The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (22 page)

The
capos
would be responsible only to Maranzano. Under them would be a second-in-command, an underboss, directly responsible to the
capo
, and beneath them would be several lieutenants, and then ordinary soldiers grouped in ranks of ten, like Caesar’s legions. Each man in the chain would be responsible to the leader just a step above him and responsible for the actions of those below.

The key was discipline, Maranzano emphasized repeatedly, rigid discipline, with Maranzano himself the supreme arbiter of all
disputes, as he would be supreme in everything. That discipline, obedience to the new rules and regulations he laid down, would be strictly enforced:

No man must ever, upon penalty of death, talk about the organization or the family of which he was a member, not even within his own home.

Every man must obey, without question, the orders of the leader above him.

No man must ever strike another member, regardless of the provocation.

All grievances to that day, imagined or real, were to be forgiven and total amnesty granted.

Total harmony was to rule both the business and the personal relationships between the families and the members; no man could ever covet another’s business or another’s wife.

At the banquet that followed, every invited guest — even those who had not been able to come but had sent surrogates instead — was required to demonstrate his fealty to Maranzano and the New Order. At a nod from Maranzano, the guests approached one at a time and laid cash-filled envelopes on the table. “I give the old man fifty grand cash myself, and when he added it all up it came to more than a million bucks.”

What Maranzano apparently did not realize at this moment of glory was that Luciano had neither forgotten nor forgiven the past and his own desires for the future. And the
capos
and under-bosses he had appointed were men who felt more empathy for Luciano than Maranzano, who felt more closely allied to the younger man’s ideas and who were willing to plot with and help Luciano topple the new Boss of Bosses.

Luciano’s own second-in-command was Vito Genovese, who saw his own ambitions enhanced by devotion to Luciano, not to Maranzano, and the same was true for Luciano’s non-Italian allies like Lansky and Siegel. Tom Gagliano’s underboss was Tommy Lucchese, Luciano’s closest friend and confidant in the Maranzano
Organization; he had been part of every turn of the conspiracy. And the other power in the Gagliano family was also a close friend of Luciano, Dom “The Gap” Petrilli. In Mangano’s family, the underboss was Albert Anastasia, who looked upon Luciano with idolatry, who would do whatever Luciano asked. Joe Bonanno had become a close friend over the years and felt he had more in common with Charlie Lucky than with his fellow Castellammarese, Maranzano. The Profaci family was riddled with allies of Luciano. And he could count, too, on outsiders, like Dutch Schultz, Lepke and Johnny Torrio.

Thus, even as Maranzano was being exalted, his throne was not founded on rock. His speech and his imperious manner may have impressed some of the soldiers, but it enraged many of the leaders. They had not fought a war, had not sacrificed lives and great amounts of money merely to fall under the supreme rule of Maranzano or anyone else. They valued their independence and were determined to maintain at least some of it.

So the plot to overthrow the self-anointed king began almost before his coronation was complete. At the Atlantic City meeting two years before, Luciano had found great favor with mob bosses around the country. Now he took steps to weld that support outside New York to his side, to probe surreptitiously whether other mob leaders would back him against Maranzano. At midyear of 1930, he and Lansky, accompanied by Mike Miranda, a trusted gunman, secretly drove to the Midwest. Their first stop was on the outskirts of Pittsburgh for a short meeting with Salvatore Calderone, the Sicilian leader of western Pennsylvania, who had been at the Maranzano banquet. Calderone was disgusted at Maranzano’s attitude and promised Luciano any assistance he might need.

In Cleveland, they met with John Scalise, Moe Dalitz and Frankie Milano, the Mafia leader in Ohio and another guest at the Maranzano coronation. Santo Trafficante, long a friend of Luciano, came up from Florida by train and Capone sent a representative from Chicago. “Even though all these guys was my friends, I still knew that I had to stand up in front of ’em and make sense, otherwise they wouldn’t take the chance of a really big war by backin’ me if all I was gonna talk was hot air. I told
’em that the old man was nothin’ better than a big tub of horseshit who was still livin’ with the
capo
crap he brought over from Sicily, and now he married it to Julius Caesar.

