The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (16 page)

For Lucania, continued support for Rothstein was not only a repayment for earlier favors done, but was also smart business, and it paid off early in 1928. The Seven Group was then a fledgling, and responsibility for seeing the liquor supplies were adequate to the needs of the group had been given to Lucania. At first, he handled this assignment with his usual flair and efficiency, but then that winter a series of unexpected hijackings combined with the foundering and sinking of a whiskey-laden freighter off Cape Hatteras conspired to wipe out the Scotch inventory. “It was such a tough situation that I hadda call everybody together to figure somethin’ out. Adonis went down to Philly to see if he could get some extra quota from Waxey or Nig Rosen, or maybe even cut some of our stuff a little thinner, to tide us over. But that would only be a drop in the bucket. We had deals with Detroit, Cleveland, Connecticut, and a lotta other places, for Scotch that we suddenly didn’t have, and it didn’t look like we had no place to get it. I even had a private meet with Tommy Lucchese, hopin’ maybe we could work out a way to trade off some stuff with some
of the guys in Maranzano’s outfit, where he was still friendly. But no soap. It looked like a pretty crummy spot for me to be in.”

Then from Chicago appeared a man named Samuel Bloom, who had made a fortune acquiring prescriptions for medicinal alcohol from friendly doctors and selling them to Capone. A man of education and cultivation, Bloom dressed well and traveled widely, something that had led to a friendship with Rothstein. Now he arrived in New York bearing greetings from Capone. “When I called Al to check on this guy Sam Bloom, Al was sore as hell, because Bloom went to Europe when Capone was lookin’ for him in Chicago. He couldn’t believe anybody would take two weeks off to go back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. And when Al asked Bloom if he went to Italy, Al was sore as hell when Bloom told him that he never went there.”

Soon after meeting Lucania, Bloom sought out his New York friend Arnold Rothstein, and then sat in on one of the gambler’s poker games at the Park Central Hotel. Bloom and an Englishman who had dropped most of his cash in the game left together about dawn. As they rode down in the elevator, they began to talk, and Bloom, feeling some sympathy over the other man’s losses, asked, “Do you want me to try to get it back for you?”

The reply sent Bloom scurrying to Lucania. The Englishman shrugged off the losses, explaining that he could well afford them because he was a major owner of the distillery in Scotland that made King’s Ransom Scotch, perhaps the most valued of the whiskeys to the bootleggers because its heavy, smoky quality made it easy to dilute without losing its flavor. Bloom was certain he could set up a deal if Lucania wanted. There was no hesitation; Lucania didn’t even bother to consult his Seven Group partners; he knew they would go along with the opportunity to corner the market in this Scotch, especially at this moment of extreme shortage. Bloom went back to his English friend, cablegrams were sent to Glasgow, and soon boatloads of King’s Ransom were flowing into the Seven Group’s pipelines through Nucky Johnson’s Atlantic City landing zone and King Solomon’s port of Boston. (When the age of Prohibition ended, Frank Costello turned up as the major legal American importer of King’s Ransom.)

For some months, it was a smooth operation. Then, near the
end of 1928, about fifteen thousand cases of King’s Ransom were landed in Boston, loaded on trucks, and started on their way to New York. They never arrived; somewhere along the road, they were hijacked — a loss to the Seven Group of close to $1 million in the liquor’s street value.

“All us guys in the bootleggin’ business knew that hijackin’ was part of the business; we’d beef about it a lot and then forget it. But this time, we all had the feelin’ it was somethin’ a little bit different from the ordinary heist. I asked Vito to put his sharp Neapolitan nose to work and investigate.” What Genovese discovered was that Bloom had dropped a hundred thousand dollars in a poker game at Rothstein’s, had given the gambler his I.O.U., payable in a week, and then had paid up — the day after the hijacking. Lucania called Rothstein and the story was confirmed. “It seemed to be open and shut that Bloom had finagled the hijackin’. There wasn’t no absolute proof, but with things like that, you didn’t take a guy to court. You pronounced your own sentence. All the guys agreed. So, a little while later, Bugsy gave Sam Bloom a cement funeral.”

