The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (32 page)

At this moment in the spring of 1935, his proposal was typical of his past, his present and his future: “The Dutchman was right. We gotta knock off Dewey. It’s the only thing to do. Charlie, I’ll do it myself so there won’t be no slipups. And it’ll be a pleasure.”

The same thought had apparently been in the minds of others at the meeting, and Anastasia’s plan was seconded. But Luciano was not prepared to go so far. “That ain’t the way. We decided that a long time ago, out in Chicago — remember? We decided we wouldn’t hit newspaper guys or cops and D.A.’s. We don’t want the kind of trouble everybody’d get if we hit Dewey. That ain’t the way — at least, not now.”

Anastasia was forced to agree, reluctantly, and the rest of the meeting, which lasted long into the night, was taken up with logistics. The defense fund would be plentiful and all efforts would be made to discover precisely what kind of a case Dewey had erected, and what could be done, legally or, if necessary, illegally, to combat it. Despite Polakoff’s warnings, most of those at the meeting were convinced the case would fail, that Dewey would never be able to convict Luciano on this charge of compulsory prostitution. “Regardless of what Polakoff said, I had a feeling that Dewey’s case against me couldn’t possibly be built around prostitution. Everybody in New York — the cops, the D.A.’s office, even the politicians who wasn’t in our bag — knew me well enough to know I couldn’t be involved in nothin’ like that, not even indirectly. The reason I said to Albert when he wanted to knock off Dewey, ‘at least not now,’ was because somethin’ in my guts told me Dewey had another angle. I didn’t know what it was, and maybe I was stupid, on account of I didn’t believe he could pull a prostitution frame and make it stick. I gotta admit that all through the meeting, Albert kept mumblin’ that I was wrong and he kept warnin’ me that I’d be sorry. So chalk that up as the number one of all the mistakes I made in my whole lifetime. I should’ve let Albert take care of Dewey the way he wanted.”

On the eve of the trial, there was a lengthy last-minute session in Polakoff’s office. Adams informed Luciano that he had learned that Dewey planned to call an endless parade of prostitutes to the stand, apparently to form the basis of his attack on Luciano. “That’s when I began to feel a little better, because I was sure no jury was gonna sit there and listen to a bunch of broken-down broads claimin’ I was their boss and I ran the racket. I was sure that as soon as Adams and Levy got ’em on cross-examination,
they’d be cut to ribbons and the jury’d laugh the whole thing right out of court.”

The case of the
State of New York
v.
Charles Lucania et al
. (an unexplained blending of Luciano’s real and assumed names) on charges of compulsory prostitution in violation of the New York penal codes, began on a bright sunny Wednesday morning, May 13, 1936, in New York State Supreme Court in downtown Manhattan. On the bench, presiding, was Justice Philip J. McCook, socially prominent and a stern symbol of society’s moral outrage, who would stare with shock and disgust at the defendants all through the trial, and especially when lurid testimony was given, who looked with concern and dismay at the parade of bedraggled prostitutes reciting their tales.

On one side of the courtroom, facing the judge and the blue-ribbon jury of twelve upright, middle-class New Yorkers and two alternates — all chosen from a special jury list — sat the short, confident special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, with his neatly trimmed black mustache, surrounded by an army of assistants. In public statements before and during the trial he would say he was society’s weapon for bringing just vengeance on a group of moral lepers.

Across the well of the court sat the ten defendants and their lawyers. Three others named in the indictments — David Marcus, alias David Miller; Peter Balitzer, alias Peter Harris; and Al Weiner — had pleaded guilty and would be called as witnesses for the state.

Dewey rose to make his opening statement, to point the direction of the state’s case against the defendants, and particularly against Luciano, who was, above all others, the man he most wanted to convict. Until a few years before, Dewey said, prostitution
in the city had been unorganized, a business run by small independents. Then Luciano had stepped in and had told the independent operators that he was taking over and was giving the business to Betillo to run as his agent. “Such was the power of his spoken word,” Dewey declared, “that they folded their tents, collected their final week’s money, and left the business. Then Davie [Betillo] organized a colossal racket.” The syndicate, Dewey maintained, controlled more than two hundred whorehouses in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, employed more than three thousand prostitutes, and grossed more than twelve million dollars a year.

