The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (51 page)

On May 14, 1947 — the feast day of San Fortunato, or, in a free translation, Saint Lucky, as some Italian reporters noted whimsically — the commission reached its decision. Luciano was to be released from jail in Genoa and given full freedom. He was not “socially dangerous,” the commission held, and added, “In this moment, you, Salvatore Lucanía, are a free citizen who has the right not to be molested and to live his own life, but who at the same time has the duty to behave himself like a gentleman. . . . You must abstain from any illicit activity.”

For the next several weeks, Luciano remained in Palermo, but by the end of June he had persuaded friendly authorities to permit him to move once more to Rome. He stopped off in Naples for a week or so, to pick up his contacts and reestablish himself at the head of the still-thriving black market, still a necessity and a basic way of life for most Italians.

He took the time, too, while in Naples to travel across the bay to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius to see Father Francesco “Ciccio” Scarpato. They had met a year earlier, in 1946, when Don Cheech, as the priest was familiarly called, was ministering to the spiritual needs of unreleased Italian prisoners of war at the Palermo detention
camp and waiting for permission from American authorities to return to his own mainland parish, from which he had been absent while serving as an Italian army chaplain during the war. That parish at Massa di Soma, one of scores of small villages dotting the slopes of Vesuvius, had been buried under molten lava from the volcano’s eruption in 1944. Excavation was proceeding slowly and Don Cheech had sought out the famous American
milionario
for financial help so that when he returned he could speed up the work. Luciano had given it.

At their new meeting at Massa di Soma, Luciano found the returned priest beset by additional troubles. He was in the midst of a bitter struggle with a militant Communist Party, led by Russian-trained Ivan Montoni, that had taken control of the village administration. He asked Luciano for more help and more money. Such assistance, he said, could be vital in his battle with the Communists for the people’s loyalty, for it would demonstrate to the villagers that he, a simple priest, had direct and personal access to the limitless funds of the famous American from New York.

“Don Cheech was a little, roly-poly guy and he had a smile that was terrific. How can you turn down a guy like that who’s dedicated to nothin’ but the best things in life for everybody else but who don’t ask nothin’ for himself? So I give him some dough. He needed an altar for the church, too, and he wanted to replace the religious pictures the volcano had destroyed and things like that, so I helped him with them things, too. Most of all, he told me he needed to be able to say that Lucky Luciano was his friend and would help him. From what I could see later, it helped, and I was proud that he was knockin’ the shit outa the Communists up there.”

In the third week of June 1947, Luciano was still in Naples, preparing to move at last to Rome, when events in California sent Italian police descending upon him.

On the afternoon of June 20, Bugsy Siegel was having his weekly manicure at Harry Drucker’s barbershop in Beverly Hills and talking to a friend, Carl Laemmle, Jr., the film producer. Siegel was in a relaxed mood. His two daughters, he said, were on their way
from New York to spend-the summer with him, and he was expecting his girl friend, Virginia Hill, to return from a European trip any day. And, too, his business was beginning to improve. The Flamingo had finally been completed and reopened in March, and though at first its luck was bad and the hotel and casino both lost money, things had turned around by May and the enterprise was at last climbing into the black. When Siegel left the barbershop, he was smiling.

That night, at ten-thirty, he was relaxing in the living room of his Beverly Hills mansion on North Linden Drive with a friend, Allen Smiley. Upstairs, Virginia’s brother, Charles “Chick” Hill, was with his girl friend, Jerry Mason. Suddenly, a fusillade from a .30-30 carbine crashed through the living room window. One bullet tore through Siegel’s head, ripping out his eye. Four other bullets smashed into his body, cracking ribs and tearing his lungs, and three more missed. Smiley was unharmed, but Benny Siegel’s career had come to a sudden and dramatic end. The last item on the agenda of the Christmas meeting in Havana had been disposed of.

Hardly had the echoes of the gunfire in Beverly Hills faded when, two hundred miles away in Las Vegas, a trio of Meyer Lansky’s men walked into the Flamingo and advised the staff that they were taking over, “on orders.” Gus Greenbaum and Morris Rosen, long employed by Lansky in his gambling empire in Miami, Havana and elsewhere, would henceforth manage the hotel and casino, while Morris Sidwirtz, better known as Moe Sedway, would be in charge of relations between the hotel staff and guests.

