The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (38 page)

“The way I figured it, the most important thing was to make it look to Lepke like we’d worked out a deal with Hoover. If he’d give himself up to the FBI and take the narcotics rap, he’d have Hoover’s guarantee that he wouldn’t be turned over to Dewey, and by the time he finished the federal stretch, the Dewey case would probably’ve caved in. I knew that Lep was scared to death of Tom Dewey, especially after what that prick done to me. Of course, we didn’t make no deal at all with Hoover, but it had to look damn sure to Lepke like we did. I also told Tommy that the plan hadda be put across to Lep by somebody he’d trust; he wasn’t gonna come outa hidin’ and run up to Dannemora to see me, and I knew he’d never trust Joe A. or Frank or Meyer. They had to get a messenger who was close enough to Lep so he’d buy the plan without question.

“Then I wrote a note to Lansky, sealed it up, and gave it to Polakoff to take to Meyer in New York. I laid the whole thing out for Meyer and told him that after all the arrangements had been made for Lep to surrender to the FBI, he and Costello should make sure that Dewey got the word that I had masterminded the whole thing — Hoover gets Lep first and then turns him over to Dewey. I also wrote that I wanted Frank to contact his best man on Dewey’s staff and say I was willin’ for the whole outfit to back Dewey in a run for governor of New York. I told him I couldn’t say no more about that part of it until I had all the details worked out in my mind.”

Lansky, indeed, knew exactly the man for the job of persuading Lepke — Moe “Dimples” Wolensky, who had worked in gambling operations for both Lansky and Lepke and was known to have Lepke’s confidence. Wolensky was dispatched as the intermediary,
unaware he was leading Lepke into a trap. Two years underground, with the mounting pressures and tensions of hiding out, had turned Lepke pliant enough to be willing to accept what seemed reasonable terms.

At the beginning of August 1939, word reached Luciano of Lepke’s compliance, on condition that he surrender to J. Edgar Hoover personally and that Albert Anastasia drive him to that meeting. The only question remaining was who would now set up the details with the FBI chief, unaware until that moment. A number of names were suggested, and the choice narrowed down to three — William O’Dwyer, a Kings County (Brooklyn) judge who owed his political success to the outfit’s muscle and money; Morris Novik, a special assistant to Mayor La Guardia and an impartial and incorruptible public servant; and the noted New York
Daily Mirror
gossip columnist and longtime friend of Hoover, Walter Winchell.

“When Frank came up with this information and mentioned Winchell, I was ready to hit him. After all, he knew how Winchell had acted when I was still at the Barbizon. But then Frank explained it, and I figured he was right. Winchell was buddy-buddy with Hoover and usin’ Winchell would convince Lepke for sure that it was all on the up-and-up. Besides, it wouldn’t do no harm to give Winchell the biggest scoop of the century. That kind of favor he knew he hadda repay, and with what I had in mind, I could use every bit of muscle I could get.

“I gave Frank the okay on Winchell, and then we started to talk about Dewey. We knew the son of a bitch wasn’t gonna be satisfied bein’ D.A. for the rest of his life. He’d already made one crack at tryin’ to be governor [losing in 1938 as the Republican candidate against Herbert Lehman] and he was beginnin’ to make a lot of noise about runnin’ for President in 1940. We figured he was too goddamn young for that, and besides, I wanted him in Albany, because that’s where he could do me some good. So Frank went back to New York with a guarantee from me to Dewey that not only would he get all our backin’ to run for governor next time, but also that Lepke was gonna be turned over to him on a silver platter, with my compliments, plus evidence.”

Just before ten o’clock on August 24, 1939, a sweltering Manhattan summer night more than two years after Lepke had first vanished, a four-door sedan driven by Albert Anastasia stopped at 101 Third Street in Brooklyn, picked up a passenger, his coat collar turned up, his face masked by large sunglasses, and drove rapidly over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. At Fifth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, Anastasia spotted a black, curtained limousine at the curb, and pulled up a short distance behind it. The rear door of the sedan opened, its passenger got out, paused for a moment for a last word, and then walked quickly to his rendezvous. Winchell, behind the steering wheel of the limousine, opened the right front door, leaned over, and stared intently at the partially disguised figure, then looked behind at the stocky occupant of the back seat. “Mr. Hoover,” he said, “this is Lepke.”

