The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (41 page)

“It was a great idea and I didn’t figure it was really gonna hurt the war effort because the ship was nowhere near ready and, besides, no American soldiers or sailors would be involved because they wasn’t sendin’ ’em noplace yet. So I sent back word to Albert to handle it.

“A couple days later, I heard on the radio where the
Normandie
was on fire and it didn’t look like they could save her. That goddamn Anastasia — he really done a job. Later on, Albert told me not to feel too bad about what happened to the ship. He said that as a sergeant in the Army he hated the fuckin’ Navy anyway.”

Within twenty-four hours, the
Normandie
, once the pride of the French luxury fleet, was a gutted wreck listing at the dock, finally turning over on its side. The cause of the disaster was debated, investigated and speculated on in the newspapers, with no satisfactory explanation ever emerging, only theories that the conflagration had been started by a welder’s torch, by spontaneous combustion, by saboteurs. But the headline-making blaze did have an immediate consequence. There were cries that help was desperately needed to prevent further disasters on the New York waterfront, to prevent possible shipping bottlenecks or the leakage of information about sailings.

The Navy heeded those calls. It was deeply concerned at that moment about the New York waterfront. Many of the businessmen there and many of the dock workers were Italians and Sicilians, a majority immigrants or sons of immigrants. Thus their loyalty to the United States came under question and there was fear that they might incite strikes or commit acts that would seriously affect the war effort, that they might even use their fishing boats to carry information and supplies to German submarine packs lying offshore.

And so the next phase of Luciano’s plan was put into effect. Italian political leaders around the country — sparked by the influence of Costello’s friends — came to the defense of the loyalty
of Italian immigrants. Even the Italian and Sicilian gangsters, they said, though criminals, were above anything else patriotic Americans who would gladly help their country in time of crisis. The Italian-dominated underworld was deeply entrenched along the waterfront, even controlled it; if the Navy turned in that direction for help, it would be forthcoming.

Thus was born the idea for what became known as “Operation Underworld.”

Approved in Washington and centered at naval headquarters at 90 Church Street in Manhattan, Operation Underworld was put in the hands of a young reserve officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles R. Haffenden. His job: to investigate the feasibility of utilizing underworld leaders and the underworld itself to help the war effort. But Haffenden knew little about either the waterfront or the underworld, and so he turned for assistance to the office of Manhattan District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey himself was too busy with his campaign for governor to become directly involved. He steered Haffenden to his anointed successor as Manhattan district attorney, Frank S. Hogan, and to Murray Gurfein, one of the key men in the original investigation and trial of Luciano. Dewey ordered them to extend every assistance, and they turned Haffenden to Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the notorious semi-literate czar of the Fulton Fish Market.

For years, “Joe Zox,” as his friends called him, had wielded absolute power over the city-owned fish market, subject only to the jurisdiction of the Luciano outfit to which he owed allegiance. No seafood came in or went out without tribute to Lanza — one hundred dollars from every boat bringing in fish and fifty dollars from every truck hauling it away. No stall operated without Lanza’s approval. He was a man of such uncontested power that he was able to run his province even from a prison cell in Flint, Michigan, during the mid-thirties when he was serving a federal sentence for conspiracy to monopolize and regulate the freshwater fish industry in New York. He was also a man of considerable ruthlessness; he had been in and out of prison since boyhood and had beaten murder and gun indictments growing out of his seizure of control over the fish market. And he was a man with wide contacts and influence — he was a close friend of Luciano’s friend,
Tammany leader Albert Marinelli; he was a brother-in-law of Tammany leader Prospero Vincent Viggiano; he was an associate and ally of Adonis, Luciano and Costello, who had been best man at his wedding in 1941.

At the start of the war, Lanza was beset by troubles — from labor unions and from Dewey’s office, which had indicted him for extortion. But these troubles did not affect his absolute suzerainty over the market and over the fishing fleets that daily sailed from New York into the open seas. He was the logical man for Haffenden to see.

“All my guys, especially Costello, had worked things out perfectly, right down to crossin’ every T and dottin’ every I. They even worked it out so that a typical Navy kid with pink cheeks and still wet behind the ears was assigned to the job. And Socks was rehearsed by Costello and Lansky right to the last syllable.”

