The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (31 page)

“I figured it was a good time to take a vacation. Right then, I didn’t know what they was after me for, but I wasn’t gonna stay around and see. I just decided to go somewhere outa New York until things could cool down. I didn’t even pack my clothes. I don’t remember takin’ nothin’ with me, not even a toothbrush. I left with only the clothes I was wearin’, went down the freight elevator, got in my car, and took off.”

Luciano drove to Philadelphia, where he met Nig Rosen at a garage and exchanged his car for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates. He stayed in Philadelphia long enough to buy a new wardrobe at Jacob Reed & Sons, borrow twenty-five thousand dollars on his personal I.O.U. to Rosen to go with the four thousand he had in his pocket (he had left another five thousand dollars in his personal safe at the Waldorf Towers), and then head for sanctuary. En route, Luciano talked to friends in New York and discovered that a quiet search was underway for him, with nobody certain where he was. That news caused him to change his travel plans; he drove to Cleveland, left the car, and took the train to Arkansas, where, for several days, he contentedly took the waters in Little Rock. There, in the gambling enclave run by Owney “The Killer” Madden as a kind of underworld health spa, Luciano was certain he would be safe.

In New York, Luciano was now a wanted man. On April 1, Dewey proclaimed him “Public Enemy Number One in New York,” to be arrested on sight. And a blue-ribbon grand jury that had been looking into prostitution, hearing the witnesses and the evidence Dewey had gathered, announced its findings. It indicted a long string of figures involved in the vice ring — Peter Belitzer, alias Peter Harris; David Marcus, alias Davis Miller; Al Weiner, and Jack Ellenstein as brokers of women into whorehouses; James
Frederico as roving field director of the ring; Jesse Jacobs and Meyer Berkman as the men charged with bailing out arrested prostitutes; Ralph Liguori as pimp and strong-arm man; Benny Spiller as the ring’s loan shark; Abe Wahrman as the chief enforcer; Thomas Pennochio as the treasurer; and Little Davie Betillo, as the apparent head man.

The biggest news, though, was the naming of Luciano. The grand jury indicted him as the man who had put it all together and who ran it. He was charged with ninety counts (later reduced to sixty-two) of compulsory prostitution.

Police all over the country were enlisted in the search for him. Two days later, he was discovered almost by accident while strolling along the Bath House Promenade in Hot Springs with his friend Herbert Akers, the city’s chief of detectives. A Bronx detective named John J. Brennan had arrived in Hot Springs a day earlier to investigate a murder completely unrelated to Luciano. Brennan was a little surprised to see Luciano strolling so openly when a nationwide manhunt was on for him. Maybe, Brennan thought, word had not yet reached Charlie Lucky. So he stopped Luciano, told him what was going on in New York and suggested that Luciano accompany him back to the city.

“John Brennan was a nice fellow, but that was the craziest suggestion I ever heard in my life. I was havin’ a good time in Hot Springs; Gay Orlova was with me and the weather was nice. I wasn’t about to take a train back to New York and fall into some kind of trap. I’d been gettin’ calls a dozen times a day from New York and nobody really knew what Dewey’s plan was, as far as I was concerned. We knew he’d been roustin’ a bunch of pimps and madams along with their girls, but nobody could figure out what this had to do with me. I never even got a whiff that he was workin’ on a frame. Anyway, I suggested to Brennan that he keep out of it. He copped a plea and said he couldn’t do that because if it come out later that he seen me, it could mean his badge. He said he hadda let ’em know in New York I was spotted in Hot Springs.”

New York authorities promptly requested Hot Springs and Arkansas officials to extradite Luciano to New York to face the compulsory prostitution indictment. The request was one thing;
to carry it out in what had become a wide-open protected sanctuary of organized crime was something else. “Owney Madden come up to my hotel and told me and Gay that the sheriff had got a demand from New York for my arrest and they’d have to hold me for a couple hours. Owney said not to worry about a thing; it was all set. I’d go down to the courthouse and then be released that afternoon. And as far as extradition was concerned, I could fight it in Arkansas and win. I mean, with our connections in that state, I figured there was no reason at all to worry.”

Luciano was taken before Chancellor Sam W. Garrett, the local justice, who promptly released him on five thousand dollars bail, put up by two of Madden’s better casinos, the Southern Club and the Belvedere Club. Then he went back to his suite and it was evident that it would take a major explosion to blast him out of it.