“Everybody started to laugh, and I knew I was tellin’ ’em exactly what they felt and what they wanted to hear. I said Maranzano’s ideas made some sense but they was old-fashioned and I’d like to dump ’em in the Atlantic Ocean because they didn’t fit no more. It took most of the day to explain what I had in mind and to answer their questions and lay everythin’ right on the line. They hadda know we just couldn’t dump Maranzano’s plans, that we hadda eliminate him entirely. All the guys there was around my age and they agreed with everythin’ I said.”

Before the meeting was over, a coordinated joint plan had been developed and agreed to. In conjunction with Luciano’s projected elimination of Maranzano, the Boss’s steadfast adherents around the country would simultaneously be eliminated; when Luciano gave the word that the actual attack on Maranzano had succeeded, his allies around the country would set in motion their own plans for murder.

That night, Luciano, Lansky, Miranda and their Cleveland hosts, euphoric over the unanimity, celebrated by attending a prizefight. The preliminary bouts had hardly begun when several police officers came down the aisle, surrounded them, and, without fuss, took them to headquarters, where they were booked on suspicion and held overnight. Questioned the next morning, all Luciano would say was, “We come to see the fights, that’s all.” They were released and told to get out of town.

“It was a stupid thing I done in Cleveland and it could’ve ruined all my plans, everythin’ I had been workin’ for years to reach. What we should’ve done the minute we got to Cleveland was to go to the nearest police station and register that we was there and that we come to see the fights. I learned a lesson and never forgot it. After that, any time I would travel someplace, like I used to go to Miami a lot, before I even unpacked my suitcase I’d head for the nearest police station and check in with the big badge.”

Though there was no publicity about the Cleveland arrests, Maranzano knew about them. As soon as Luciano arrived back in
New York, he was summoned to the ruler’s headquarters. “Maranzano wanted to know what the hell I was doin’ in Cleveland. So I said to him, ‘Listen, I went to see the fights with some guys. You know I never miss a good fight. What do I have to do, check in with you every time I wanna take a crap?’ ”

Though Maranzano seemed to accept the explanation, some suspicion had been aroused, and he directed a subtle threat at Luciano. “By the way, I never properly expressed my admiration for the way you handled the matter of Don Giuseppe. It was a very good job, Charlie. You should have arranged for me to have pictures of you pulling the trigger.”

Despite the rumors and stories about the killing, Luciano realized that Maranzano believed that he had committed the murder personally, as directed. Basking in the secret support he had just won around the country, Luciano told Maranzano the truth. “Even if you’d been there with your own camera, or sent God to do it for you, you wouldn’t have gotten no pictures of me pullin’ the trigger. Like the newspapers said, I was in the crapper when Joe got it. So stop jerkin’ off and forget it.”

Luciano later remembered that Maranzano stared at him with shock. “What I told him gave me a lot of satisfaction. But some little bell went off in my head tellin’ me that I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

For Maranzano, this was recognition that his hold on Luciano was not so strong as he had imagined and that Luciano and some of his closest friends represented a very real peril to him. He set in motion plans of his own to rid himself of the danger without delay. He made a list of names marked for execution: Luciano, Genovese, Costello and Adonis within the Italian-Sicilian group, and such non-Italian Luciano allies as Dutch Schultz. Absent from the list, for apparently he did not consider them a major threat, were Lansky and Siegel; and absent as well, for apparently he had no idea of their closeness to Luciano, were Lucchese, Anastasia and Torrio.

Then Maranzano looked outside his immediate circle for a killer, determined that no Italian under his rule would be required to break the dictum he had laid down. He contracted with
the notorious young killer Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, a lone wolf for hire to the highest bidder.

It was almost a race to see who would be killed first — with, initially, none of the victims aware that he was marked. Maranzano, like Masseria before him, was well protected, never without bodyguards, and so nearly impossible to reach. Luciano, Genovese and the others, however, were more vulnerable; men whose business did not permit them the constant shelter of protected places.