Lanza agreed to a meeting, but only if it was held in private — a public meeting could make trouble for him, he said, if word got around that he was seen talking to someone in uniform. So a rendezvous was set for midnight on a park bench at Grant’s Tomb on upper Riverside Drive. Haffenden asked for Lanza’s help in combating sabotage and fifth columnists. Specifically, he wanted Lanza to permit naval intelligence to install sophisticated communications equipment and place agents in the fish market and aboard fishing boats. Lanza said he would help all he could in the market, but he told Haffenden, as he had been rehearsed, that he had no power over the docks or over the other areas the government might want to monitor. If the government really wanted to get the entire Italian-Sicilian population cooperating fully, and especially if it wanted the help of the underworld, there was only one man to see. Haffenden asked for the name. Lanza told him — Charlie Lucky Luciano, currently an inmate at Dannemora prison.

Haffenden went back to Gurfein for advice. Could Luciano, he asked, really be persuaded to put aside what must certainly be considerable bitterness at authorities and agree to help his country? Gurfein thought so and telephoned Moses Polakoff to arrange a meeting with Luciano. It was a call Polakoff knew was coming. He suggested that instead of an immediate conference with Luciano, a preliminary meeting be held to explore the possibilities,
a meeting to which he would bring one or two close friends of Luciano who might have greater persuasive powers over the imprisoned gang leader. That session was held over breakfast in a hotel dining room overlooking Central Park. Meyer Lansky was Polakoff’s companion.

(Years later, while seeking a haven in Israel from United States tax-evasion indictments, Lansky offered his version of that breakfast: “Gurfein,” he said, “explained the situation to me. I went immediately to see Frank Costello, telling him the story and asking what does he feel about it. Frank was patriotic and felt that help should be given. So . . . we decided that we will tell Charlie Lucky that if he will be helpful in this case, it might help him to get out of prison.”)

The next day at Dannemora, Luciano was called to the warden’s office to take an important call from New York. “Dr. Martin tells me that this is a confidential call and he hands me the phone. It’s Costello on the other end. He hits me with the news that the government wants me to do ’em a favor. He asked if it’s okay to bring up some guys from the Navy Department who would like to talk to me. I said, ‘Listen, Frank, I’m not talkin’ to anybody to do favors. If they’re so anxious to see me, let ’em bring me down to New York. I don’t feel like doin’ favors while I’m up in this dump.’ And while I’m sayin’ this, I kinda smiled at the warden, because I don’t want him to think it’s nothin’ personal. Frank asks me to hold on for a minute, then he gets back on the phone; he tells me that he’s with guys from Dewey’s office and they said, okay, they’ll bring me down to Sing Sing for the meet. But they have to get an okay from Judge McCook because accordin’ to the law, he’s in charge of me.”

McCook signed the transfer order within days. “It was like goin’ from Siberia to civilization. It was really great. I got a very nice cell all to myself, a clean one with hot and cold running water; I even had decent toilet paper for the first time in six years. A little thing like that can mean a helluva lot when you’re shut up in jail.

“That afternoon, they took me to the lawyers’ room. I walked in and one of Dewey’s top guys is there with Polakoff and George Wolf, also Costello and Lansky. Before I even had a chance to say
hello to anybody, I spot a table in the middle of the room loaded down with all kinds of cold cuts — just like the table we used to have in the back room of Dave Miller’s Delicatessen. So I said, ‘Fellas, before we talk, you’ll have to excuse me,’ and I made a dive for that table. It was Lansky’s idea to load it up with all the stuff he knew I liked, and he even had them kosher green pickles and the Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic I loved. I said, ‘Hey-y, Little Man. Where the hell did you get these pickles?’ And Meyer laughed and he said, ‘For you, Charlie, I stopped down at the pickle factory on Delancey Street before we drove up here. I told ’em it was for you and they sent their regards. Those pickles are from the top of the barrel.’ And they was, the little tiny ones, crunchy ones that I used to get by the bagful and bring to my apartment at the Waldorf Towers. I couldn’t get the smell of garlic out of the place for a week. But that minute, the taste of them pickles was almost as good as freedom.”

