The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (40 page)

The war brought rewards to others, too. Herbert Lehman left Albany to enter the service of his country, and New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey was elected to succeed him as governor of New York.

And up in Dannemora, Luciano finally unveiled his master plan to win freedom. “You could say,” he laughed years later, “that Albert was the spark that sprung me, and my new best friend, Tom Dewey, was the ignition.”

“I’ve read a million stories about me and Dewey and how I got paroled, and all of ’em are so much horseshit. The idea started in 1940, when I gave Moe Polakoff the note for Lansky about backin’
Dewey for governor. And it kinda grew from there, with some things comin’ in from left field, like the time McCook come to see me, until everythin’ finally fell into place.”

The first big leap forward toward success came at the end of 1940 when an unexpected visitor arrived at Dannemora. “I wasn’t expectin’ nobody and it kinda made me nervous, what with all that was goin’ on in New York with Reles. I could only think it hadda be some bad news. Then to make me even more jittery, instead of takin’ me to the visitors’ room, the guard walks me to Dr. Martin’s office. When I walk in, the warden tells me to sit down and then he clears out, leavin’ me alone. A half a minute later, the door opens and that son of a bitch Judge McCook walks in. Jesus, I hardly recognized him. In four years, this guy had aged a million years, I mean he looked like he was ninety. He comes over and shakes my hand and he asks me how I’m gettin’ along, are they treatin’ me all right, that kind of thing. I say, yeah, sure. Then he sits down and just looks at me. So I sit down and look back at him, just waitin’. Pretty soon, he starts talkin’ and the words pour out of him like he can’t shut off the faucet. He tells me he’s a good Christian; he says he goes to church every Sunday and he always tries to do the right thing. I can’t understand none of this, so I just sit there and don’t say nothin’, just listenin’ and wonderin’ what the hell he’s gettin’ at.

“Then McCook starts to shake like he was made out of jelly. Then the next thing, he starts to bawl, real tears. Can you imagine a big important guy like him, a society guy, breakin’ down that way? A fuckin’ judge who sends people up to the pen, who puts guys in the hot seat, sittin’ there and shakin’ and cryin’? He asks me what he done to deserve what’s happenin’ to him. Well, I figure it must be pretty bad if he’s actin’ like that and comes all the way up to Dannemora to tell me about it, to cop a plea with me, of all people, that he never done nothin’ wrong to nobody.

“The whole thing sounded so crazy that I thought the guy blew his top. Then he gets to it. He tells me that after he sent me up, his house burned down to the ground and everything he owned was destroyed. But that was only the beginning. He says his wife and one of his kids died and he was gettin’ hit by all kinds of
disasters, one right after the other. He says that from the time he sentenced me, everythin’ in his life went sour.

“When he tells me all this, you know how I felt? I didn’t feel no pity for that dirty bastard. Why should I? What did he feel when he sent me up on that phony rap, which he knew goddamn well was a phony? So why the hell should I feel anything for him when he starts havin’ troubles? At that minute, I had all the troubles of my own that I could handle. But I didn’t say a word to him. I just let him talk, because now he was no different than some shitheel in my outfit who’d come up to my office to make a confession about what he done that was wrong and hope to Christ I wouldn’t break his head. They would always beat around the bush as long as they could and then they’d have to come to the point.

“That’s the way it happened with McCook. When he gets all finished, he turns to me and says why did I put a Sicilian curse on him? I didn’t know what the fuck to say. I just looked at him like he was loony. Then he gets down on his knees, crawls over to me cryin’ like a baby; he grabs hold of my hand and starts slobberin’ over it — he even starts callin’ me, ‘Mister Luciano,’ and beggin’ me to take the curse off him, pleadin’ with me to help him. He swears he didn’t mean to do me no wrong, that what he done in court was what he thought was right. But now, after thinkin’ about it and searchin’ his soul, as he said, he thinks maybe he made a mistake and he has to make up for it. Right then and there, I knew McCook was my pigeon.

