The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (54 page)

At Taormina, Lansky filled Luciano in on the status of the
Organization. “He said things was goin’ very good with all our gamblin’. He told me he was goin’ to Switzerland to open up some new bank accounts for a few of the guys, like Joe Adonis and our good friend Batista.” The conversation turned to the ambitious Vito Genovese. “Meyer said that Vito and Carlo Gambino was makin’ it look on the outside like they wasn’t gettin’ along too good, but under the table they was like two fingers together.” That, both Lansky and Luciano agreed, could only mean trouble in the future. Together with Frank Scalise, Gambino had risen high in the Mangano organization in Brooklyn, run then by Phil and Vince Mangano, and had become one of the most trusted lieutenants to Albert Anastasia, heir apparent in that family. “Meyer said it wouldn’t surprise him if one of these days, Albert took care of the Manganos and took over that outfit. [In 1951, a year later, Philip Mangano was murdered and Vincent disappeared; Anastasia became the new boss.] When that happened, Carlo was liable to get very ambitious. So Lansky asked me to send a message back to Vito and Carlo to tell ’em I knew what they was doin’ and to cut it out immediately, that I wouldn’t sit still for Vito tryin’ to muscle in on Anastasia. I also sent back a little private side message to Gambino. I told him I thought he was one of the best leaders in New York and maybe in ten or fifteen years, he could be head of it all. But he oughta keep his pecker down and be patient. That helped put a clamp on Vito for a few more years.”

Lansky also brought up the subject of an expansion of the organization’s gambling empire to Europe. He told Luciano he planned to stop in London for a scouting trip on his way back to New York. “I told him when the time was right, I would manage to slip up there and meet him and we could make some decisions personally.

“It was a nice visit. Meyer had his new wife along, Teddy, and she really surprised me. She was no Igea but she was a damn good-lookin’ girl and really bright.”

Soon after Lansky’s visit, Luciano was back in the news. During one session of his organized crime committee’s hearing, Senator Kefauver, echoing the constant refrain of Harry Anslinger, called the exiled gangster “the head of a phantom government which enforces its own laws and carries out its own executions.” Luciano,
he said, was “the brains in an international drug ring running between Italy and the United States,” and he demanded that Italian authorities take some action. Luciano responded at a press conference with scorn and derision. And the Italian police were circumspect and somewhat less than compliant. “The Italian police are excellent in detecting and enforcing the law, but the laws are not adequate and sentences are not strict enough,” said one official. There was a problem with France, he said, where legal production of narcotics was permitted without government supervision. “We must now have legislation which will legally outlaw unsupervised narcotics distribution and choke off the source of illegal supply.” Luciano’s name was nowhere mentioned. But the surveillance and the pressures on him seemed to increase, for a time.

Then, in the summer of 1950, they relaxed and his enforced absence from the Italian mainland came to a sudden end. With the United States embroiled in what would turn out to be a long and frustrating war in Korea, and convinced that general war in Europe was imminent, President Truman reversed the direction of American foreign aid. Under the Marshall Plan, it had been mainly for the economic recovery of Western Europe; now the President ordered a deemphasis on the economic aspects and a sharp increase in the military, to arm the allies for the struggle ahead. In Italy, by then beginning to make a substantial recovery from the ravages of World War II, that announcement was greeted with anything but pleasure and the Italian government began to resist some of the all-pervasive American influence.

Luciano was one beneficiary. “One day, it was sometime late in the summer of ’50, a few big muckety-mucks come over to see me at the Villa Igea. They was very polite fellas that I never seen before, but I knew about ’em and I’d been tryin’ for months to find some bagman who could put me in touch. But it seemed they wouldn’t take no dough. Now here they was, out of a clear blue sky, without even a phone call in advance and they tell me and Igea that we can live in Naples. It didn’t cost me a cent. They said I had been behavin’ myself all that year while I was in Palermo and they had no reason to keep me tied up in Sicily forever.

“So we packed up everythin’ and we headed back for Naples. Only this time, I’m feelin’ that all this freedom could blow up
again, knowin’ about the way my Italian countrymen operate, and I figure these very nice fellas will be right on my ass as soon as somethin’ big happens anyplace in Italy or the States. Igea wanted to find an apartment and bring the furniture down from storage in Rome, but I said no, on account of who knows what’s gonna be tomorrow. So we moved into a hotel, and you know where we moved to? Right into the Hotel Turistico in Naples. You know why? Because it’s right across the street from the Caserna Zanzur, the military barracks of the Guardia di Finanza, the guys who are in charge of investigatin’ junk. I said to Igea, ‘If those guys wanna keep a watch on me like they’ve been doin’, I’m gonna make it easy for ’em. I’m gonna live right across the street so they can see me from their goddamn windows every time I come in or go out.”