Everyone waited until Luciano had eaten his fill, and then the urgency of the situation was pressed upon him: the government needed assistance with its security program among the unions, specifically the longshoremen, along the New York docks. Haffenden asked whether he would be willing to use his influence to help.

“I put on a very serious face and I kinda thought it over. Then I said, ‘Why are you fellas so sure that I can handle what you need while I’m locked up in the can?’ After all, I didn’t want to make it look like I was gonna jump at this. But Haffenden came right back and said that he had it on ‘very reliable authority’ that any word I sent out from anywhere would be listened to and followed through.

“When it was all set, that’s when I just sat there and listened while the deal was bein’ put to Dewey’s guy. Now I wanna make it clear that he knew just what was goin’ on, that this whole thing was rigged just the way they rigged me six years before. As far as Haffenden was concerned, he didn’t know nothin’ that was goin’ on except that he was sittin’ there with his mouth open, prayin’ I would say yes and help his whole department down at 90 Church Street. Finally I said, yes, and I could see him let out a big sigh of relief. He was a very happy guy. Then Dewey’s guy suggested that Haffenden go into another office and call his people at naval intelligence,
so that we would have a chance to confer on the details of how this would be worked out.

“When the kid left the room, that’s when we got down to cases. We put it right on the table. I said that the way we figured it, after Willkie beat Dewey for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, Dewey hadda win the governorship of New York in order to get in line for another shot at the nomination. Costello chimed in and said he’d already gotten word that the Republican big shots had agreed to push Dewey for President in 1944 even though he was runnin’ for governor on the promise not to try for President in two years.

“I repeated my promise that Dewey would get all our support and we would deliver Manhattan, or come damn close, in November, which would mean he’d be a shoo-in. Then, as soon as he got into office, he hadda make me a hero. The only difference would be, a hero gets a medal, but I’d get a parole. That was it. I made it very strong that if Dewey didn’t buy the proposition immediately, I’d pull out all our support and throw it against him. And even if he won as governor, next year, in 1943, when they would start buildin’ him up for President, I’d be ready to start my campaign for a new trial, and I’d make an appeal that would be based on every rotten thing he done at my trial. I told Dewey’s guy I wouldn’t level my heavy guns at him or Sol Gelb or any of the other guys on the staff, just at Dewey; all I wanted to do was to let the newspapers know how Dewey got them witnesses to commit perjury, how he put words in their mouths, how he bribed them broads for phony testimony — the whole works. I said that sure, I knew we’d tried for an appeal with that kind of thing before and it hadn’t worked, but it wasn’t as loaded as we had it now. Besides, we’d make sure it was in the newspapers — maybe they wouldn’t buy it before, but with Dewey tryin’ to be President, a lot of the big papers would print any kind of dirt they could get on him, and he wouldn’t be able to stand that. I said it was one thing to become governor on the back of a gangster but I’d be a son of a bitch if I’d want the President of my country to get there on my back with no favors to me. That was it.

“Dewey’s guy left the meetin’ to carry the message. I told Levy and Polakoff to take a walk around, and then Frank and Meyer and me
sat down and talked our own business — about how we was doin’ with ration stamps and if this deal with Dewey could help us maybe get a bigger corner on the market, especially with gasoline and meat. Tommy Lucchese had taken over a lot of the restaurants that Schultz used to control and the outfit was not only supplyin’ meat but we was sellin’ ’em the stamps so they could buy it. Frank told me we had a good lock on about four hundred gas stations where we bought a piece in each one all the way from New York to Louisiana — that was some business until the war was over.

“But as far as my helpin’ the government was concerned, then or even the following year when they said I helped ’em open up Sicily for the invasion by gettin’ the cooperation of the Mafia guys to help the American troops, that was all horseshit. It would be easy for me to say there was somethin’ to all that, like people have been sayin’ for years and I’ve been lettin’ ’em think, but there wasn’t. As far as me helpin’ the army land in Sicily, you gotta remember I left there when I was, what — nine? The only guy I knew real well over there, and he wasn’t even a Sicilian, was that little prick Vito Genovese. In fact, at that time the dirty little bastard was livin’ like a king in Rome, kissin’ Mussolini’s ass.”