While those events were taking place in America, it was already the morning of June 21 in Italy. When the news reached Naples, the Guardia di Finanza, acting on orders of American officials in Washington, took Luciano into custody to question him about the Siegel murder. But to all questions, he had the same answer: “Beverly Hills is seven thousand miles away from here. How in the world could I have anything to do with a murder of an old friend?”

“I never knew who actually done the job on Bugsy. But I remember that Jack Dragna had a rep for bein’ a pretty sharp shot.
But I really didn’t know and I didn’t care who done it. All they hadda tell me was the results.”

The Siegel murder, however, left some loose ends — most important, Virginia Hill. “I didn’t know this Virginia. She was apparently a good-lookin’ girl from the South somewhere, and Adonis was the first one to latch on to her when she come to New York. He give her a job workin’ our numbers bank and I heard that she was a real crackpot, slept around a lot and so forth. Naturally, after Bugsy went, she was a big danger because she knew too much. There was one thing everybody was sure of — on them nights that Bugsy spent on the pillow with her, he spilled enough into her pink ear about the outfit and the top guys that could cause plenty of trouble. The logical thing was to get rid of her. But we had a big bookmaker in Chicago, Joe Epstein, who handled our layoffs and he was nuts about her; he kept protectin’ her, sendin’ her money, even durin’ the time she was with Bugsy. In fact, practically all the guys in the outfit who ever laid her — and that just about included everybody — stood up for her to make sure she didn’t get hit. Besides, Lansky wanted to get his hands on that dough in Switzerland.

“But Virginia was scared to use the money, even though we heard that lots of times she was pretty bad off. When the Kefauver hearin’s started in the States a couple years later, Virginia was subpoenaed to testify. She got in touch with me in Naples and wanted to come to see me. I knew that meant a shakedown. So the boys arranged that if she would keep her mouth shut, we would let her dig into the Swiss account, keep some of the money, and return the rest to the treasury in New York. She never spent none of it until after the Kefauver hearin’s was over and we could be sure she done the right thing as far as we was concerned when she testified. She got a lotta laughs on the witness stand but she never really said nothin’.”

In March 1966, Virginia Hill committed suicide.

The questioning of Luciano about the Siegel murder was brief and futile. He was soon released and quickly departed Naples for Rome, where he took a suite at the Savoia Hotel just off the Via Veneto. He remained there only briefly before moving back to
the Excelsior, where he could look out directly over the fashionable boulevard. There he registered as “Sig. Salvatore Lucanía — Palermo, Sicily.”

In Rome, he soon became a target for the cameras of the Italian
paparazzi
, the freelance photographers who descend with an enraging unconcern for privacy on the famous and infamous. On the advice of his lawyers, Luciano refused all requests for interviews and photographs. “But it didn’t make no difference whether I talked to them bastards or not; they made up stories anyway, just to print somethin’. There was hardly a day when some newspaper didn’t publish a story that Lucky Luciano was the biggest tourist attraction in Italy next to the Isle of Capri.

“From the time I got back to Rome in June of ’47, I never did nothin’ really bad. I mean, only black marketing and the changin’ of money, like before. Even though everybody in the country was doin’ it, I hadda be especially careful, ’cause I was the ‘gang boss’ and everywhere I went, guys with cameras was followin’ me. And that Asslinger wasn’t gonna give up on me just because the commission in Sicily said I could walk around like a human bein’. I got tipped off the American Embassy in Rome had orders to force the Italian police to keep me under surveillance. I couldn’t hardly turn around without fallin’ over them guys.”

But still, despite the surveillance and the pressures of American authorities in Italy, Luciano maintained his power over the underworld in the United States. His deportation did not change this. No important decision that might affect the future of organized crime in the United States, he said, was made without his consultation and advice during the next decade.