Hoover nodded, reached across, and opened the rear door, motioning Lepke to enter. “How do you do?” he said brusquely.

“Glad to meet you,” Lepke responded. He entered the car and settled into the seat next to the FBI director. But any pleasure he might have felt at that meeting quickly evaporated. With Hoover’s first words, he discovered there was no fix, no deal, at least as far as he was concerned. Either Hoover wasn’t admitting that a deal had been made or he didn’t know about one. Bluntly, Hoover informed Lepke he would be quickly tried on the narcotics charges by federal authorities — which Lepke expected — and then, to Lepke’s horror, would be turned over to Dewey for trial on charges Dewey had publicly proclaimed would send Lepke to prison for five hundred years. “I wanted to get out of that car as soon as I heard that,” Lepke said later. But that was impossible. As soon as Winchell turned on his car lights and pulled away from the curb, a fleet of other cars, filled with FBI men, surrounded the limousine and escorted it to FBI headquarters in Manhattan.

Within a month, Lepke was in a federal courtroom, on trial for narcotics conspiracy. He was sentenced to fourteen years. Hardly had sentence been pronounced before the stunned racketeer was turned over to Manhattan District Attorney Tom Dewey, who saw him as another and major stepping-stone on the path to Albany at the very least and possibly to the White House. In state court, Dewey won a conviction of Lepke on charges of extortion and
other crimes in the bakery racket and had the satisfaction of hearing Lepke sentenced to a term that just about matched Luciano’s — thirty years to life.

With the scalps of two of the nation’s major racketeers — Luciano and Lepke — dangling from his belt, the political fortunes of Thomas E. Dewey, the racket-buster, were clearly on the ascendant. “It was a matter of life and death for me to make sure that Dewey got to Albany first, before he tried for the White House. I needed him in the state capital, because, as governor, he’d have the power to grant me a parole. So there was two questions that hadda be solved. One, to make sure Dewey beat the shit out of Lehman or whoever the Democrats put up; and, two, to put aside enough money for Dewey’s personal campaign that would make him really obligated. Except, this time there would be none of that crap like happened with Roosevelt, where we put it up first and then got screwed. I had somethin’ else in mind for Mr. Tom Dewey that would give me the edge.”

Early in 1940, Frank Costello appeared at Dannemora with some disturbing news. “Listen, Charlie,” he whispered through the visitors’ screen, “our friend Bill O. has Reles stuck away in the Tombs for some old rubout. What are we gonna do about it?”

“We do nothin’ unless the Kid opens his mouth. That we can’t afford. But what’s more important, will O’Dwyer protect us? I thought you told me you had him in your pocket?”

“Sure we do,” Costello said, “but he’s got big dreams. We put the money up that made him D.A. in Brooklyn, but as sure as we’re talkin’, he wants La Guardia’s job.” Then Costello added something that made Luciano see his plan for gaining quick release from Dannemora begin to fade. “I don’t know whether we can hold him in line. This guy Turkis [O’Dwyer’s Assistant District
Attorney Burton Turkis] has a lot of ambitions, too, and he’s been talkin’ to Reles, squeezin’ him. We can’t buy Turkis; he’s an honest bastard. So Bill O. may have no choice but to give him a free hand.”

“I couldn’t sleep at all that night. That’s how strong the feelin’ was that Reles was gonna blow every hope I had at that time of gettin’ sprung by Dewey, if and when he became governor. I could hardly believe what was happenin’ to me, because, among other things, I learned from Costello that afternoon that he’d made a good contact with Dewey through one of the guys on Dewey’s staff, and the word had been passed to Dewey that he was gonna get plenty of money for a run at Albany. Costello said Dewey didn’t turn down the offer, and in my book that was as good as acceptin’ it. And now along comes this stuff from left field and maybe it can upset the whole fuckin’ apple cart. I knew if I was in New York I could do somethin’ myself to handle a situation like this. But stuck away in Siberia, I hadda leave my chances a hundred per cent in the hands of other people and my bones told me it was gonna be bad news.”