For the prostitutes, the labor was a dreary and deadly form of slavery. Most of the girls lived in sleazy hotels with their pimps, paying the rent from their earnings. They worked at their trade ten to fourteen hours a day, servicing all comers, yet coming away with little profit; half of what they earned went to the madam, who, Dewey said, split it all the way up the line, all the way to Luciano; ten per cent to the man who had booked them into the house; five or ten per cent into a bonding fund to make bail if they were arrested and to pay for legal services; more for board at the brothel; and five dollars a week for medical treatment.

Then, turning with disdain and righteous indignation to stare at Luciano (who stared back with a slight smile of amusement and disbelief), Dewey asserted, “The vice industry since Luciano took over is highly organized and operates with businesslike precision. It will be proved that Lucky Luciano was way up at the top in this city. Never did Lucky or any codefendant actually see or collect from the women. Luciano, though, was always in touch with the general details of the business. We will show you his function as the man whose word, whose suggestion, whose very statement, ‘Do this,’ was sufficient. And all the others in this case are his servants.”

Dewey then began his parade of sixty-eight witnesses to the stand, a procession that would last three weeks. Most — forty — were simple laborers in the ring or madams who had come up through the ranks, girls with names like Rose Cohen, alias Renne Gallo; Muriel Ryan; Dorothy Arnold, alias Dorothy Sherman, alias Dixie; Betty Winters; Sally Osborne; Mary Thomas; Helen
Kelly, alias Nancy Miller; Kathleen O’Connor. None had ever seen or heard of Luciano. Their dealings had been at the lowest levels, though most could point to Ralph Liguori as the man who had put them into the brothels; and they could point to Betillo as someone they had seen around, to Berkman, Pennochio and Spiller and a few others as frequent visitors more interested in giving orders than availing themselves of the services of the girls.

They talked about the houses and the madams, women with names like Jenny the Factory, Gussy, Little Jenny, Cokey Flo, Nigger Ruth and Jean Bradley. They talked about the bonding service and how Abe Karp, the disbarred lawyer, had advised them, coached them on the stories they were to tell before the magistrate’s court.

Luciano’s name was never even mentioned in these first days. From the testimony of the witnesses, he seemed a man who did not exist. “It was like I was someplace else. They wasn’t talkin’ about me and I never ever seen none of them broads. I kept turnin’ to Polakoff and sayin’, ‘See, Moe. I told you. They ain’t got a thing on me.’ But Polakoff kept telling me, ‘Wait, Charlie. He’s just building this case. He must have a few surprises ready.’ Moe was right.”

What Luciano did not sense was that Dewey was using the witnesses for more than just building a solid case against the codefendants. The prostitutes came to the stand looking indeed like fallen women who had been ill-treated, not just by society but by those they declared responsible for their fall, who kept them prisoners in a profession from which there was no escape. Most were narcotics addicts, but all said they had kicked the habit since their arrest, thanks to treatment provided by Dewey and his staff. They claimed that the defendants had kept them constantly supplied with drugs, giving and withholding them as reward and punishment, and so chaining them to the ring. The repetition had its effect. More and more, McCook and the jurors began to look at the witnesses with growing pity and compassion. McCook’s voice and manner grew harder and sterner as he repeatedly overruled defense objections, and the glances the jurors directed at the defense table were increasingly contemptuous. Thus, when the name Luciano was mentioned even in passing for the first
time, the allusion was enough. It appeared to courtroom observers that both judge and jury at that moment had only been waiting for the mention, were prepared to believe whatever was said.

When Al Weiner, a codefendant who had pleaded guilty, was sworn, to testify for the prosecution, tension filled the courtroom. “I told my lawyers that I had never seen this guy, except for his pictures in the newspapers.” As Weiner told his story, Luciano and his legal staff visibly relaxed. He had been an independent operator whose thirty-five houses had been taken over by Davie Betillo after threats to his life if he didn’t join up. His contact was always Betillo and as far as he knew, it was Betillo’s business.