Bloom’s disappearance — his body, unlike others sunk in the rivers around Manhattan, never surfaced — upset nothing. He was not missed; his absence barely drew comment. He had been only the middleman, arranging the deal between the British distillers and distributors of King’s Ransom and Lucania and the Seven Group. Even without him, the whiskey continued to flow without interruption into the Seven Group’s pipeline.

Though the success of the Seven Group seemed assured from the beginning and its business grew steadily, “I began to feel very shaky about the whiskey business.” By 1928, there were mounting signs that the Noble Experiment could not remain a permanent part of American life. It had turned a large part of the nation into lawbreakers, and many Americans, even some who hailed its original purpose, had begun to tire of it, to see it as an experiment that had failed.

Some of these opponents began to look for leadership to the governor of New York, Al Smith. Regularly, he derided the “drys” and called for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. In 1924, he
had tried, and failed, to capture the Democratic nomination for President. By 1928, however, he seemed unstoppable.

“One day, in the early part of 1928, Costello picked me up and took me to a private house — I think it was in Westchester — and it belonged to a millionaire named John J. Raskob. He had a lot to do with puttin’ up the Empire State Buildin’, and he was a big backer of Governor Al Smith. I almost fell over when I walked in and saw Smith standin’ there in person, in Raskob’s library. I’d met a lotta big shots by then, but that was the first time I even knew that Costello had made contacts as high up as Al Smith.

“The Governor was a tall guy with a husky voice, somethin’ like Costello’s, and it had the streets in it, just like ours. He shook hands with me and said, ‘Hello, Charlie, it’s a pleasure to meetcha.’

“I looked at him and started to laugh. ‘What the hell are you doin’, Governor? You’re tryin’ to put me out of business.’

“He sort of smiled and said, ‘No, I’m not. I brought you up here to do you a favor. Naturally, being a politician, I expect to get a favor in return. Whyn’t you sit down and listen to what I have to tell you.’

“So we all sat down and Raskob poured some drinks; and I was too dumb to shut my mouth. I said, ‘Governor, you’re tryin’ to repeal Prohibition, and that’s gonna throw us all outa business.’

“Smith kinda brushed that aside and told me, ‘My boy, in a couple of years, there won’t be any Prohibition at all. I intend to get that nomination and I intend to win this election. I’m tellin’ you, and I’m going to tell the American people that when I get in the White House, I’m personally going to see to it that the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment are thrown in the wastebasket, legally. That’s why I brought you here. Costello has told me all about you, and I need your support right here in my own state. There are two things I want you to do: take my advice and make your plans to get into the legitimate end of the whiskey business; and, second, line up overwhelming support for me from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, where you fellows control the delegates. I want every one of those delegates at the convention in Houston. If I get them, I’m prepared to make things good for you.’

“That’s just the way he put it, and it kinda made my head swim, that maybe we’d found ourselves a President. I couldn’t help but think about Hampton Farms and the Brooklyn Truancy School and I wondered whether my old man would believe me if I told him about this. We shook hands all around. Then I did somethin’ real smart, and it made the Governor look at me with more respect. I told him I wanted to think about what he said before givin’ him an answer. That was the truth, anyway, because I wanted to go back to the city and talk to Johnny Torrio. What Smith had been talkin’ about, the end of Prohibition, was exactly what Torrio had predicted before he run out to Italy. I knew somethin’ hadda be done, because now I was absolutely sure that Al Smith’s figurin’ was right. I kept sayin’ to Frank all the way back to the city that I still couldn’t figure how legit whiskey could pay off anythin’ close to bootleggin’. I said, ‘You know, Frank, we been in the rackets all our lives. Maybe we ain’t got the imagination for a straight business.’

