The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (12 page)

Lucania and Adonis drove the hundred and forty miles to Atlantic City, taking every back road and shortcut they knew, in three hours and met with Johnson at a mansion he maintained in Chelsea, an exclusive Atlantic City suburb, for the purpose of private meetings and accommodations for special guests. “I knew Nucky would do practically anything for a buck. For a lotta money, I figured he could be tempted to accept an offer the boys and I had decided was a good idea. So I said to him, ‘Look, Nucky, I don’t want to beat around the bush, and I’m not lookin’ to chisel a sharp deal. I need all the Scotch I can lay my hands on, and you know everythin’ that’s comin’ in and out. Now I want a better deal than the fair shake you’ve been givin’ everybody. I’ll make you a partner.”

Perhaps it was just such a deal that Johnson himself had intended to propose when he called Lucania for the meeting. For without hesitation, the tall, urbane ruler of the Jersey coast said, “I’ll give you an exclusive on my beach. Nobody else can land any stuff here. I’ll give you protection all the way to the Camden Ferry across from Philly. I’ll let Costello bring in all the slots he can handle. You can run gambling spots that we’ll decide on, near the big hotels. Now, Charlie, what do I get?”

Before answering, Lucania had one further demand. “I need Scotch now, Nucky. So, who’s makin’ the next shipment?”

“Maranzano,” Johnson answered. “A boatload, two trucks, of uncut stuff will come in at Ventnor two nights from now. It’s going to be cut by Waxey Gordon and Bitsy Bitz in Philadelphia.” He pulled out a map and marked the route the Maranzano trucks would take from Atlantic City, passing through Egg Harbor, New Jersey, by a back road.

“After gettin’ information like that, I shook hands with Nucky on the deal. That day, I give him ten per cent of everythin’ as long as the Volstead Act remained the law; everythin’ from my outfit, that is. But the rest, includin’ Costello, Lansky, Siegel and Adonis, all chipped in, so it wasn’t too big a bite from any one of us.

“As Joe and me walked to the door, Nucky said somethin’ that
made me feel pretty good. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘I like the way you handle yourself. Most of all, I like the way you dress. You’re starting to look like a real corporation executive.’ Comin’ from a guy who practically ran a whole state, I really appreciated that. As we got into the car, Joe said to me, ‘That’s the smartest move you ever made. It’s worth millions.’ And it was.”

Two nights later, three cars containing ten heavily armed men, including Lucania and Siegel in the first, Adonis and Lansky in the second, set out from New York to erect a roadblock on the Egg Harbor back road. It was unfortunate, Lucania said, that it had to be a Maranzano shipment that was being hijacked, for if he and his friends were recognized, it would mean war; but he could not afford to show any hesitation to Johnson and he desperately needed the whiskey. A tree was felled across the road and at two in the morning, the Maranzano trucks appeared, with several men riding shotgun. At the sight of the tree, the trucks halted and some of the men jumped out to remove it. “Siegel started to shoot right away, and then Lansky opened up. One of the Maranzano guys was bumped off and another one was wounded, and the rest of ’em gave up right there. But that didn’t do ’em no good because we took away their guns and give ’em a good beatin’ before we took off with the trucks. Maybe the best thing about it was that none of ’em recognized us because we was all masked.”

Lucania filled his orders from the hijacked shipment and then waited for the old Don to retaliate, certain that Maranzano would have some idea who pulled off the job and so would come down in force. But again nothing happened.

“That’s when I knew that Joe Masseria had called it right. I knew then that I’d go with Masseria, no matter how much I hated him personally. Maranzano could never take on the combination of me and my guys joined together with Joe’s big outfit. I decided that I’d make the deal with him as soon as possible, but I hadda work it out so he’d come to me again, instead of me goin’ to him. That would give me some kind of edge when we started talkin’.”

