The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (15 page)

Just before four that afternoon, Lucania and Adonis left Moe Ducore’s and crossed the street to the Manger. “We was both a little nervous, me especially, because I knew that if this was the wrong move, it was gonna set all of us back ten years.” He knew that much would depend on the way he comported himself during the meeting. “I knew I was gonna have to feel my way, and I wasn’t gonna do nothin’ that would cut off the guys who had been my best friends from the beginnin’.”

It was not an easy situation into which he was walking that afternoon. In recent months, Masseria had taken little trouble to disguise his growing bitterness over Lucania’s continued refusal to throw in with him. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Joe the Boss wanted a share, at the very least, of Lucania’s multimillion-dollar liquor business, which continued to flourish as though nothing could stem its growth. But perhaps more, he wanted Lucania personally, for with Charlie Lucania at his side, with Lucania’s political connections and protection, with all his other interests, with the guns and men he would bring to a merger, Masseria’s strength would be multiplied, would so far exceed Maranzano’s that there was doubt that a challenge would even be mounted, let alone have a chance to succeed.

Lucania and Adonis rode the elevator to the second floor of the Manger, where Masseria maintained a suite of offices. As they approached the door, they noticed a chambermaid’s room with the door slightly ajar; Gentile and Levine were hiding there. And then they were with Masseria. “I was surprised to see he only had one guy with him, Joe [Giuseppe] Catania, who was very high up in his outfit. But there was doors to two rooms on both sides, so Adonis and me didn’t know whether Masseria had anybody else listenin’ in. I was pretty surprised to see Catania there, because some of my boys had been tellin’ me for years, ever since Masseria started to talk to me about joinin’ up with him, that Catania hated my guts.”

As they came through the door, Masseria was seated at a round table, in the center of the room, that was covered with platters of Italian delicacies, hors d’oeuvres, meats, shellfish, toasted peppers,
a tureen of pasta, sauces and cheeses. “There was enough on that table for a banquet and I kept figurin’ that any minute half of Masseria’s mob was gonna show up and sweep down on that table. But nobody showed. I think Masseria ate half of all that food himself, most of it with his fingers — and if he didn’t look like a pig on two legs, I never saw one. He was one happy guy that day, talkin’ and laughin’, tellin’ jokes, talkin’ about the time he was in Sicily before I was born, and all that crap. And it really bothered me. I was expectin’ to deal with a rough guy, but this old guy I was lookin’ at as he was stuffin’ himself was just too fuckin’ happy to make me feel good.”

When Masseria could eat no more, he looked up at Lucania and Adonis with a grin on his face and said, “Have you boys got a piece on you?”

“I got sore and I said, ‘Cut out the crap, Joe. You said you wanted to have a meet. I don’t bring
pistolas
to a meet unless it’s with an enemy. Are you tryin’ to tell me that you’re an enemy?’ ”

Masseria laughed, his jowls quivering. He nodded to Catania and said, “Find out if these two boys are my enemies.” Catania gave them an expert frisking and then shook his head at Masseria, who promptly rose, approached Lucania and put his hand on Charlie’s arm. “Now you have a chance to be my friend or the both of you are dead men.”

And so the ultimatum was in the open. “Joe, you oughta know by now that I’m not afraid of you,” Lucania said. “I came here to talk business, and Joe A. is here with me as a witness. I’ll give it to you straight; okay, I join up with you.” Masseria smiled with pleasure, but before he could do more Lucania had something else to say. “But I’ve got some conditions, Joe. I have to be number two man, above everybody but you. I want a fair piece of the action, and I put into the pot everythin’ that me and my guys do — everything, that is, except not one fuckin’ drop of whiskey.” Then Lucania waited.

Masseria’s eyes bulged from his head, a mouthful of still unmasticated food spurted from his mouth all over the rug, and along with it a hoarse roar of protest and invective. He stomped around the room, grabbed dishes, a crystal table lamp, other bric-a-brac,
and threw them at the walls. Lucania and Adonis remained silent, watching. Catania seemed frightened, backing away.

With the same suddenness with which he had turned on his rage, Masseria turned it off. He bellowed a laugh, swung around, and put his hand on Lucania’s arm again. “You dirty, skinny son of a bitch! You’re the only
paisan
in this whole fuckin’ town who ain’t afraid of Joe the Boss. Okay, Charlie Lucania, you got a deal.” He squeezed Lucania’s hand in a viselike grip, pumping it up and down, then grabbed a huge handkerchief from his pocket to soak up the perspiration that was pouring down his face.