Dewey began to light the fuses. He fired off angry messages to Arkansas Governor J. Marion Futtrell and to state Attorney General Carl E. Bailey demanding that they cooperate in efforts to bring a dangerous criminal to justice. He called in the New York press and declared coldly, “I can’t understand how any judge could release this man on such bail. Luciano is regarded as the most important racketeer in New York, if not the country. And the case involves one of the largest rackets and one of the most loathsome types of crimes.”

Dewey’s steady barrage brought results. Governor Futtrell, increasingly embarrassed at being pictured as the friend and protector of gangsters, ordered Hot Springs officials to bring Luciano in and hold him for extradition hearings. Once again, apologetically, the police came to Luciano’s suite and once again took him to the courthouse, this time lodging him in a cell. “The sheriff told me there wasn’t nothin’ he could do, that he had orders from the governor and they hadda hold me for a while. Anythin’ I wanted while I was there, he would make sure I got it. And anytime I wanted to use his office to make calls or meet people, it was okay. So I took advantage of it; I even had Gay come in to keep me company.”

From that cell in Hot Springs, Luciano began to draw up plans to fight extradition. He met constantly with Madden and other underworld leaders; and Moses Polakoff, one of the most brilliant
New York lawyers, hurried down to be with him. Together, they drafted a reply to Dewey, called in reporters who had gathered to witness the drama, and with a grim, angry expression, Luciano read to them: “Back of this action is politics, the most vicious kind of politics. I may not be the most moral and upright man alive, but I have not, at any time, stooped to aiding prostitution. I have never been involved in anything so messy.”

“The fact is, the newspapers and wire services didn’t print everythin’ I said. Especially how mad I was when it looked like Dewey’s complaint against me had to do with whores. And I resented that, not because I was lookin’ for publicity, but because only Dewey’s side of the story was gettin’ into the papers. I didn’t like the idea of him startin’ my trial before he had me back in New York.”

The statements from Dewey and Luciano swirled back and forth, but the move to carry off extradition appeared no closer to success than it had at the start. The Hot Springs protection, which the mob had bought and paid for over the years with both money and the kind of entertainment that had turned the city into a major national resort, bringing economic prosperity to all, was wrapped around Luciano tightly. There was no hurry to hold extradition hearings and the mood of Hot Springs was such that even if they were held there, the New York request might be denied.

Well aware of this, Dewey stepped up his pressure on state officials. Finally, Attorney General Bailey ordered Luciano transferred to Little Rock for extradition hearings before the governor. But Hot Springs was not anxious to surrender its famous guest, and Luciano was not anxious to depart. The sheriff refused to honor Bailey’s order. Bailey countered. He sent a troop of twenty Arkansas Rangers to Hot Springs to take Luciano into custody and move him to Little Rock. Still the sheriff refused to surrender Luciano. The Rangers massed and gave the sheriff an ultimatum: Either surrender Luciano within the hour or they would storm the jail and take him. The sheriff surrendered.

In Little Rock, Luciano was held without bail and the jail was surrounded by troops of Rangers armed with machine guns. The atmosphere was tense and ugly as Governor Futtrell prepared to
hold the hearing. “If they was goin’ to all this trouble just to get me back to New York, then I figured I’d be damned if I’d go.” But Luciano’s attempts to stay backfired. One of Owney Madden’s aides approached Bailey with an offer of fifty thousand if he would make certain extradition was denied. Bailey was the wrong man to approach. At the opening of the hearings he revealed the offer and said, with scorn and anger, “It must be demonstrated that the honor of Arkansas and her officials is not for sale for blood or money. Every time a major criminal of this country wants asylum, he heads for Hot Springs. We must show that Arkansas cannot be made an asylum for them.”

“When I heard that crap come outa Bailey’s mouth, I couldn’t believe my ears. The truth of the matter is, Bailey was always workin’ with us in Arkansas and we never had a problem with him or his office before. All of us who was there thought he should’ve been able to handle the pressure from New York a lot better’n that. At least he could’ve shown some appreciation for all the things he got from us before.”

Bailey’s revelation killed any chance Luciano had. Futtrell upheld the warrant, and Luciano, manacled to two New York City detectives, was returned to the city he had fled. There, at a preliminary hearing, he learned officially the details of the charges, learned that if convicted on all ninety counts of the indictment he faced 1,950 years in prison, learned that his bail was an extraordinary $350,000.

