The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (3 page)

“When I looked around the neighborhood, I found out that the kids wasn’t the only crooks. We was surrounded by crooks, and plenty of them was guys who were supposed to be legit, like the landlords and storekeepers and the politicians and cops on the beat. All of ’em was stealin’ from somebody. And we had the real pros, the rich Dons from the old country, with their big black cars and mustaches to match. We used to make fun of them behind their backs, but our mothers and fathers was scared to death of them. The only thing is, we knew they was rich, and rich was what counted, because the rich got away with anythin’. One time, we got a big prosciutto ham that was sent to my mother by a cousin in Lercara Friddi. We got all excited because it was the first package that ever come from home. My old man got out a hammer and opened up the crate, and there was this beautiful ham all wrapped up in burlap. We was ready to attack it right then, but my mother
said no, a prosciutto ham has to be hung up for a while so that the air could get at it and it wouldn’t be too soft.

“The next day, a guy named Moliari knocked at our door after dinner. It was Tuesday, and he come to collect his dollar. He was a moneylender, the fat bastard, and he specialized in Sicilians. I think my old man had borrowed some money to buy a new bed for my sisters and he was about three or four weeks behind in payments. So Moliari come up with two guys to take back the bed. When he got a look at that prosciutto ham hangin’ in the kitchen, the son of a bitch took it like it belonged to him and started to walk out. When he got to the door, he said to my mother somethin’ like, ‘I’ll take this; you don’t want your girls to sleep on the floor.’ But I fixed that shitheel good. About two months later, we knocked off his apartment and we grabbed over four hundred dollars. That was the most expensive prosciutto the son of a bitch ever stole.”

Out in the street, young Lucania, looked at by his contemporaries with some awe because he had served time, became the leader of a gang, his leadership reinforced by the lessons in crime he had learned during his four months in Brooklyn and could now teach his followers. His gang, of six to a dozen Sicilian friends, marauded through the Lower East Side. There was hardly a store or a lone pedestrian walking home at dusk safe from him or from scores of other gangs like his. But it was one thing to rob and steal and have some real money, and another to be able to use it. Lucania and his friends still lived at home, under stern and watchful eyes. Their fathers worked long hours, came home exhausted with only a few dollars each week, hardly enough to keep the family in food and shelter. They knew what things cost and what it took to earn money. To flaunt new clothes, new possessions on a delivery boy’s pay, part of which was going to help the family, would do more than create suspicion; it would earn a beating or worse from fathers whose word was law in their own homes and whose morality was unbending.

To circumvent such parental suspicion and punishment, young Lucania developed a plan, using what he had learned from his teachers at school, whenever he was at school, about union. Unity meant sharing the work and the profits. So all the money they gained from their forays was put into a common pool to be shared
equally by all members of the gang, with the money hidden away, buried in vacant lots or other caches. Everyone wanted new clothes, for they were the outward signs of success. But new clothes meant trouble at home. Lucania decreed that new wardrobes would have to be acquired gradually, in such a way that suspicions at home and suspicions of patrolling police would not be aroused. When someone felt he needed a new pair of shoes, a new shirt, anything new, there would be a meeting of the gang at which the expenditure was put to a vote.

“I had a rule that every member hadda have a job, as a kind of front so he could explain how come he could buy new things. I let two Irish kids join because they had jobs and besides, they was nice fellows. One of them was a redheaded guy by the name of Willie Mulvaney, whose old man was a cop up in the Bronx. One time, Willie wanted a new pair of pants; he was still wearin’ knickers because he was so little. So we had a regular meet and his request got turned down flat. Well, this dumbhead Willie Mulvaney takes the money anyway and buys himself the long pants and wears them home. His old man, Mulvaney the cop, kept a book on every penny Willie earned. When he found out that Willie didn’t steal the pants from a store but actually paid for them, the shit hit the fan. There was about fifteen kids in my gang by that time, and we all got hauled to the police station on Fourteenth Street. It was like a circus. Our mothers and fathers, all our relatives was tryin’ to talk at the same time, tryin’ to explain to the sergeant that we was good boys who wouldn’t do nothin’ wrong. Everybody, that is, but my old man. He beat the crap outa me right there in the police station.”