By the mid-1920’s, though not yet thirty years of age, Charlie Lucania had arrived at a plateau that once would have been beyond his imagination. He was rich and growing richer, the money pouring in ever-increasing amounts into his coffers. He was living in a large furnished apartment on Manhattan’s East Side in Murray Hill, everything in good taste, everything expensive. His wardrobe was bursting with new clothes, all from the best stores and tailors, and as Arnold Rothstein had taught him, conservative, subdued, exuding the aroma of success and respectability. He had at his disposal a fleet of big black supercharged cars, some souped up and refined by his own hands, for he was a man who loved fine cars and was a tinkerer with motors, and some worked on by his friend Meyer Lansky, equally passionate about engines. He numbered among his friends the city’s elite in politics, society, sports, entertainment; they welcomed him into their homes and they came to him seeking favors. He could choose any kind or type of woman that struck his fancy of the moment, with little fear of rejection. By watching, practicing, imitating, listening to the lessons of Rothstein, he had learned the ways of the rich, had acquired the veneer of a gentleman (though always, just beneath the surface, there was a barely concealed menace, a threat of sudden violence, and he never lost, no matter how he tried, the rasp and inflection of the Lower East Side, which was later to seem alien to the rest of him).

Charlie Lucania had become an executive, controlling an empire whose growth was ceaseless, both horizontally and vertically. It was an organization he called his “outfit,” though it was only the germ of what would come. “In them days, there was no real combination. Costello had his outfit, and Siegel and Lansky had their outfit, and Adonis had his. But we all had one thing in
common, and that was the whiskey and how to keep it flowin’. I never got mixed up with Costello in the slots; I didn’t go on no fur jobs or jewelry heists with Adonis’s guys, or things like that. Of course, I got my share, because at the top we was partners. But it got to be a thing where they all looked to me, and I’d always say to them, ‘Don’t ask me to make your decisions for you in your own business. All I wanna do is make the stuff that we do together pay off as big as possible.’ It was a terrific arrangement and one of the reasons I think it worked so good was that I wasn’t doin’ a Masseria, trying to be the Big Boss.”

The more his friends turned to him for advice, the more important he became, the more Lucania became concerned with “makin’ our outfit into a real business, like any big corporation. Of course we couldn’t advertise with a slogan or a trademark like Packard cars, ‘Ask the Man Who Owns One,’ but that didn’t mean things couldn’t be run right. So I made up a lotta rules for the guys who worked for me. Why shouldn’t I? After all, don’t department stores and big offices tell their people how to behave and what to wear?”

His regulations gave his men an image the antithesis of the one portrayed in the press of the day and later popularized in the scores of Warner Brothers movies of the early 1930’s. Lucania’s men were ordered to dress neatly and conservatively, like office workers, to avoid wide-brimmed hats, loud shirts and ties, garish suits completely. (“Let Capone and his Chicago guys do that. We won’t.”) When in a car, there was to be no speeding or violation of any traffic law except when absolutely necessary, for it was impossible to know who might stop a speeder and what might then be found inside the car. Anybody who was a member of the Lucania outfit was expected to be circumspect in everything, if he wanted to remain a member. But according to the unwritten code, nobody could quit, and being fired could be sudden, unpleasant and permanent.

Despite Lucania’s rules, the members of his outfit had come to it, as he and the other leaders had, from a violent world of robbery, mugging, theft and other crimes, and reversion was an easy step, since there wasn’t always enough work every day to keep everybody busy. Some used their spare time to return to their old
callings, knocking over any place where there was loose money or marketable goods. “I tried to explain to all the boys in my outfit that there was lots of easy ways to make a buck. There was no reason to go out on their own and take chances just because they might have a couple of days or weeks on their hands with no jobs to do for me.” But his words often went unheeded, for some of his boys went in over their heads in gambling or with girls and needed some extra cash. “Most of the time, they’d get caught, and then I’d have to get the mouthpieces, put up the bail and the rest, because no matter what they did, I made it a policy to back ’em to the limit. I just tried to make ’em understand the penalties of stupidity.”

There was the time in the summer of 1925 when Lucania began to spread his bookmaking operation all over Manhattan. He gave Vito Genovese the job of bringing the small candy and other family-owned stores into line. “I told Vito we was gonna do somethin’ none of the other outfits ever had the sense to do. We was gonna guarantee a guy in any little store a yard and a half [$150] a week to handle the bettin’ slips and let us put in the phones.” These were the “momma and poppa” stores, many owned by Jews, who would ordinarily have rejected any offer from a gangster. “But when we guaranteed ’em that hundred and fifty, it shut ’em up — most of ’em, anyway. And that dough sent more Jewish kids to college and made more Jewish doctors and lawyers than all the rich Hebes on Riverside Drive put together.”

