The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (49 page)

“I took his advice and I told the meetin’ I would never go against the majority. But it was goddamn obvious to me that the majority wanted to play with fire and that’s why I wanted to make one thing very clear; there was a son of a bitch by the name of Asslinger who couldn’t think about nothin’ else except that Charlie Lucky was king of junk. So I said, ‘For chrissake, keep me out of it or else I’m gonna take an ad in the New York
Mirror
and declare myself.’ That got another laugh. But Frank was right. Vito won that round. And it would cause more trouble in our outfit than anythin’ we ever done up to that day.”

Then a sober Meyer Lansky rose to discuss what he called “The Siegel Situation.” (Siegel had not been informed of the meeting, since he would be the subject of major discussions and decisions; that he would learn of it no one doubted, but it was important
that he learn only later.) Lansky focused on Siegel’s current activities in the small, sleazy Nevada oasis called Las Vegas, in 1946 little more than a stopping-off place for east- and westbound travelers in need of food, water, gasoline and dry ice to cool their cars on the trips across the desert. Reno was then the state’s thriving metropolis, thanks to quick divorce laws and legalized gambling in Nevada. But Siegel envisioned Las Vegas not merely as a rival. He was sure he could create an organized gambling Eldorado there that would turn the city into the promised land for the underworld, an oasis of glittering hotels with all the services and entertainment the high-rollers demanded. He had communicated his enthusiasm to his partners in the underworld and persuaded them to go along, with Luciano, then at Great Meadow, giving the final authorization in 1943.

So Benny Siegel started to work on his initial venture, a hotel and casino he named the Flamingo. Once he had owned an interest in Florida’s Hialeah racetrack, where large flocks of pink flamingos nested in a lagoon in the infield and soon became the track’s trademark. Siegel saw the bird as a good-luck omen and he adopted it. Its color, pink, would be the motif of the hotel; and to decorate the Flamingo in the most grandiose and lavish manner, he gave a free hand to his mistress, Virginia Hill. From that moment on, the Flamingo was Siegel’s preoccupation, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Though he saw huge profits flowing from the legal gambling games, despite Nevada’s taxes, he was realist enough to understand that he would have to provide more than the tables to woo customers from Reno. He planned to lure them with the finest food and best wines, the most luxurious accommodations and the biggest Hollywood stars — all at such low prices that no one would be able to pass Las Vegas by.

As the Flamingo rose, anything Siegel wanted, he got, through the influence and muscle of his underworld partners. In these first postwar years, construction materials were difficult to find, but pressures were put on suppliers and on the underworld-dominated Teamsters Union for the trucks to haul those supplies to the desert. And when Siegel needed more money, as his ideas far outran his budget, Lansky and others reached into the underworld treasury to provide it. When he had begun, Siegel had said that the Flamingo
would cost one million dollars. By December 1946, Lansky told the delegates in Havana, the costs had skyrocketed to nearly six million. And with the hotel still unfinished a year after ground had been broken, Lansky said, Siegel had even turned to outsiders for more money, soliciting his friends in Beverly Hills and throughout the movie colony, telling them, “You’re in on the ground floor of the biggest gold mine in the world.”

Some of those outside investors, disgruntled at the long delays in the Flamingo’s opening, had begun to complain. Led by an executive of American Distillers named Samuel Rothberg and his brother, C. Harry Rothberg, who between them had put up more than $250,000, a number of the private investors started to make motions about taking an active role in the operations to protect their money. To forestall such a move, Siegel realized that some visible evidence of his success was necessary, and so he announced that the hotel and casino would open on December 26, 1946, even before it was completed.

Much of this was known to the Havana delegates; for some time their anger at Siegel had been growing as they watched their own multimillion-dollar investment in his hotel seemingly going down the drain. If Siegel could, indeed, make a success, they would smile on him again. But Siegel’s old partner, Lansky, had news that deepened the frowns. He had learned, he said, from sources in the private banks he dealt with in Zurich that Virginia Hill had been making regular trips abroad, accumulating an unusually large wardrobe, that she had taken a long lease on an apartment in Switzerland, and, most disturbing, that she had deposited more than three hundred thousand dollars in a numbered account in a Zurich bank.