The small, squat, hard-eyed “Kid Twist” Reles had been one of the prime executioners in the Lepke-Anastasia enforcement group, a merciless man who had never been out of trouble with the law since his first arrest at sixteen in 1924 — his rap sheet listed forty-two arrests, including six for murder, and he had been in prison six times. But Reles’s serious problems — and those of others in major positions in the underworld — began early in 1940 when a minor hoodlum named Harry “The Mock” Rudolph, serving a short term on Riker’s Island, decided to talk about a murder he had witnessed six years earlier. His friend Alex “Red” Alpert, he told Brooklyn police, had been killed by Abe Reles, Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein and Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore. On the basis of Rudolph’s statement, Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer won murder indictments against the three; they were arrested, lodged in separate jails, and grilled relentlessly.

On March 31, more than forty days after his arrest, Abe Reles’s wife appeared at O’Dwyer’s office and declared, “My husband wants an interview with the law.”

Luciano’s fears were about to become fact. Reles was rushed from the Tombs in Manhattan to O’Dwyer’s office in Brooklyn, where he demanded a private interview with the district attorney. “I can make you the biggest man in the country,” he told O’Dwyer, and then, alone, proposed a nonnegotiable exchange: if all charges against him were dropped, if he were granted immunity from any further charges growing out of what he or anyone else might say, and if his future freedom were guaranteed, he would tell all that he knew about organized crime and would testify in court as a witness for the state.

It was the break O’Dwyer had been praying for, but at that moment neither O’Dwyer nor anyone else realized just how big a break this was.

Reles was placed under constant police guard at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn, only a few steps from the district attorney’s office. Then he began his grisly confessions. The first gush lasted twelve days and filled twenty-five stenographic notebooks with tales of wholesale slaughter, of murders he knew about personally. He provided the names of accomplices and of corroborating non-accomplices — a necessity under the law if convictions were to be won — and where to find them. Kid Twist’s memory for details was staggering, and he led Turkis and other interrogators in O’Dwyer’s office down a tangled path of an underworld enforcement-murder operation that was almost impossible to credit.

Initially, Reles recited a list of minor hoodlums and their crimes — “Happy” Maione and “Dasher” Abbandando, who murdered a loan shark named George “Whitey” Rudnick by stabbing him sixty-three times with knives and ice picks, shattering his skull and strangling him; “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and Buggsy Goldstein, who garrotted and cremated a small-time gambler named Irving “Puggy” Feinstein on orders of Albert Anastasia, who was acting at the behest of fellow ganglord Vince Mangano (inexplicably, neither O’Dwyer nor anyone else ever questioned Anastasia or Mangano about the Feinstein murder), and a host of others.

Reles’s testimony would eventually send Maione, Abbandando, Strauss, Goldstein and others to the electric chair. But that would come later. At first, the fascinated Brooklyn prosecutors merely listened, copied down his words, and ordered arrests. That he was
singing was supposed to be a total secret. It did not remain so long, at least not from the underworld. A few weeks after his meeting with Luciano about Reles, Costello was back at Dannemora, talking in whispers through the screen.

“Reles is singin’,” he told Luciano. “O’Dwyer told me he’s got no way to hold it back.”

“How much is he singin’?”

“Plenty. The cocksucker’s got a memory like an elephant and a voice like a canary. He just keeps vomitin’ stuff up like he can’t stop pukin’. If he keeps on goin’, they’re gonna get everybody for murder, and that includes that shithead Lepke. But it’ll also include Benny Siegel and Albert, take my word for it. Reles tied in Allie Tick-Tock and I hear that Allie’s made a deal with Turkis.”

“I don’t give a crap about Lep. Whatever he gets, he’s got comin’. But we’ve got to work somethin’ out to get Bugsy and Albert out of this.”

Lepke was, indeed, about to get what was coming to him. On the basis of evidence supplied by Reles and Allie “Tick-Tock” Tannenbaum, a key assassin on the Murder, Inc., payroll, O’Dwyer, in May of 1940, demanded that federal authorities return Lepke to Brooklyn to stand trial for the 1936 murder of a candy-store owner named Joseph Rosen. A former garment trucker, Rosen had been forced out of business by Lepke and had threatened to make complaints to authorities. Lepke had ordered his murder and had given the contract to three killers — Mendy Weiss, Louis Capone and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, who fired seventeen bullets into their victim.

It took nearly a year and a half before that trial was finally held. Then, in November of 1941, with Turkis guiding the prosecution and Tannenbaum as the star witness, Lepke, Capone and Weiss were convicted of first-degree murder (Strauss was already on his way to the electric chair for the Feinstein killing, so he was not tried for this crime), and two and a half years later, on March 4, 1944, all three were executed at Sing Sing.