The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (36 page)

Dannemora sits on a barren plain in a nearly inaccessible corner of New York State. A grim, forbidding place surrounded by thick gray stone walls, it is a maximum-security prison, and only the most incorrigible prisoners are sent there. In summer, it endures the broiling sun; even the walls glisten with sweat. In winter, the gales howl down out of Canada, coating the walls with thick layers of ice. To the American underworld, it is known as Siberia.

“When they told me I was goin’ to Dannemora, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take it. It meant movin’ outa the Waldorf Towers into a sewer. The worst part of it was, we didn’t have no connections up there and that meant I was gonna be in for a real rough time, no matter how quick Polakoff could work the appeals and get me sprung. I was willin’ to put up a million-dollar bond — and I told ’em that, as soon as I heard about Dannemora. But once they had me, they wasn’t gonna let me go.”

Before he had departed for his years in prison, Luciano tied off the loose ends of his life in New York. “I felt like I was practically actin’ out my own will, and there’s no feelin’ a person can ever have in his whole life as bad as that. My clothes and all my fancy stuff — I put everythin’ in charge of my brother, Bart, so he could put it all in storage and take care of my jewelry. I took care of Gay; she’d been really good to me them last few months and she rated somethin’. My family hadda be protected and I hadda protect my own situation when it came to lookin’ out for my dough and what would be comin’ in while I was away — and if I was gonna get it. I worked it all out with Lansky, and that’s the point where Meyer became the real treasurer of the outfit. I put him in charge of my money and later on he started to take care of the finances of quite a few guys.”

As he was driven, shackled to other prisoners, through the gates
of his new home, Luciano made a resolve. “I remembered what Goodman told me twenty years before, the other time I was in the can. He said, ‘Do what they tell you. Don’t make no trouble.’ He was right, because they got you by the balls when you’re in jail and the way to get along is to follow orders. Otherwise, the only trouble you can make is for yourself. On my way up there, I made up my mind that I was gonna be the best fuckin’ prisoner in the place.”

But Luciano’s thoughts were not just of the endless years stretching out ahead. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind that I was bein’ sent up the river on an out-and-out frame. It was there, twenty-four hours of every day — me, Charlie Lucky, the big shot, caught in a net that was big enough to see comin’ a mile away, and I walked right into it with my eyes wide open. It was like a knife in my belly. Sometimes in those first nights at Dannemora, I’d dream about that knife, and I’d wake up screamin’ because I could feel Dewey twistin’ it inside me and cuttin’ me open.”

At Dannemora, Luciano was not, of course, the usual prisoner; he was, after all, the king of the underworld, and his peers inside accorded him that status, as it had been accorded him on the outside. “Wherever I went in that place, practically from the first day I got there, there was always other cons after me, askin’ me to do ’em favors, to put in a good word with the guards or the warden. They all thought I was gonna beat the rap and I guess they wanted to make sure when I got out and they got out, that they could come to see me back in New York and I’d give ’em a hand.”

In the yard at exercise time, as though he were back in his New York headquarters, Luciano would hold court, surrounded by sycophants and courtiers and available to anyone seeking to enlist his favor. “But I was no king or any bullshit like that. I talked to anybody who wanted to talk to me and I did what I could to help out the guys who needed help. I wasn’t lookin’ to be the leader of Dannemora; it just happened. When a con was about to get out, he’d come over to see me and maybe ask for some names to see on the outside. As a matter of fact, we got quite a few fellows for the outfit back in New York durin’ the time I spent in jail that way.”

For prison officials, at first anyway, there was an attempt to deal
with Luciano, their most notorious convict, as though he were just another inmate. He was given no special treatment and, as soon as he had been processed, was assigned to work in the laundry. “Even though I made up my mind to be a guy who wouldn’t cause no trouble, that was goin’ too far. Back in thirty-six, a prison laundry wasn’t like a big laundromat. We didn’t have no electric machines, no air conditionin’. There I am, in a place that’s like a sweatbox, a boiler room, and I’m supposed to wash and iron the shit all the other guys was wearin’, like I was some kind of washerwoman. So after a few weeks I found out where to spread the dough around — a few bucks here and there, because what prison guard has more than a pot to piss in? — and pretty soon I was up in the library, where it was clean, quiet and I could do some real thinkin’ and plannin’.”