Before he was led to the detention cell where he would be held until the bond was posted, he was given a few moments alone with Polakoff. “Moe, this whole thing is crazy,” he said. “You gotta get me outa here. We got a lot of work to do on that son of a bitch Dewey. He’s turnin’ me into a whoremaster.”

“But I could tell from the look on Polakoff’s face that he didn’t think it was all so crazy. He gave me hell, just like he done in Hot Springs when he got there, for runnin’ outa New York without callin’ him first and gettin’ his advice. He said that just because I took it on the lam, then fought like a bastard not to be extradited, it was gonna be held against me in court. I said to him, ‘Moe, that’s all lawyers’ horseshit. I could smell it out in Hot Springs that all Dewey wanted was to get my head in a noose,
whether it was a frame or not. What did you expect me to do — hand myself over on a silver platter?’

“Polakoff talked to me like a Dutch uncle. He said he had a lotta contacts all over the place — after all, the guy used to be one of the United States attorneys — and everythin’ he heard said Dewey’d built up a solid case against me. I got sore as a boil, and I said, ‘So they got a lot of punks and whores to lie. You mean to say that we can’t beat that? You mean to tell me Dewey expects to put me away because some crummy two-dollar whore says I was her boss, or whatever she’s gonna say? Jesus, Moe, if you think that’s a solid case, then maybe we better get some new lawyers to help you.’ ”

Luciano’s bond was quickly posted and he returned to the Waldorf Towers to plan his defense. He called together his friends — Lansky, Siegel, Costello, Adonis, Lucchese, Anastasia, Torrio and a few others — and asked Polakoff to sit in. They gathered early in the afternoon, in a jovial mood celebrating Luciano’s return. “Everybody was kiddin’ me about all them whores I’d been screwin’. Albert gave me a whack on the back and said, ‘Boy, Charlie, you must really be a lousy lay. Them broads all turned on you.’ Everybody started to laugh and Benny said, ‘This should make a good title for a movie — Suck and Tell.’ Everybody screamed. Then Polakoff got up and his face was sour enough to turn into a lemon. The kiddin’ around stopped all of a sudden, and Moe started to lay it on the line.”

There was nothing to laugh about, Polakoff said. An indictment of the length and detail Dewey had obtained should not be considered something made of air, particularly not when they considered the trouble Dewey had taken to get Luciano brought back to New York. Instead of making jokes about it, they had better calm down and plan seriously how they were going to fight the charges in court. It took Polakoff, speaking slowly and deliberately, more than an hour to give his assessment, and when he finished, he was surrounded by a group of very sober and concerned men. “Okay, we gotta fight this thing. You do whatever you think is right. You get whatever you need,” Luciano told him.

“It’s not going to be cheap, Charlie.”

“Fuck the money. Whatever it costs, whenever you need some, you’ll get it.” At that moment, Luciano had no conception of what the tap on his treasury would be. Later, he said that when he added it all up, the case cost him more than seven hundred thousand dollars.

Polakoff departed, to begin his preparations for the trial. A brilliant legal strategist, Polakoff himself was not a courtroom lawyer, devoting himself rather to planning and research. To argue the case before a jury, he reached out to George Morton Levy, one of New York’s most respected trial counsels, and as Levy’s chief courtroom aide, he selected Francis W. H. Adams, until a few months earlier Dewey’s successor as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (and two decades later — his work for Luciano rarely mentioned — to become a highly respected and sternly moral police commissioner under New York’s Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr.).

When Polakoff had gone, Luciano and his friends sat for a time in silence, contemplating the words that they had heard. Then Albert Anastasia broke the silence with a flat proposal. His solution, as usual, was to urge prompt action, the more violent the better. Almost from the day of his arrival as a legal immigrant into the United States in 1920, he and his brother, Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, had centered their activities on the violence-ridden Brooklyn docks where they had risen to power in the longshoremen’s union. Murder had become a way of life for Anastasia; he had spent eighteen months in Sing Sing’s death house in the early 1920’s for killing another longshoreman and had been freed, with the charges dismissed only when four of the major witnesses against him disappeared permanently. With Lepke, he had become head of the enforcement arm of the Unione Siciliano, which was later to be called by the press “Murder, Inc.” and which the authorities would credit with at least sixty-three murders. Anastasia himself came to have a record listing nine more arrests (four for murder), but no convictions.