“There was no doubt in Meyer’s mind that Bugsy had skimmed this dough from his buildin’ budget, and he was sure that Siegel was preparin’ to skip as well as skim, in case the roof was gonna fall in on him. Everybody listened very close while Lansky explained it. When he got through, somebody asked, ‘What do you think we oughta do, Meyer?’ Lansky said, ‘There’s only one thing to do with a thief who steals from his friends. Benny’s got to be hit.’

“So it was put to a vote. Naturally, Meyer and Phil Kastel didn’t have no votes, but that didn’t make no difference; the result was
unanimous, and Bugsy was as good as dead. Then it was decided the contract should be handled by Charlie Fischetti, and he said he would be in touch with Jack Dragna on the Coast. Jack was the outfit’s number two guy in Los Angeles under Bugsy, but that wouldn’t cut no ice because he would do what he was ordered.

“Then Meyer got up again and said he recommended that the hit shouldn’t be made until after the Flamingo opened. If the place was a success, there was ways to take care of Benny for stealin’ without bumpin’ him off, and he could be made to pay back the money. Benny had been a valuable guy for a long time, almost from the beginnin’ with me and Lansky and Costello, so none of us really wanted to see him get it. But if the Flamingo was a flop, well, that’d be it for him.”

By Christmas eve, the pressure of that day-long meeting and a number of smaller discussions that followed had brought the delegates to a point where a break was necessary. Wives and girl friends arrived and that night a gala holiday party was held at the Nacional, ostensibly in honor of Frank Sinatra, but in reality for Luciano. The food was good and plentiful and so were the wines, the liquors and the entertainment. The celebration lasted until early in the morning. But the Havana papers the next day, and throughout the week, failed to mention any of the activities at the hotel. “In them days, the word was around that what was goin’ on at the Hotel Nacional was off limits. There was maybe twenty papers in Havana, but that was a place where the politician was boss and it was easy to lose a license to publish a paper if you ran somethin’ you wasn’t supposed to.”

Once again, on the night of December 26, the delegates gathered in the conference room, this time to wait for news from Las Vegas. The time difference was three hours and so it was long after midnight, on the twenty-seventh, when telephone reports about the long-awaited opening of the Flamingo began to arrive. The first news was not good. The weather in Las Vegas was cold and raining.

Lansky took Luciano aside and told him, “Charlie, with that kind of weather, only a miracle can save the Flamingo. And there’s somethin’ else I have to tell you. Before I left New York I asked some questions about opening a hotel the day after Christmas, and some people in show business up there laughed at me. They said
the week between Christmas and New Year’s is like Death Row as far as entertainment is concerned.”

“I knew Meyer was right. Benny was so desperate to make a showin’ he took the big chance to beat the odds on show business. Of course, he did have one thing goin’ for him, a terrific show. I hoped against hope that maybe all of this talent would attract business and bail Benny out.”

Siegel had, indeed, rounded up talent that normally might have insured success. He had enticed George Jessel as master of ceremonies, Xavier Cugat and his band to provide the music, and Jimmy Durante and George Raft to star in the show and greet the customers. But at three
A.M.
in Havana, a telephone call to Lansky revealed that almost no one had come to see, listen and gamble, and the opening of the Flamingo had been a flop.

When Lansky passed around the news, rage boiled over, and there were loud voices demanding that the contract on Siegel be fulfilled with dispatch. Lansky, however, advised caution, suggested a short delay. In the meantime, he said, the Los Angeles lawyers for the Flamingo should explore the advisability of throwing the hotel corporation into receivership. This, he said, would put a stop to the losses. Then, the outfit could form a new syndicate to buy out the original corporation and its creditors at pennies on the dollar. To those who thought such a move might mean just pouring more money down the rathole, Lansky was blunt. He still had complete faith in Siegel’s vision that Las Vegas could be turned into a gambling gold mine; it was just a matter of going about it the right way. Lansky was persuasive. With the approval of Luciano and the council, he immediately set to work on his plan. By the middle of January, the Flamingo was closed, and then new money was poured in from the underworld to put it into shape before a second opening. As for Benny Siegel, he had been reprieved — for the moment.