In the library, in his cell, everywhere, Luciano’s obsession was no different from that of other inmates — how to get out. “I really felt like I was in Siberia when it came to the strategy that Levy and Polakoff was workin’ on in Manhattan. It was the first time in all my years that I had no control and nothin’ to say about what was goin’ on in my life. It was like I had — claustrophobia. I felt closed in, not just because I was in prison, but because I was like in solitary with no connection with the outside world, my world in Manhattan.”

After a few months, the raging frustration at his position, the constant nightmares began to subside and Luciano came to accept as inevitable the fact that release would not come soon, that the appeals process would be a long one. He began to come somewhat to terms with his situation, particularly in the library. “There I was, surrounded by all them books and I started to think about Lansky — how Meyer was always walkin’ around with a book stuck in his back pocket and his nose buried in another one. The son of a bitch was always readin’, always learnin’ somethin’, mostly havin’ to do with numbers. That’s when I started reading.”

Unlike other convicts, who, if they read at all, devoted themselves to lawbooks looking for legal loopholes to win freedom, Luciano turned elsewhere. “I figured I was payin’ my lawyers plenty, so why the hell should I spend my time doin’ what I was payin’ them to do? So I started to read books on history and
geography that had to do with America. No matter what anybody says, I was a good American and I always think of myself as a good American. But I didn’t know shit about my country. I didn’t know where anyplace was. Sure, I knew Chicago and Miami and Hot Springs and Saratoga and all the towns in between, but I didn’t know much else. Before I went to work in the Dannemora library, if you asked me where the hell Des Moines was, I couldn’t’ve told you. And I read a lot about Sicily and Italy. I was born in Sicily and I had a lotta relatives still livin’ there, but I knew less about that place than I did about America. By the time I got out of the can, though, I knew more about the history of Sicily and Italy than a lotta college professors in the United States.

“I was reading so much that one day, when Frank Costello came up to see me and I started tellin’ him about all the books I’m reading, Frank says to me, ‘Charlie, you’re becoming a goddamn Sicilian Meyer Lansky.’ Whadda you think of that?”

In his cell at night, Luciano read, and he practiced penmanship. Hour after hour, he sat at his desk with yellow lined paper and a pencil and wrote carefully, again and again, forming each letter painstakingly, copying the forms in the penmanship books he took from the library. In later years, his handwriting would have a round, studied look, without distinctive style, merely an imitation of clear and well-formed school penmanship.

But, in prison, Luciano did not abandon the empire he had constructed back in New York, and he was determined to maintain a close and continuing control over it. He had left behind Joe Adonis as his liaison with the Unione Siciliano, Meyer Lansky in charge of finances and Frank Costello as caretaker of his personal holdings and as immediate superior to Vito Genovese. They made regular trips upstate to see him, to discuss important decisions, and to carry back a steady stream of messages and orders. It was not the same as when he had been in charge in person on the scene, but still his orders were obeyed and his suggestions rarely, if ever, questioned. Though he continued to share in the profits, he was unable to see, to savor, to relish the results; he could only hear about them in letters or from his visitors.

“It was lousy. I was sittin’ up there in the library while down
in New York and all over the country everybody was scorin’ big and I could only hear about it and dream about it. I could taste it but I couldn’t swallow it.

“And I was pretty upset after a while when Lansky hadn’t been up to see me for a couple of months. So I sent word, about Easter-time in 1937, for him to come up right away. Instead of Lansky, Adonis came up, and he wasn’t so full of smiles.”

Adonis told Luciano that Lansky had been unable to make the trip and when Luciano asked why, Adonis hedged. “Well, he had some business out of town and I knew you’d want me to come up here and tell you about it.”

Luciano sensed trouble. “Stop shittin’ around, Joe. What’s goin’ on?”

Adonis hesitated, then said, “Lansky’s down in Havana. I got word yesterday that he made a deal with Batista and he’s got control of the casino at the Hotel Nacional. So far, nobody knows who gets cut in for what.”

“When Joe A. told me that, I was pretty pissed off. It was hard for me to believe, after Molaska and all that stuff, that Meyer could still do anythin’ so stupid as to go out on his own like a sittin’ duck. So I told Joe not to jump to no conclusions and to pass the word around for everybody to hold their water, and to get in touch with Lansky and tell him to get his ass up to Dannemora right away.”

