, Bonanno was welcomed by his former deputy Frank Garofalo, who had seemingly retired there, alongside another family member, John Bonventre. One day, some Sicilian Men of Honour took him for a tour of the city and he visited some of the historical sites he remembered. For lunch, they took him to a restaurant in the Piazza Politeama. The restaurant owner greeted the Mafiosi profusely, kissing their hands and asking for their blessing.

For a moment, Bonanno was left by himself at a table and asked the waiter for a jug of water – but without ice. The waiter returned with a pitcher full of ice. Bonanno complained and the waiter mumbled under his breath in the local dialect, thinking the American could not understand him. How wrong he was! Bonanno grabbed the jug of water and smashed it on the waiter’s head – blood and glass everywhere. As the waiter cowered on the floor, Bonanno berated him in the local tongue. The rest of the Mafiosi returned and the waiter, shaking on the floor, begged for his life. Bonanno was in no mood for any further violence and assured the restaurant owner it was no big problem. He even gave the waiter a generous tip at the end of the meal.

That was Bonanno’s most vivid anecdote of his return to Sicily, but he also visited his home town of Castellammare, viewed the Greek Temple at Segesta he so loved and placed flowers on his parents’ tomb. After a few weeks, he got ill and returned to his new home in America. He was glad to be back.

In truth, however, the trip to Sicily was not a happy accident. It was, in fact, part of a major Mafia strategy to put Bonanno and his associates at the very centre of an international crime network. The real purpose of Bonanno’s trip was to organise the Mafiosi of Palermo and western Sicily into an efficient arm of the Mafia in America. He wanted to see them form a Commission, just as the Mafia had in the US, in which leading crime families came together to co-ordinate their criminal enterprises.

Bonanno and his deputy, Garofalo, who was not in retirement, but highly active making connections with Sicilian Mafiosi, brought them together at the Grand Hotel Et Des Palmes in Via Roma, central Palermo. The Sicilian contingent was led by Don Giuseppe Genco Russo – the man Don Calogero Vizzini had supposedly called on to help him assist the Allies at Monte Cammarata.

Together, in the gilt and mirrored belle époque splendour of the Sala Wagner (the composer had stayed there to work on his opera Parsifal), the American and Sicilian Mafiosi discussed how Sicily would become the major transit point for heroin out of Europe to America. The little coastal resorts of north-western Sicily, such as Castellammare del Golfo, with their food export companies, would provide perfect cover for exporting drugs to the US.

If Bonanno had played a very minor role in World War II – compared to Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Vito Genovese – he had positioned himself perfectly to benefit enormously from the regime they helped establish in post-war Sicily. The island was ruled by the Christian Democrats who had accommodated the Mafia in order to defeat the Communists. All this, with the blessing of the United States government, who faced bigger enemies in the Cold War.

For Bonanno, the view from that restaurant in Palermo could not have been better. He returned to his island as the conquering hero with the Mafia in a stronger position – both in Sicily and America – than they had been in the three previous decades.

Everything was looking very good, but the next month it all went very wrong.

Bonanno returned to the US when he did, not because he was ill or tired, but because he was expected to report on his Sicilian deal-making to other Mafiosi at a major gathering of crime family heads at Apalachin, a small country town in upstate New York in November 1957. The prime mover of this crime conference was Vito Genovese who had just eliminated Albert Anastasia. He now saw himself as Boss of Bosses, but Lucky Luciano, sidelined in Italy from the main Mafia business in the US, had one final blow to deliver against his rival.

Luciano, along with Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, appears to have been part of a conspiracy that informed the police about the meeting at Apalachin and it was raided, with top Mafiosi farcically forced to flee into the woods to escape the law. The long list of Mafiosi recorded at Apalachin, including Bonanno, was a revelation for the national press and confirmed their view of the Mafia as the leading force of organised crime in the US.

Luciano, sitting back in his villa in Naples, could afford to laugh at Genovese’s embarrassment at Apalachin. Within a few months, he set up the mobster in a narcotics deal that sent him to jail for the rest of his life.

Apalachin also shook the world of Joseph Bonanno. ‘We were falling, falling, falling part’, he wrote. Apalachin forced him out of the shadows and US government investigations dogged him ever after. The end of Genovese and Luciano as rulers of the New York underworld tempted him into his own empire-building, but within five years, his crime family was split by deadly rivalry – dubbed the Banana War – and he was forced into retirement.

When Bonanno published his memoirs in 1983, the US government wanted to use the book as proof of a Mafia conspiracy. When Bonanno refused to answer questions before a grand jury, he was jailed. He died in 2002 at the age of ninety-seven.

Lucky Luciano died from a heart attack at Naples airport in 1962.

Meyer Lansky retired to Israel in 1970 after making a fortune out of his casinos in Cuba and Las Vegas. His presence embarrassed the Israelis and he was forced back to the States where he was prosecuted for income tax evasion. The case failed and Lansky carried on making money during his retirement in Florida. Like most Jewish gangsters, and unlike most Italian-American mobsters, he kept his wife and children well away from his business and it died with him – there would be no criminal heir.

One of Lansky’s proudest moments was when his second son, Paul, graduated as a captain from West Point, the US Military Academy. He was among the first American military advisors sent to Vietnam in 1962. ‘He believed very firmly in the American role in Vietnam’, said Lansky. ‘And now that we’re no longer involved, people are beginning to see the true situation. Paul was right. I always shared his views about our role in Vietnam.’

One of Paul Lansky’s roommates at West Point was the son of a Colonel Freeman, a close colleague of General Eisenhower. When Ike became president, Meyer Lansky received a surprise invitation to the inauguration. Lansky presumed it was a mistake and the colonel didn’t know his gangster reputation. He politely refused:

But I got a reply from Colonel Freeman saying something like ‘Don’t forget to come to the ceremony. Don’t you know that in our clubs we play the same slot machines that you’ve got in your casinos, and that we used to drink your bootleg whisky?’

That certainly made me smile. But I sent thanks and regrets again. Big public things just aren’t my style.

Lansky died in 1983. The era of Lucky Luciano and his gangsters was finally over.