“It was all I could do to keep from laughin’. I tried to calm him down and that wasn’t easy. Here’s a guy who sent me to the can for fifty years and now he’s down on the floor kissin’ my hand and beggin’ me to take off the Sicilian curse. If it was in a movie, nobody’d believe it, but that’s the way it happened. Finally, I told him he shouldn’t worry about the curse no more because I’d arrange to have it taken off. I told him to go home, just not to worry no more, and one of my guys would be around to see him later on to discuss what he could do for me. When I said that, I could see that McCook got scared. But I told him he wouldn’t be asked to do nothin’ dishonest or illegal; only that one of these days it might
be that he could help me get out of jail, and then the curse would be off permanent.

“So out of a clear blue sky, this guy fell right into my pocket. I didn’t have to pay him off or nothin’ like that. When I went back to my cell, all I could think of was that I finally got justice out of McCook, only it came four years late.” (In 1943, when Luciano made his first bid for parole, it was Judge McCook, in his role as a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, who heard the arguments. Though Luciano then had served only seven years of his sentence, McCook said, “If Luciano continues to cooperate and remains a model prisoner, it may be appropriate at some future time to apply for executive clemency.”)

McCook’s mellowed and more benevolent view of Luciano was the first step, but it would be some time before any use could be made of it, for the continuing disclosures of Reles and Tannenbaum in New York were creating a climate hardly conducive to granting freedom to Luciano. What was needed, for the moment, was patience to wait for the pressures to subside. “When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt declared war, I got my second break. With a thing like that goin’ on, who cared about gangsters and all that crap that was on the front pages practically from when my trial was on five years before? So I knew the time had come to make my move.

“I sent word to Polakoff that I wanted him to bring Costello and Lansky up to Dannemora right away. We met in the visitors’ room and this time I told Moe to sit in with us; I wanted him to know the details of my plan and to try to punch holes in it if he could. I told them it had more twists and turns than a pretzel but that I’d been thinkin’ about it and I knew it would work if we played it right. I told them the only way I’d ever have a chance to get free was if we had a strong and direct line to the governor of New York. Who was the governor that would spring me? I figured it hadda be nobody else but Tom Dewey. He got the headlines that made him a big shot in New York on my back and now he was a natural to run for governor in 1942, and that was why I had sent word earlier that we would back him. With all the time I had to think it over, I come to the conclusion that Dewey was no better’n me, except he was a legal gangster and I wasn’t. Anybody who’d
make up that kind of frame that he did to put me away hadda be a crook at heart. Inside of me, I just knew that Dewey could be bought, if it was handled by the right middleman, and if it was for somethin’ big enough to make his mouth water. Costello had already set up a go-between if and when we needed him, so that part of the plan was already set.

“I didn’t know how long that fuckin’ war was gonna last, but it handed me a lot of favors; one of ’em was that them goddamn whores who was stashed away in Europe hadda come back to New York and they was on their own — Dewey had a lot of other things on his mind and the last thing he wanted to bother about was them lyin’ broads. I told Moe that I wanted ’em again. But this time he hadda tie ’em up with tighter affidavits, that they hadda be worked on stronger, and that included all the witnesses against me. What I wanted most of all was a confession from all of ’em that it was Dewey himself that made ’em lie; that it was Dewey that coached ’em; that it was Dewey that paid ’em off, and so forth. The blame on Dewey hadda be open-and-shut, that he masterminded every fuckin’ detail of the frame against me. I told Moe to handle it just like he was getting ready with another plea for a new trial.

“While I was layin’ it out, Lansky popped in and said we’d already done that, paid a lot of dough for it, and it hadn’t worked because McCook wouldn’t buy it. That’s when I started to laugh. I told them the story about McCook comin’ up to see me; I think that was the only time I ever saw Costello’s mouth open so wide he couldn’t get it shut. Meyer just stared at me. But Polakoff was sore. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told him about it before; he said if I had, it could have saved a lot of waitin’. But I told him it wouldn’t’ve worked, that the time wasn’t right back in 1940. In fact, I said I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to use the new testimony until after Dewey was elected.

“Then Costello stuck his nose in. He said, ‘What happens to this whole fuckin’ plan if Dewey don’t make it to Albany?’

“It was a good question, so I turned to my little addin’ machine and I said to Meyer, ‘What are the odds that Dewey runs and wins?’