Within a week, Lansky was in the visitors’ room at the prison, accompanied by Polakoff — who was present at most meetings to give them a semblance of legitimacy; prison officials were always told that Luciano’s visitors were working on his appeals. As was his habit, Polakoff sat off to one side of the room, far enough away so that he could not hear the discussion.

“What’s it all about, Little Man?” Luciano asked Lansky quietly.

“Joe A. told me you wouldn’t yell,” Lansky said, “and I should’ve known better than to think you would. The Cuba deal is for everybody, just the way we talked about it four years ago. The only thing that’s mine is a deal I made in Havana for sugar, and that goes into Molaska. You have a piece of mine, Charlie; I never wanted it any other way. About Batista — it’s the best thing
that ever happened to us. I’ve got him in my pocket, whether he’s president or whether he puts somebody else in, no matter what happens. He belongs to us. I handle all his money — every dollar, every peso he takes, I’m handling the transfer to his account in Switzerland.”

Luciano was assured. Then he and Lansky turned to other matters of moment. Bugsy Siegel was particularly in Lansky’s mind. Siegel had moved to Los Angeles, where he was handling the outfit’s West Coast activities. “I know Benny’s a good-looking boy,” Lansky said about their old friend, with a hardness and a dispassion that distressed Luciano, “but he’s no movie star and he’s beginning to act like one out there. If he was just using his new friends, all these movie people, as a front, I could understand. But he ain’t. He’s really playing the part of a Hollywood big shot and that’s no good for a guy who should be handling our private business. I’m saying this now because I’ve got a feeling that someday Bugsy’s gonna be a serious problem.”

The conversation then turned to Vito Genovese, who had sent a message through Lansky asking permission to leave the country. Genovese had become convinced it was that or go to prison, perhaps even the electric chair, for his activities as one of Luciano’s regents had fallen under Dewey’s scrutiny, and authorities, too, were beginning to dig into his role in the murder of Ferdinand Boccia. “Lansky knew I hated the little bastard’s guts, and I hated the way he kept playin’ around with junk in spite of every warnin’ I give him, and maybe we’d all be better off if we let the cops get rid of him for us. But I told Meyer I still couldn’t bring myself to give the order, to let him go to the chair; I still couldn’t forget that he helped to make a lot of it possible for everybody, with what he done for all of us with Masseria and Maranzano and other important jobs like that. Meyer started to argue with me, but I stopped him cold. I said, ‘No, he can go to Europe and take anythin’ with him that he wants to, but I don’t want him floatin’ around noplace but Italy. Tell him to stay there and keep his nose clean.’

“Meyer took the message back and Vito left New York with two million in cash. He worked out a deal with contacts in Naples that he’d made a few years before to bring the money to Italy in
a big suitcase that would never be opened when he went through customs. He also bought a house in the Jersey Highlands for his wife, Anna, on account of she had to stay behind until he could see what was doin’ in Italy, and he left two hundred and fifty grand in a vault in the Manufacturers Trust Company bank on Fifth Avenue, with two keys — one of ’em for Anna and the other he gave to Steve Franse, one of the few guys in the world Vito trusted.

“When Vito left, I’m positive up to that minute, the only thing he ever read in the papers was about what maybe was goin’ on in our outfit. I don’t think he knew a thing about Hitler or the problems in Europe. He just knew that Mussolini was a big shot in Italy and little Vito had already made his good connections so that everything could be nice and easy for him until things cooled off in New York and he could come back.”

Before Lansky left Dannemora that afternoon, Polakoff was called into the discussion, to hear the matter uppermost in Luciano’s mind — his appeals and the possibility of freedom. Levy and Adams had left the case soon after the trial, and Polakoff had been joined by another outstanding trial lawyer, George Wolf, who managed to combine courtroom pyrotechnics with the kind of behind-the-scenes planning and strategy that complemented Polakoff’s abilities. “I thought Levy done a lousy job. I paid him a fortune to top Dewey and he gave me as much showmanship as an Oyster Bay flounder. So we switched to the best, Georgie Wolf; he cost me over ninety grand plus expenses, just to handle an appeal. But I can’t argue, because he eventually dug up the one piece of ammunition I’d need to get out of Dannemora and get free.”