“Naturally, we was pretty damn depressed about what happened in Vegas, and nobody felt like talkin’ much to nobody else that night. By this time it was four o’clock in the mornin’. I started to leave, but Vito stopped me and asked could I come up to his suite on the top floor. He said he had some things he wanted to talk to me about, private. So I said, okay, figurin’ now he was gonna
finish what he wanted to say when he come out to my house when he first arrived in Havana. We went upstairs, not sayin’ a word. Then he closes the door, turns to me and says, ‘Charlie, I want half of Italy.’ I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, ‘Vito, what are you talkin’ about?’ ”

Genovese said, “Charlie, after all, I set up that whole thing in Europe — the black market, the truck routes to Germany, everything. It’s all yours and you were operating it before you got here, and it’s waitin’ for you when you get back.”

Luciano was puzzled. “You’re nuts, Vito, I ain’t goin’ back. I’m stay in’ in Cuba.”

Genovese shrugged. “I understand different. I heard that Washington knows you’re in Havana and they’re gettin’ ready to put the screws on these jerks in Cuba to get you thrown out. There’s gonna be so much heat that nobody can do nothin’ to help you. Charlie, you’re gonna have to get outa here and go back to Italy. By rights, everything that’s over there is half mine — and I want it.”

“So that fat little son of a bitch finally coughed it up. But he wasn’t kiddin’ me. He never had that edge on me, because I could read him like a book. The dirty cock was tryin’ to take me. It was like an obsession with him, and it come to me that minute that there was no difference between Vito Genovese and that prick Asslinger; they had the same idea in common — get Charlie Lucky Luciano. Maybe Asslinger figured he’d be a big man if he could nail me, like Vito figured if he could muscle me out he would finally get up that last step of the ladder and be the Boss of Bosses.

“Just as sure as I was alive it meant that Vito had tipped off Washington about my bein’ in Havana and probably made it sound like I was handlin’ junk. So what could I do? I called him a greedy fuckin’ pig to his face and he starts callin’ me a few things. I lose my temper maybe once in five years and that was the day. As we was yellin’ at each other, it suddenly come back into my head what that shitheel had done during the war, how he managed to set up all them pipelines that he’s braggin’ about when he was workin’ hand-in-glove in Italy with our enemies and with the Nazis, all durin’ the time they was tryin’ to beat his own country in the war. So I done somethin’ that I never done before,
and it was against all the rules that I myself set up. I pushed him up against the wall and I beat the livin’ daylights out of him.

“He was a tough little prick, but I was bigger and a helluva lot tougher. Besides, I was damn mad. I started to knock him around the room like he was a rubber ball. I didn’t hit him in the face — I didn’t want to mark him up. I just belted him in the guts and in the kidneys, and when he fell down I just started to kick him in the belly, and every shot I took with my fists and my foot I told him he was only a shit and a son of a bitch and a dirty rotten Neapolitan louse — even worse, he was a fink American who turned on his own country like a fuckin’ traitor.

“I beat him up so bad he couldn’t get out of his room for three days. The only guy who knew about it was Anastasia, because when Vito was layin’ on the floor, out like a light and not movin’, I suddenly thought maybe I broke somethin’ inside him. So I went over to Albert’s room and brought him back to Vito’s suite with me. Then I got a doctor to patch him up. The doc knew Lansky and he also knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

Luciano had broken three of Genovese’s ribs and fractured his left arm, in addition to afflicting countless bruises all over his body. The next morning, Luciano told Lansky of the fight and asked him to make certain the doctor permitted no visitors to Genovese. Then they circulated the story that Genovese was in bed with a sudden attack of a virulent and contagious form of the flu, and that while he could have no visitors, he would welcome fruit, flowers and personal get-well messages — and they poured in through the next days.

“What I done to Vito was very serious. It could’ve meant that he could have me over a barrel; he could even have called for a ‘table’ and asked to have me knocked off. But I wasn’t worried. For one thing, who the hell’d believe Vito over me? There wasn’t a mark on him, except around his body, and we had already fixed up the doc to say that he’d slipped in the bathtub. Then, just before me and Albert put him on the plane, while we was ridin’ to the airport in the car, I said to him, ‘Don Vitone, if by any chance you should make the mistake of mentionin’ what happened between us to anybody else, then I — Charlie Luciano — will get back into New York, if only long enough to do a final job on you.
I’ll walk right up to you and I’ll put a gun between your eyes and I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out. You won’t get it in the back, the way you like to do it, you Neapolitan prick.’