But a couple of days later, another of the codefendants, turned witness, was called: David Marcus, alias David Miller. He said he had objected to Betillo taking over his business. His objection had been met by six shots fired at him from a moving car, and the next day Betillo had told him to join promptly or “Charlie would take care of me.”

“Did you ask who Charlie was?” Dewey asked.

“No,” Marcus replied.

“Who do you think Charlie was?”

The question had hardly been spoken and Marcus had not even opened his mouth to reply when George Morton Levy was on his feet in rage, voicing a loud objection, which McCook sustained. But the name Charlie hung in the courtroom. Dewey turned away with a satisfied smile; he had made his point.

A couple of days later he strengthened it, when the third codefendant who had pleaded guilty, Peter Balitzer, alias Peter Harris, was called. He had been turned from one of the biggest independent operators in the city into a manager and booker for the syndicate. When he had expressed some reservations, Betillo had told him, “Don’t worry, Charlie Lucky is behind it.” But, Balitzer added, Betillo had ordered him on pain of serious injury never to mention Charlie Lucky’s name to anyone, particularly not to his madams. As for himself, he had not seen or dealt directly with Charlie Lucky, though he had gotten further confirmation of his feeling that Luciano was indeed at the top. One of his houses had been held up and the stickup men, young punks well known in the underworld, had been taken out in the country
for a beating by Abe Wahrman, the syndicate’s enforcer. During the beating, Balitzer testified, Wahrman said, “Didn’t I tell you to keep away from those houses because they belong to Charlie Lucky?”

“When this guy Balitzer come up with this cockeyed story, I grabbed Moe Polakoff’s arm and I said, ‘How can Dewey get away with this? For chrissake, Moe, I’m not a lawyer, but ain’t that what they call hearsay? Ain’t you gonna object?’ ” Levy did, indeed, object, but McCook overruled him. And several members of the jury stared at Luciano with growing distaste.

Then came Joe Bendix. “I knew the punk. I knew him from way back and he was nothin’ but a cheap thief, a guy who was always tryin’ to butter me up. If I wanted a sandwich, he was the first guy out the door on his way to the deli. But I couldn’t figure what he was doin’ at my trial. I heard he was up in Sing Sing for life.”

Indeed, that was where Bendix was, serving a life term as an incorrigible thief under New York laws mandating such a sentence for multiple convictions. He had answered the call from Dewey’s office that had gone out to the prisons offering leniency to those with information about Luciano that might help the prosecution.

He had known Luciano since 1929, Bendix told the court, when he used to see him on Seventh Avenue in front of Moe Ducore’s drugstore. Then, after a couple of prison terms, he had seen Luciano again in 1935 and talked to him at least three times about working in the prostitution syndicate.

How had this come about? Dewey asked.

Jimmy Frederico was a good friend, Bendix said, and he knew that Frederico was in the business and was in with Charlie Lucky. He had talked to Frederico and a couple of weeks later Frederico had taken him to the Villanova Restaurant on West Forty-sixth Street to meet the boss. According to Bendix, Luciano said, “Frederico talked to me about you. I understand you want a job as a collector for the houses of prostitution. I understand you’re a little too high-hat for the job. What’s the idea of wanting a job that pays only thirty or thirty-five dollars a week?”

As Bendix related his tale, Polakoff gripped Luciano’s arm tightly — he would continue to do so from then to the end of the trial.
“My arm was black and blue from where Moe was holdin’ me.” Luciano turned to Polakoff and whispered, “The bastard’s lyin’. There ain’t a word of truth in it.”

Bendix said that he was willing to take the collector’s job because “that’s better than going back to stealing.” If he were caught stealing again it would mean life in prison under the multiple-felony statute.

Luciano answered, Bendix said, “If you’re willing to work for forty dollars a week, it’s okay with me. I’ll tell Little Davie to put you on. You can always meet me here.” They had met at the Villanova twice more, with Luciano pressing him to take the job. “Lucky,” he said, “definitely promised me the job.”

When Dewey finished, Levy took Bendix on. Had Bendix accepted this so-called job offer?