5

Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano: The Founder of the Modern Mafia

Many people throughout the world questioned Time Magazine’s judgement when it named the infamous New York gangster of the 1930s, Charles ‘Charlie Lucky’ Luciano, as one of the world’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, alongside such luminaries as Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin D Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, Walt Disney and Henry Ford.

In the wake of heavy criticism of Luciano’s inclusion in such an illustrious list, Time magazine explained that while Luciano may not have been of good character, ‘he modernized the Mafia, shaping it into a smoothly run national crime syndicate focused on the bottom line’. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was outraged: ‘The idea that Luciano civilized the Mafia is absurd. He [Luciano] murdered in order to get the position that he had, and then he authorized hundreds and hundreds of murders.’ However, in defending his controversial choice, Time business editor Bill Saporito called Luciano ‘kind of an evil genius’ who had a ‘deep impact on the underground economy’.

But no matter what, there is no doubt whatever that Luciano single-handedly turned the common ramshackle Mafia, with hundreds of various unorganised factions throughout America, into the biggest and best-run – albeit illegal – organisation in the USA. Here is how he did it. You make up your own mind.

The foundations of the Mafia in America as we know it today were the original Black Hand gangs of criminal Sicilian immigrants who, around the turn of the century, made capital cities such as New York their home and illegally exploited their decent fellow Italians for money. These gangs of violent thugs stood over ordinary citizens with threats of violence and death if they didn’t pay them protection money. It worked, and soon the gangs throughout every capital city in America branched out into drug trafficking, gambling, bootlegging, union racketeering, organised theft, hijacking and numbers rackets.

By the late 1920s, the New York underworld was controlled by two opposing Black Hand gangs run by Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Both had hundreds of ‘soldiers’ under their control, who were prepared to commit murder should the directive come from the boss. Joe the Boss headed the largest crime family in New York but Maranzano wasn’t far behind, and had ideals of taking over and becoming the Boss of all Bosses in New York.

Although Joe the Boss had a hundred or so more soldiers than his opposition, Maranzano ordered his thugs to kill any Masseria gang member on sight or, better still, kill Joe the Boss himself. But the Boss kept himself heavily guarded at all times. And so, in 1928, began what became known as the Castellammarese War, so named after a district in western Sicily from where the Black Hand was said to originate.

Joe the Boss’ Underboss was an ambitious young gangster named Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. ‘Lucky’ was so named because he had once been taken on a ‘ride’ by opposition gangsters – from which no one had ever returned before – and miraculously survived. Luciano’s escape from certain death had left him with a scar running the length of his face as a memento.

As the gangland killings mounted up to 50 and more over the next couple of years, Luciano saw an opening for a smart young businessman. If he could get rid of both Joe the Boss and Maranzano and call a peaceful truce, he could take control. One day in April 1931, Luciano suggested to his superior, Joe the Boss, that they have lunch together at the Nuova Villa Tamora restaurant at Coney Island, which was run by a friend of Luciano’s.

With their bodyguards waiting outside in the car, the pair finished a feast of pasta and seafood and after all of the other patrons had left, Luciano suggested to Joe the Boss that they play a game of klob, a popular two-handed card game of the time, drink wine and discuss business. They had played only a single hand when Luciano excused himself to go to the toilet. No sooner had Luciano left the table than four of Luciano’s lieutenants, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, rushed into the restaurant and filled Joe the Boss full of lead. As he lay on the ground, in his blood-splattered right hand the late Boss held the ace of spades. The owner of the restaurant, who was the only witness to the killing, was mysteriously murdered several weeks later.

He wasn’t sure who killed Joe the Boss – though he had his suspicions – but Maranzano appointed himself as the Boss of all the Bosses, with Luciano his Underboss. It was a big mistake. With the war now allegedly over and the two gangs combined to form one army of about 500 soldiers, Maranzano wasn’t content to leave it at that. He ordered his men to keep killing those who had offended him during the war, and the murders went on. Luciano decided it was time to make his final move.

Six months after the murder of Joe the Boss, four supposed federal tax agents raided Maranzano’s posh offices on Park Avenue on the pretext of inspecting his books. As he was forever being investigated, Maranzano wasn’t suspicious and let them in. The men set upon Maranzano and shot him many times, but he would not give in. In the end they had to stab him to death. To everyone Luciano was now Capo De Tuti Capi or ‘Boss of all the Bosses’; the underworld was at peace and the killings finally stopped.