“It was really hard for Joe A. and me to believe that Masseria wanted us so bad that he was willin’ to show it like that. The rest was easy and we walked out of there about fifteen minutes later, after a couple glasses of wine to close the deal, and as of that minute I was the number one lieutenant to Joe Masseria. But there was lots of good conditions, all my whiskey operations still belonged to me and my guys, and we had a clear-cut agreement there wouldn’t be no hijackings of any kind and we would supply all of Masseria’s joints with everything from whiskey to beer. Dutch Schultz was controllin’ all the good beer in Manhattan by that time and I talked to him before the meet and got his backin’.” And Masseria offered no objections to Lucania’s maintaining his partnership with his old friends, who were Jews and non-Sicilian Italians.

Minutes later, when Lucania and Adonis reported back to their friends at the rear of the drugstore, they were greeted with disbelief. “Even Costello, who smiled maybe once a year, started to laugh, and he said, ‘You’re gonna make mincemeat outa Joe the Boss, and that’s a lotta meat to chop up.’

“Then I got serious and I said to ’em, ‘I wanna admit somethin’. I was wrong when I figured that Masseria could win a war with Maranzano. Not a chance. He’s too fat, too old, and behind all that hard front there’s nothin’ left but a soft brain. It’s only a matter of time, so let’s use it the best way we can.”

It took only a few hours for the word to spread that Lucania and Masseria had joined forces, with Lucania the new number two man in Joe the Boss’s family. The strength implied won him new power, but it did not ease what Lucania knew was a delicate
situation. He was certain that Masseria would not for long accept the holdout of the liquor business from his control. It was, then, necessary to flatter and placate Masseria constantly. “I told all my guys that the only way we could keep that fat bastard’s nose out of our liquor deals was to kiss his ass in public a dozen times a day. In fact, I made up all kinds of words for us to use with him, like, ‘Joe, when they made you, they broke the mold,’ and ‘Nobody in New York can handle this business like you can,’ and ‘What you forgot, Maranzano’ll never know,’ all that kinda crap. And that soft-brained Masseria used to lap it up like a cat lickin’ cream. He’d sit there and smile and fiddle with that big gold chain he used to wear across his vest, and he’d nod his head like we was little kids payin’ attention to the teacher. Shit, he really used to make me vomit.”

Initially, at the end of 1927, Lucania attempted to devote much of his time to Masseria’s business, working out of a two-room suite that Joe the Boss rented adjacent to his own office at the Hotel Pennsylvania. “That’s where I started to organize his whole fucked-up operation. And except for not gettin’ the liquor, he didn’t have much to complain about. I was givin’ him my time, Costello threw the slot machines into the deal, Schultz gimme about fifty speaks to toss into the pot as a show of his good faith, I combined some of the Lepke-Lucchese action with Masseria’s loansharkin’, and he even got Meyer and Bugsy, who was the top protection guys in the country by then. At least Masseria was smart enough to see that even though they was Jews, they could save him a fortune by protectin’ the robberies the outfit was pullin’ off all the time in midtown. It was a lot of business to tie up right, but in about six months, I had it all runnin’ smooth as silk.”

Of the more than two hundred men Lucania now had working for him, the only one he had trouble with at this moment was Joe Catania, who tried to undercut him by spreading the rumor that the merger was only a temporary thing and Lucania would not last long. About two o’clock one morning, after spending the evening at the Palais d’Or listening to Paul Whiteman’s band, Lucania dropped by his Hotel Pennsylvania office. As he came in the door, he saw Catania prying open the drawer in his desk. “I
don’t know what this idiot thought he was gonna find, on account of we never kept no records in an open place like that. He didn’t hear me come in, and I stood in the dark watchin’ him. As soon as he got the drawer open, I walked over and slammed it on his right hand. While he was screamin’ and moanin’, I dragged him into Joe’s office, dumped him on the floor, and called Masseria to tell him to send a doctor to take care of his boy. Catania used to be a pretty good bowler with the duckpins, but after that session with me, he never bowled again. And I never had no trouble with him after that, either. And all the guys in the Masseria family, they was my slaves from that night on.”