It was not long before the neighborhood became too small to contain Lucania and his friends. It was too poor; even the most successful job earned only a few dollars. And there was competition for those few loose dollars. There was the multitude of other young gangs. And there were the neighborhood branches of the old secret societies, the Mafia and the Camorra and the rest, brought over from the old country and terrorizing the immigrants who could not escape them, bleeding the neighborhood of everything beyond mere subsistence.

So, Salvatore Lucania began to look outside, uptown. To the
north, in Manhattan, was East Harlem, and there, in another Italian-Sicilian ghetto, other youths had their own monopoly. That territory was unfamiliar and the spoils there no greater than at home. But in between was the rest of the island of Manhattan where, they thought, were limitless riches. As Lucania looked north of Fourteenth Street into this realm of wealth, he began to perceive how its residents lived, what possessions they had. He dreamed that someday it would all be his, that he would control and own it, would walk its streets like a king in his own domain.

He was, of course, not alone with such ideas. Other gangs from the Lower East Side and from East Harlem had similar visions. They hit the middle of Manhattan from both ends, and though conflict was inevitable, it was held to a minimum because the territory was so vast and there was so much for all.

And midtown was a place where new friends could be made and new, if at first uneasy, alliances struck. “It happened at a movie theater in Times Square — I think it was called the Victoria. It was a Saturday night and some of my guys and me went uptown to see what the action was. We liked to go to the movies because them silent pictures had titles and they helped us learn English. Of course, we always sat in the balcony; it was cheaper and besides we could throw stuff down on the people in the orchestra and raise all kinds of hell. This particular night the manager threw us out, and at the same time he threw out some other guys who was sittin’ on the other side of the balcony. One of the guys was a little bit older than us and he had an outfit called the 104th Street Gang. We got together and it turned out that this older guy was not from Sicily; he was a Calabrian from Cozenso. His name was Francesco Castiglia; later on, though, he got famous under the name of Frank Costello.

“The first time I heard him talk, I had to lean over to hear him, because his voice was very husky, like he had a cold. A lot of Italian kids talk like that. Their mothers wanted the best for them, and they thought the best was to get their tonsils and adenoids out the first time the kid’s nose started to run. A lot of times, the doctor wasn’t so good, or the knife slipped, and the kid always talked like he had a permanent sore throat after that. That’s what happened to Frank.”

Until he met Castiglia, young Lucania had always thought that intelligence was the sole preserve of Jews. But in Castiglia he discovered an Italian who seemed just as clever and perceptive, who had dreams for the future that paralleled Lucania’s, and who combined it all with a certain surface polish and a deep-grained toughness; Castiglia then was rarely without a pistol and he was earning a reputation as a hardened hoodlum. The two became immediate friends and that friendship would last until the final years of Luciano’s life.

If crime had become the main vocation of Lucania and his friends by the time they were fifteen or sixteen, some legitimate employment was still a necessity if they were to continue to live at home with their families; they were not yet making enough outside to do otherwise. Lucania moved from job to job as errand boy, and in 1914, when he was seventeen, went to work as a runner for the Goodman Hat Company on West Twenty-fourth Street. His job: delivering ladies’ hats to Goodman’s customers in shops and department stores around town. His wages: six dollars a week, a dollar more than the going rate. “It’s a little hard to explain that one dollar a week more could make such a difference. But that was around 1914, and a dollar was a fortune. With my guys, that extra buck made me important, and I kinda liked the feelin’.”

Goodman had raised the ante on Lucania because, like so many who met him throughout his life, Max Goodman was charmed by him, fell under a spell he seemed able to conjure almost at will. On one level, Lucania was a tough and vicious kid off the streets with little social conscience, with a barely concealed penchant for violence that led him, with little thought, to smash anyone and anything in his way. It was this side that his father discerned early and that convinced the older man that his son was, perhaps, beyond redemption. But there was another aspect, and he donned it whenever it suited his mood or need. It was this side that drew his mother, Goodman and hundreds of respectable people to him through the years, that helped them ignore or dismiss the hoodlum. They saw him with his mask of warmth, openness, almost naïve ambition; with them, he could be ingenuously eager to please and to emulate, reliable, thirsting for knowledge, willing to work hard, even at times selfless.