Charlie Lucky Luciano named the combined organisation the Unione Siciliane after a secret criminal society believed to have first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily. Members of all of the crime families were collectively called ‘Mafioso’, Mafia or ‘members of the Mafia’. The humble Luciano refused the title of Capo De Tuti Capi and chose simply to call the national crime organisation over which he was the supreme ruler ‘the outfit’.

Now the newspapers and gossip columnists called him ‘the Boss’ when they wrote about him, although they had no idea what he was the boss of. And while his friends, associates and underlings still called him Lucky, Charlie or Charlie Lucky, everyone thought of him as the Boss. He modestly insisted that he wasn’t the boss of anything other than his own outfit, and was of no more importance than any of the other family leaders in the Unione Siciliane. But despite his protestations, to everyone he was the Boss and whatever he wanted was done without question. And Lucky Luciano was a good Boss.

Luciano instigated the five New York crime families – Bonanno, Gambino, Colombo, Genovese and Lucchese – which had their own territories, and he set up a commission or ‘board of directors’, of which he was the head. Only Italians could sit at the new Commission, which mainly comprised the heads of the families. Luciano sat above all of the leaders of the five families.

All of America’s smaller crime families had to fall into line and kick back a percentage of their earnings to the Commission under threat of death from Murder Incorporated, Luciano’s personal band of assassins. As the Jewish brains behind Luciano’s organising skills, Myer Lansky, once reportedly said: ‘We’re bigger than US Steel.’ And he was right. In the early 1930s and all through the Great Depression, nationally the Mafia was turning over hundreds of millions of illegal dollars annually, and Lucky Luciano was getting a direct percentage from all of New York’s activities and distributing it among his lieutenants.

The charismatic Luciano set up home in a penthouse at the Waldorf Towers and wore elegant suits, silk shirts, handmade shoes, cashmere topcoats and fedora hats. He was the walking fashion statement of the day. Charlie Lucky always had a beautiful showgirl or a nightclub singer on his arm and actor George Raft and comedian Jimmy Durante were among his friends.

But the good life for the supreme leader of America’s biggest and most profitable organisation ended abruptly when special prosecutor Thomas E Dewey – who was totally oblivious to the fact that organised crime even existed – charged Luciano with multiple trumped-up counts of compulsory prostitution. Convicted on 62 counts in June 1936, Luciano got 30 to 50 years in Dannemora Prison. But for all his crimes, Charlie Lucky was definitely not a pimp. To this day, where gangsters gather, it is still said of their beloved leader that it was a ‘bum rap’.

Such was Luciano’s power that he ran the Mafia like a Swiss watch from prison. In return for his freedom, Luciano struck a deal with the US government that he would keep the allied docks free of Nazi sympathiser bomb attacks on supply ships, and that his friends in Sicily would aid the allied war effort. In 1946 he was deported to Italy, from where he ran the American Mafia until he eventually retired in the 1950s on a substantial pension, delivered to him from the USA in cash each month. Lucky Luciano dropped dead of a heart attack at Naples airport in 1962. He was aged 64.

So secretive was Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano’s organisation, which was making billions of dollars each year, that it wasn’t until a lowly Mafia soldier named Joe Valachi broke the code of Omerta that anyone knew it existed. For a breakdown of a murder rap, Valachi revealed all of the secrets of the Cosa Nostra (as Valachi called it) to a 1963 Senate Subcommittee. Until then America hadn’t the slightest idea of what had been going on right under the noses of law enforcement agencies for decades. They knew there were gangsters and crime, but had no idea that it was organised like a huge corporation. It was so secretive, in fact, that the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, refused to acknowledge that it ever existed.

And therein lies a tale. Rumour has it that Hoover really had known of the Unione Siciliane’s existence for many years but had been convinced that it wouldn’t be a good idea to acknowledge its existence, otherwise photos of Hoover and his assistant, Clyde Tolson, in compromising sexual positions, which had come into the possession of Mafia accountant Myer Lansky, would be released to the newspapers.

Hoover and Tolson’s relationship was suspect as it was. They went on every vacation together, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together, went to work together, lived together, never had families, never had girlfriends, and when they died they were buried together; the pictures would confirm their sexual relationship.

It seems that even the most important crime fighter in the history of the United States, like everything else in America, was under the control of the Mafia.