Almost simultaneously with Maranzano’s employment of Coll, Luciano devised his own scheme. It would be impossible, he knew, for anyone known to Maranzano and his bodyguards to get to the Boss; even if he could, the mission would be suicide. Only some outsiders, unknown to the Maranzano circle, would have a chance to do the job and escape, vanish without a trace. Maranzano had opened the way for just such an attempt to succeed. He spent much of his time in new offices in the Grand Central Building at Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, where he conducted both his legitimate fronts — a real estate business and an import-export operation — and his illegal operations. Frequent visitors to those offices were Maranzano’s accountants, who prepared his tax returns.

Luciano took his plan to Lansky for discussion. “That’s the way we get him. The son of a bitch is so happy to be a taxpayer that he’d even invite a Treasury agent to come in and look at his books.”

Lansky followed Luciano’s instructions and imported, from Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston, three Jewish gunmen, all with stereotype Semitic features. Then Red Levine, Luciano’s longtime aide, was named to head the four-man murder squad. Born in Toledo, Ohio, he was a strange man, devoted to his religion and his family and at the same time a killer. At home he always wore a yarmulke, and if he was going on a job during the Sabbath — from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday — he wore the yarmulke under his hat. And, before doing anything else on the Sabbath, he would put the tallith over his shoulders and pray.

Lansky rented a house in the far reaches of the Bronx, and there the four killers were installed in total isolation and given a
crash course in the characteristic behavior of federal tax agents. They were not permitted to leave the house, or to go into the yard; everything they needed or wanted — food, women, entertainment to suit each man’s particular taste — was supplied. All through the summer, Lansky worked with them, training them how to walk, talk, act so that they would appear in fact to be law enforcement officers. He showed them photographs of Maranzano in different poses, drew diagrams of Maranzano’s offices. Luciano and Lansky were determined that nothing would go wrong, and they were willing to spend as much money and time as needed. Luciano estimated later that the cost of the project came to more than eighty thousand dollars.

Near the end of August, the project suddenly took on urgency. Frank Costello received a phone call from Nig Rosen in Philadelphia, who had news of great importance which he could divulge only in person. For Rosen, a close friend and ally of Waxey Gordon, to call Costello and not his fellow Jewish mobster, Lansky, was only partially a surprise. For Lansky and Gordon had become bitter enemies in the latter years of Prohibition, battling over liquor allocations, money, everything, and accusing each other of doublecrosses. By the middle of 1931, the situation had become so tense that no cooperation between them was possible. Further, Gordon was in deep trouble with the Bureau of Internal Revenue over income tax evasion. At that juncture, Luciano felt that he was being forced to make a choice, in secret at least, between Lansky and Gordon, really no choice at all. Together, he and Lansky had come to a decision on how to handle the situation. They would help the federal government do it for them. If the federal forces received information revealing a good accounting of Gordon’s legendary sources of income on which he paid no taxes, his elimination could be effectively accomplished. Lansky’s brother Jake, sometimes called “Jake the Hunchback,” had some contacts in Philadelphia, where he often traveled on Seven Group whiskey deals. Among his friends were several Internal Revenue agents, and Jake Lansky was given the job of clandestinely feeding them the financial information that led to Gordon’s indictment, arrest, and later conviction for income tax evasion.

Nig Rosen had no suspicion of the Luciano-Lansky part in the
Gordon troubles, but he was well aware of the Lansky-Gordon feud. Thus, at the end of August 1931, he placed his call to Costello rather than Lansky.

Costello made the trip, and what Rosen told him sent him rushing back to Luciano. Rosen had learned of Maranzano’s murder list and of the hiring of Vincent Coll as the executioner. He had also learned some of the details — that within the next month, Maranzano would ask Luciano and one of the others on the list to his office for a business discussion. Coll would be waiting for them. Rosen had refused to tell Costello where he had gotten the information, though he did say that Angie Caruso, a trusted Maranzano underboss, had been in Philadelphia a couple of days earlier, had been drunk and very talkative.