“It didn’t take him more than a minute. He said, ‘I make it a
good five-to-one or better. If he don’t break a leg and he has our help, he’ll walk in. He’s a good fifty-to-one to run because the Republicans haven’t got nobody else. But without our support, he’s only sure of carrying upstate and that’s not good enough. With us, he can do good enough in the city to walk in.’ The way Lansky come on, I could see he’d been studyin’ the situation and was sure of himself, which made me feel good.

“Then Polakoff come up with the key question. He said, ‘If you expect to get a parole after Dewey becomes governor, just like that, you’re making a big mistake, Charlie. He’d be impeached, that’s how serious a mistake it would be. It would kill his chances to be President, and he’s not going to jeopardize himself whether you give him political support or not. Did you think about that?’

“I’d already thought about it and I told him I wasn’t stupid enough to think Dewey could spring me without the best possible excuse that would keep his face clean all the way through. That was the third big point. I told ’em that about six months before the war started I got a letter from Vito from Rome, where the little prick was livin’ it up pretty good — he had big contacts, includin’ Mussolini himself. I knew Vito inside out, and the one thing I was sure of was that he never bragged; he liked to pull fancy tricks, but he never boasted to me. In his letter, Vito told me how great he was doin’. He made a lot of contacts down in Sicily with guys whose names I give him before he left. The most important thing he said was that in Sicily my name was like a king. Vito said that Mussolini was really pourin’ out the shit on Americans, but as far as I was concerned, down in Sicily they thought of me as a real number one guy. And that set me to thinkin’ how I could give Dewey the legitimate excuse he’d need to let me out.

“I had a newspaper with me and I showed them how the Navy Department was givin’ out a lot of stories about sabotage and fifth column and that kind of thing. There was even a story on the front page about a campaign they called ‘Zip Your Lip,’ which shows how worried they was about German subs sinkin’ our ships or some spies blowin’ up ships in the harbor. It looked like the whole Eastern waterfront, especially in New York, was a mess of sabotage.

“I could see Lansky start to smile while I was layin’ it out, because he was the first one to see what I was gettin’ at. He said, ‘Charlie, I get it, I get it. It’s terrific. How can Dewey turn down a patriotic hero? I gotta hand it to you.’ Then he looked at Costello, and Frank said, ‘Charlie, I think we can handle all the angles. We got a lot of people with the Navy guys down on Church Street and we can pass the word about anything. I think you’re as good as out.’

“So I said to them that they had two things to work on without delay. First, there hadda be somethin’ that would deal with sabotage and it hadda be front-page stuff that would make it necessary for the Navy or someone to come to us for help. And they hadda line up all them witnesses and get ’em signed, sealed and delivered, strong enough to make sure we could get a new trial if we needed to. They all thought it would be dynamite. But I said no, I had somethin’ else in mind and I wanted to hold it. I just needed to be absolutely sure we had it under lock and key.”

For a month after that meeting, Luciano waited anxiously, nervously, for some news. All he heard was that his friends had yet to come up with an idea that would start things moving. “I lost all my patience. I got into fights with guys in the yard; fellows would come up to see me and I’d turn away from ’em. I knew I was actin’ like a shitheel but I couldn’t help it; my nerves were ready to give up.”

Then in late January of 1942, Luciano’s future brightened. Learning of Luciano’s need for a front-page event that would bring the potential peril of sabotage to the front, Albert Anastasia brought an idea to Frank Costello. “Costello got in touch with me right away. Albert had worked this idea out with his brother, Tough Tony [a major power in the International Longshoremen’s Association]. Albert said that the guys from Navy intelligence had been all over the docks talkin’ to ’em about security; they was scared to death that all the stuff along the Hudson, the docks and boats and the rest, was in very great danger. It took a guy like Albert to figure out somethin’ really crazy; his idea was to give the Navy a real big hunk of sabotage, somethin’ so big that it would scare the shit out of the whole fuckin’ Navy. This big French luxury ship, the
Normandie
, was sittin’ at a pier on the
West Side of Manhattan, and accordin’ to what Tony and Albert was told, the government was workin’ out a deal with that guy de Gaulle to take it over and turn it into a troopship. Albert figures that if somethin’ could happen to the
Normandie
, that would really make everybody crap in their pants.