These were the qualities Max Goodman saw and became certain he could foster. Not only did he pay Lucania that extra dollar in wages, but often he would take the young man home with him after work, and not infrequently on a Friday afternoon to celebrate the Sabbath. With Goodman, Lucania saw another way of life, that of the Jewish middle class, which drew him and filled him with envy. The Goodman apartment in the West Forties was large and well furnished in the style of the immediate pre-World War I period, with comfortable overstuffed chairs and sofas covered in mohair, dark mahogany chests and tables; all his life he would remember the doilies and antimacassars that Mrs. Goodman crocheted and that lay across the backs and arms of chairs and sofas, on the tops of tables and chests. He would pick them up and stare at them, finger and examine them, put them down and return to them. And he began to realize what it meant to be not poor.

He began, as well, to get a sense of another side of the Jewish world that had always been alien to him, the religious side. On those Friday evenings when Max Goodman brought him home, he was part of the religious Sabbath festival, and he would watch with fascination as Goodman put the yarmulke on his head and spread the tallith across his shoulders to preside at the service at his own table. Mrs. Goodman would light the candles and Goodman would read the prayers, and then the dinner would be served, chicken-in-the-pot, chicken soup with matzo balls, noodle kugel, noodle soup, all the traditional Jewish foods, At first, he had expected, for he had always been taught, that it would all be barbaric, both the ceremonies and the food. Instead, he found it only a kind of happy family gathering and discovered that even some of the food was familiar; Jews ate spaghetti, though it was the wide kind and not garnished with garlic or tomato sauce; they liked ravioli filled with meat, though in a different shape from what his mother made, and they called it “kreplach.” And so he began to understand that Jews were not all that different from the people he knew. (Later, he was a regular customer at Jewish delicatessens and later still, when in Italian exile, it was the taste of such food that he missed most.)

But none of his feelings for Goodman, nor any of the trust that Goodman placed in him, could deter Lucania from the road he
had chosen. Still, success on that road eluded him. In the petty crimes he and his gang were committing, he was no closer to it than in his six-dollar-a-week daytime job. Some of his friends had already been picked up and sent to jail. His new friend from East Harlem, Frank Castiglia, was arrested in 1915 for possession of a gun, pleaded guilty, and was sent away for a year by a judge who told him: “You had a reputation for being a gunman and you certainly were a gunman in this particular case. You were prepared to do the work of a gunman.” (Castiglia served ten months, avoided guns as much as possible thereafter, and was not convicted of another crime for nearly forty years.)

So far, Lucania himself had been lucky with the law; he had not been caught during robberies, muggings and the rest, though he was increasingly suspect and his constant nights out and the new things he sometimes sported brought him under suspicion at home. Against this was the realization that if he was going to make the kind of money he wanted in the field he wanted, if he was going to achieve the kind of power he dreamed of, he would have to take chances, bigger and more dangerous ones.

For some time he had been watching George Scanlon move through the neighborhood. “You couldn’t miss Scanlon; he drove a big limousine and parked it wherever he wanted to — next to fire hydrants, even on the sidewalk — and nobody bothered him. He wore sharp clothes with wide stripes and he had a diamond ring on his pinky finger. He smelled like the United States Mint.” But nobody ever held up George Scanlon; he was as safe as if he were surrounded by a troop of police, and perhaps he was. For Scanlon was the neighborhood narcotics pusher.

Scanlon’s business was a relatively new one. It had been only about a decade since Congress had taken the first tentative steps to outlawing addicting drugs, with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and more stringent prohibitions in 1914 with the Harrison Act. Though the real clamp-down was yet to come, such laws had an insidious and unexpected effect. For decades, Americans had been seeking relief from a thousand real and imaginary ills by gulping Chief Raincloud’s Indian Elixir and a hundred other patent medicines. If they brought none of the expected cures, they did something else: based on opiates or cocaine,
they turned thousands into addicts. And so when such laws banning narcotics were passed, the addicts were forced by act of Congress and the New York State Legislature to seek drugs illegally, and to pay higher prices for them than ever before. A new breed of criminal rose to fill the demand, not just from pimps and prostitutes, the most notorious and well-publicized users, but from the addicted housewives deprived of their patent medicines.