For half a year, Lucania devoted himself to modernizing the Masseria empire. He brought to it the theories and techniques he had developed as an independent, emphasizing the necessity of careful planning before undertaking any kind of job — from a warehouse burglary to attempts to capture new markets for olive oil, cheese or any of the other Masseria monopolies. He instituted rigid discipline and tight controls from the top, and he fostered cooperation with noncompeting gangs. Under his executive eye, the Masseria empire flourished even more than in the past. And during this period, new power and respect poured down on Lucania, from Moe Dalitz and his Cleveland allies, in and out of the Mayfield Road gang; from Al Capone, who was having increasing troubles with Bugs Moran on Chicago’s North Side and deemed it both profitable and expedient to forge strong ties with Lucania in the East; from the Purple Gang in Detroit, which needed Scotch to augment the Canadian whiskey it was ferrying across the Detroit River; from Harry Stromberg, better known as Nig Rosen, who had moved into a position of equality in Philadelphia with Waxey Gordon and Bitsy Bitz.

Then Torrio returned from Italy, one step ahead of Mussolini’s Black Shirts, and decided to eschew the blood-soaked battlefields of Chicago and settle in New York. He renewed his friendship with Lucania and others and began to talk up an idea that Lucania, too, had been considering for some time both as a business practicality and as a way of strengthening his position so that the tightrope he was walking with Masseria would not turn into a noose. The idea was that the most important bootleggers in and
out of New York should combine, at the very least in a loose alliance that would guarantee continued sources of supply to all and would, in the unity, protect all from powerful outsiders such as Maranzano.

In discussions with Torrio — now the underworld’s elder statesman, a power not so much for what he controlled but because of his farsighted ideas, his perceptions, his criminal expertise and his organizational talents — Lucania and his friends debated, weeded, and finally selected those they considered the strongest allies. The merger was limited to seven outfits by Lucania, the perennial gambler who had implicit faith in that lucky number. The “Seven Group,” as they called it, was indeed a formidable alliance in the bootlegging world: Lansky and Siegel, whose Bug and Meyer Gang covered New York, New Jersey and surrounding areas, and who functioned as prime protectors, enforcers and shippers; Joe Adonis, who operated mainly in Brooklyn; Longie Zwillman and Willie Moretti, whose territory consisted of Nassau County (in western Long Island) and northern New Jersey (including Newark, Jersey City, and Fort Lee); Bitz, Gordon and Rosen from Philadelphia; King Solomon of Boston, who ruled much of New England; Nucky Johnson from Atlantic City, the ruler of the South Jersey coast; and, of course, Lucania and Torrio.

So successful was the Seven Group in its cooperative ventures that by the end of 1928, it had struck cooperative alliances — for buying, selling, distilling, shipping and protecting — with twenty-two different mobs from Maine to Florida and west to the Mississippi River. The man who pulled it all together, who had the growing respect and trust of all his contemporaries and associates, was Charlie Lucania. As a kind of ex officio commander-in-chief of the group, he found that his New York headquarters was the clearinghouse where all the intricate problems of the Seven Group were handled. And the man Lucania assigned the task of coordinating the business, of seeing that his decisions were expedited, was Vito Genovese, whom he sometimes called “the Italian Bugsy Siegel.” Genovese’s main area of responsibility was in Manhattan, the center of Lucania’s own empire. Italians were more and more coming to the front in that borough, and he felt it would be wiser
to set another Italian — Genovese — to dealing with them than the Jews, Lansky and Siegel.

The only other Lucania interest that remained outside the cover of the Masseria canopy revolved about the joint gambling enterprises he was plying with Arnold Rothstein and Rothstein’s newly acquired associate, a beefy, red-faced Scandinavian named Frank Erickson. Rothstein had taken on Erickson to handle his high-level bookmaking business, which dealt only with such big-stakes bettors as Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, and other corporate and financial executives. While Rothstein handled poker games where there was no limit on bets and, on his own, had begun to move into the narcotics business in a major way, Erickson dealt with the horseplayers, even accompanying them to the tracks around the city and personally handling their bets so that the regular track odds would not be affected. This was the beginning for Erickson; after Rothstein’s death in November of 1928, his bookmaking business, on his own and in partnership with Costello, flourished so greatly that over the next twenty years he became perhaps the biggest and most important bookie in New York.