“ ‘Charlie,’ Costello told me, ‘in our group we got enough imagination for any kind of business. It don’t scare me at all to go legit as far as whiskey is concerned. That don’t mean we’ve got to give up gamblin’; and we can do that in a big way. We can have big casinos all over the country. What the hell, more people like to gamble than drink. I think we oughta get behind Smith. At least with him, we know where we stand.’ ”

And, indeed, they backed Al Smith all the way. He captured the Democratic nomination, but in November he was buried in the Hoover and Republican landslide. His stand on legal liquor was only a minor factor. Smith was a Roman Catholic, the first Catholic to run for President in a Protestant nation where suspicions of Catholics as tools of the Pope in Rome were widespread; he was from the big city, New York, with the accents and manners of the metropolis basic to his nature, while the nation itself was still essentially rural and suspicious of cities; he was a Democrat while the nation was in the midst of an unparalleled prosperity many believed had been brought about by the Republican administrations; and he offered change at a time when the national mood was to keep things as they were.

What Lucania and his associates in the Seven Group read into
the election returns was a sign that Prohibition would be around for some time to come. They were sure that as long as national prosperity continued — and they, along with most of the nation, could see no signs of its ending — the nation would opt for stability and against any change that would rock the boat, resulting in resistance to ending the increasingly unpopular Noble Experiment. (This they believed right up until that black week in October 1929 when the stock market crashed.)

So the bootleg business boomed along with the rest of the economy in the dizzying days of the final months of prosperity. But in that whiskey boom, there were problems: fierce competition for supplies was driving prices up wherever whiskey was made and could be bought — in Europe, Canada, the Caribbean. The chaos would end, the bitterness resulting from such competition would be halted, and everyone would profit only if some order, some logical sense of allocation could be agreed upon by the major racket bosses.

“Costello and me talked it over with Torrio and Lansky first. I asked Meyer to put out a few feelers around the country, to see if the top guys would be willin’ to make a meet — you might say, like a national convention of our own.”

It took months, through the end of 1928 and into 1929, before arrangements reached a conclusive stage for such a meeting. Meanwhile, Lucania was having other problems. “Masseria kept on my ass every two minutes; he was forever callin’ me up to find out why I wasn’t with him, or why the fuck I was sleepin’ late, why I didn’t go on a job the night before. That son of a bitch was always tryin’ to turn me into a chambermaid.”

Then there was Maranzano. The old Don’s campaign for absolute control of the Italian underworld was becoming more open and intense. It was bringing him into conflict with other Mafiosi around the country — particularly with Masseria, with whom there was, anyway, extraordinary antipathy. “They come from opposite sides of Sicily and both of ’em brought the whole idea of vendetta with ’em when they came to America. I never seen nothin’ like it. It was like in the hills of Kentucky, with families knockin’ each other off for some fucked-up reason that maybe
goes back a hundred years and nobody ever remembers why no more.”

The hijackings by Masseria and Maranzano of each other’s trucks increased, and so did strife in almost every area. Masseria responded by sending gunmen to kill a Maranzano ally named Gaspar Milazzo, a native of Maranzano’s hometown of Castellammare, who had become the
capo
in Detroit. The move welded other natives of the Castellammare region tighter to Maranzano, and Masseria replied by declaring open season on any native of Castellammare and anyone allied to Maranzano. And so began the Castellammarese War, which dominated events in the Italian underworld until late in 1931.

“All us younger guys hated the old mustaches and what they was doin’. We was tryin’ to build a business that’d move with the times and they was still livin’ a hundred years ago. We knew the old guys and their ideas hadda go; we was just markin’ time. The way we looked at it was that gettin’ rid of a Masseria or a Maranzano was no different from some bank tearin’ down an old buildin’ so they could put up a new one. For us, rubbin’ out a mustache was just like makin’ way for a new buildin’, like we was in the construction business.”

But Lucania became greatly concerned when his friend Tommy “Three Finger Brown” Lucchese found himself in the middle of the approaching feud. Lucchese had become a trusted underboss to Tom Reina, head of his own outfit in the Bronx, which had given allegiance to Masseria. But as the battle was beginning to surface, Maranzano assiduously wooed Reina, offering him in exchange for support a share of the income from Masseria’s rackets on the Lower East Side. “Tommy come to me and he told me the whole story. He said that Reina forced him to go with him to a secret meet with Maranzano, and Tommy was surprised that Reina seemed to like Maranzano’s deal. That took a lotta guts on Reina’s part, because by this time Masseria was ready to murder anybody who even looked in the direction of Maranzano.