There were personal contacts and couriers arriving and departing with his messages regularly. And he set up a secondary channel for written communications. Two friendly American Army officers, one in Naples and the other in Rome, let him use their APO addresses in Italy. Incoming letters were usually in pink envelopes and postmarked from Brooklyn or one of several cities in New Jersey, with no return addresses.

The couriers who arrived with messages often went away with oral replies from Luciano. But they brought not merely word from the United States; they brought, too, packages of American
currency, averaging, he said, twenty-five thousand dollars a month; this was his allotment to himself from the profits of the enterprises his partners were running for him back home. There were also profits from the casino in Havana and other underworld investments he held jointly with Lansky and others, and this money was allowed to accumulate, to be used for any unforeseen emergency or as a fund for future investments.

Always, in whatever he did, Luciano was forced to be wary, for he knew that the American narcotics authorities in Italy were constantly attempting to trap him. “Almost every day, guys would come up to me with some kind of deal, a way to make a quick buck. I’ll bet about half of them promotions had to do with narcotics. It was just what I was scared about in Havana, when I had the fight with Vito. No matter what I would say or do, or try to do, Asslinger and his whole organization was set on trippin’ me up for pushin’ junk, one way or another. So I took steps to make sure as possible that it didn’t happen.”

What Luciano did was to arrange with his hotel managers wherever he lived in Italy that the same domestics cleaned his suite or apartment daily, and only when he or a friend was present. He had the only key to his apartment, and no one was to enter when he was not there. No mail or packages could be delivered to the apartment; they were handed to him in the lobby and opened in the presence of the desk clerk or the manager. “A couple years later, I put guys on my payroll in order to protect myself from every son of a bitch who wanted ‘Charlie Lucky’s help.’ I used John Raimundo — he was called ‘Cockeye’ because that’s what he was, cockeyed — and a fella by the name of Joe Di Giorgio to find out what guys wanted before they could see me. It sounded like I was actin’ like a big shot, but I hadda worry all the time about police guys and dope agents in Italy and America who wanted to make a big name by nailin’ Lucky Luciano. Joe and John done all the checkin’ on things for me, and I trusted ’em all through the years.”

In the late fall of 1947, despite American help advanced through the newly conceived Marshall Plan to aid European recovery, Italy was still destitute. Much of the money for reconstruction,
employment and more failed to reach the workers as Italian industrialists and politicians siphoned off dollars. American charities, especially the Salvation Army, stepped in to aid the poor. Large shipments of clothing were sent to Italy for free distribution. Again, this help was blocked — this time by petty Italian gangsters. They knew that freezing people would spend whatever they had for clothes to keep themselves and their children warm. The racketeers hijacked the clothing and began selling it at huge prices on the black market, and the police seemed powerless to intervene.

“One day a priest come to see me at the Hotel Excelsior. At first he was a little embarrassed to get the words out, but I told him just to say it out loud. So he explained about the clothes bein’ hijacked. He figured that because I was the big American gangster, I could help fight fire with fire. I think this priest’s name was Father Moldato and he had his parish near my hotel. The day he come to see me it was so cold in Rome that you could freeze your balls off. And right down below my window on the corner of the Via Veneto, them thieves was sellin’ Salvation Army clothes at Fifth Avenue prices. I thought it was a real rotten racket and I told the Father that I would look into it. After all, thief or no thief, there has to be a limit to how far a crook can go.”

Luciano made contact with the Italian gangsters. “I don’t even remember their names no more; I think one guy was called Vittorio and he seemed to be one of the leaders of the whole setup all over the country. I got this clothes hijacker and his pals together for a meet. It was in a garden restaurant around the corner from the Excelsior; it was closed because of the cold weather. I knew the owner and he let me use the joint. These guys knew who I was, and I told ’em, ‘Cut out the fuckin’ hijackin’ of American clothes — or else.’ They started to argue with me, but I said to them, ‘If I walk outa here, ten minutes later you’ll all be dead. So gimme your answer right now and don’t shit around.’ So the hijackin’ of the Salvation Army shipments stopped right away, and from then on them clothes reached where they was supposed to be goin’. The only compromise I made with them pricks was that they could sell the stuff they already socked away, and that would be it.