But where Genovese concentrated his efforts was on the Lower East Side, among the “snowball cart” peddlers, men who pushed around carts containing a huge cake of ice, quart bottles of fruit flavors and a metal scoop; for two cents, the peddler would scoop out a flavored ice into a paper cup, and the neighborhood kids were his best customers. In recruiting them, Genovese had ideas that went beyond bookmaking. “Without sayin’ nothin’ to me, he starts to muscle a bunch of these old geezers, mostly Italians, to pass junk for him in their neighborhoods. I almost clobbered him. I said to him, ‘You stupid shithead. You had a good idea, but why screw it up with narcotics, especially when I told you — no junk. Go out and organize ’em, sure, but to take bets for us. We got all the precincts protected and no Feds to worry about.’ He seen the
light and in less than a month we had over two hundred pushcarts makin’ book for us. That was the time, though, when I should’ve cut his prick off, right then and there. Believe me, I lived to regret that I didn’t.”

So Lucania’s bookmaking empire spiraled. He and his partners owned and financed hundreds of police-protected handbooks around Manhattan, and they controlled a number of central bookmaking banks where the bets from the individual bookie could be laid off — shared — so as to avoid any great loss to them if too many bettors hit a winner. It was lucrative business, for them if not for the small bookie. They grossed perhaps $500,000 a week, or more. The individual bookie might handle $2,000 a week in bets, if his business was good. But that was his gross. Part of it went back to the winners; another part, up to half the bet, was charged for the layoff privilege with the central bank. More of the gross went for police protection, either paid directly by the bookie or, more likely, by the outfit of which he was a member out of funds he supplied. More went for rent, telephones and other expenses. If a bookie did well, he earned about 7½ per cent on the total bets placed with him, or about $150 a week. And so the supposedly generous offer of $150 a week guaranteed to the small storekeepers was anything but; it had been carefully computed by Lucania and Lansky.

But their rewards from gambling were not limited to their share of the income of the neighborhood books and the central banks. They ran, as well, a more luxurious operation in the form of horse parlors where the rich and the sporting crowd that didn’t have the time or inclination to travel to the tracks to watch the horses, and yet wanted some of the excitement that was absent in betting with bookies by phone, could get what they desired. The parlors were lavishly decorated, drinks of good Scotch and other whiskey were provided free, women of polite society were welcome (which was not true at the men-only private clubhouse at Belmont), there were tables and sofas where the bettors could relax while waiting for the results, which were flashed in and announced within seconds of the end of a race, and there were betting windows that simulated those at the tracks, and the track odds or better prevailed. It was in these horse parlors that Lucania “collected a
fortune in diamond bracelets and rings from some of the best ladies in Manhattan. Once in a while I took ’em home with me, the broads, I mean, so I could examine them jewels a little closer while doing a body readin’ on the lady herself.”

What was apparent from all this was that people wanted to bet as much as they wanted to drink, and there was no reason why the two should not be combined. The back rooms of the better speakeasies, and particularly the outlying roadhouses, were equipped as casinos, with roulette wheels and crap tables, birdcages, blackjack tables and other games of chance. House limits were generally fixed at two hundred dollars a bet, but the big players were often granted a no-limit game.

Gambling, liquor, everything they touched seemed to flourish. “I always liked to gamble, but one thing I never did — gamble in the stock market, because the stockholder on the outside don’t know a thing about what’s happenin’ inside the company. Years later, I was down at Bradley’s in Florida, and I ran into that guy Hutton who had a big brokerage firm up in New York. Hutton was a good friend of mine. He was playin’ chemin de fer one night, and when he finished — I think he dropped about eighteen grand — I went over to him and I said, with an absolutely straight face, ‘Hut, I wanna talk to you; I wanna help you get even for what you just dropped. It’s somethin’ about the market. I think it’s a good idea if I could get my outfit listed on the New York Stock Exchange.’