Luciano’s permission to return to the mainland had its restrictions. He could travel freely in the south, but he could not go north of Rome. And this was distressing. “Back in the States, I learned to play golf pretty good. I figured I could take it up again and maybe Igea could learn and we could both play together. But the nearest golf course was up in Fiuggi, which is a little bit north of Rome. Them Italian bastards wouldn’t let me go up there. Then one day a messenger from Frank Costello in New York shows up with a beautiful set of golf clubs, complete. Frank had ’em made special to my measurements by the pro shop at the Westchester Country Club, perfectly balanced and made by hand, and they must’ve set him back at least six, seven hundred. Frank knew I was barred from every golf course in Italy, because all of ’em are north of where I can go, so he sends me a set of clubs for a present, the dirty cock. Some sense of humor.” Almost as a reminder, Luciano, though he was never to use those clubs, kept them standing in a corner wherever he lived and had them polished and cleaned every week.

In the spring of 1951, another present arrived from New York, this time one he could make use of. “When Lansky was over, he noticed I was drivin’ a little Italian car and that bothered him. So when he got back to New York, he told the fellas to look around and they arranged for me to get a brand-new 1951 Buick — Lansky looked all the cars over and decided the Buick was the best car in the States to use the kind of gas they have in Italy. A tourist
brought the car with him on a boat trip and when the ship stopped in Naples, this guy was kind enough to leave the keys with me.”

In his new car, Luciano was often on the road, speeding across southern Italy, usually just for the pleasure of driving. It was too conspicuous, though, for those times when necessity, as it often did, demanded that he break the travel ban and head north. Many of those trips were to Milan, to visit the Lissonis, and then he would use one of the small Italian cars he had at his disposal.

“There was only one time we had any trouble. Most of the time we took the back roads so I wouldn’t be spotted, because on the main
autostrada
you had to stop at the toll booths and any one of them guards could’ve known who I was. But this particular trip, it was in the spring of ’51, we had to go on the
autostrada
because it was rainin’ like hell and all the side roads was flooded. When we got there, I was a damn fool. While Igea was seein’ her folks, I decided to go to the San Ciro racetrack and bet a few bucks on the ponies. That’s where I must’ve been spotted.

“The next day, it was still rainin’ hard, so I decided to leave the car in Milan for somebody to drive back for us when the roads was clear, and take the train. When we got to the station, there was a million cops waitin’ for us. As soon as our taxi pulled up they surrounded me like I was John Dillinger. A dozen of them plainclothesmen got on the train with us and rode all the way back to Naples. I don’t know what they thought I was gonna do while the two of us was cooped up in that little compartment. When we got to the Termini in Rome, them cops wouldn’t even let us off the train to stretch our legs. If it hadn’t been so damn uncomfortable, it would’ve been funny. But the whole thing was rotten for Igea. She never said a word; all the way back, she just kept smilin’ and once in a while, she’d reach out and pat me on the arm and say, ‘Don’t think about it, it’s not important.’

“About this time, we met a guy from Rome by the name of Giuseppe Dosi. I guess he was my enemy because he was head of the Rome branch of Interpol. He met Igea one time with me in Naples and when I saw him the next day, he looked at me and he said, ‘Luciano, there has to be some good in you, because that girl is one of the finest women I’ve ever met. If I hear that you ever do
anything unkind to her, I will personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life in the Regina Coeli prison’ ”

Late in 1950, a visitor arrived in Naples with some unpleasant news. The visitor was Carlo Gambino, and he had come to talk about Luciano’s old friend Willie Moretti. The New Jersey mobster was in the advanced stages of syphilitic deterioration. “Just like it happened with Capone, Willie’s brain was bein’ affected and he couldn’t control himself half the time. He hadda be watched whenever he went out, because nobody knew what he might say in public. There was a vote in the council that Willie had to go — for his own good and everybody else’s. At that point, I guess the whole idea of killin’ anybody began to make me sick. I had a lifetime of it and now I hadda vote on whether to kill a guy who had been one of my best friends. I told Carlo I wanted the hit held up. I gave Carlo the orders to tell the council absolutely no on Willie, unless there was no way he could be helped by the right kind of doctor, and I didn’t mean one of our bullet-hole specialists. I said, let ’em take him to a guy on Park Avenue, the Mayo Clinic, or anywhere to try to save him.”

But Moretti’s deterioration had progressed too far to be reversed or even arrested. On October 24, 1951, Willie Moretti was shot twice in the head, from the front, in a restaurant near Cliffside Park, New Jersey.

The attitude of the Italian police in these years was a strange and variable one toward Luciano. If they wanted to restrict his travel inside the country, fearing that free scope would lead to illegal deeds, they nevertheless had no compunction about permitting travel abroad. In October 1950, only a few months after he returned to the mainland, he was once more issued an Italian passport, with visas good for travel to Switzerland, Belgium, France, Spain and England.

“I didn’t ask for it at that time and I didn’t pay to get it. I wanted it, but I didn’t think I’d get one if I applied. It was just that one day a guy from the Caserna across the street drops over to the Turistico and asks me if I’d like to have my passport back. I tell him, sure, you bet. So they give it to me, just like that. I
think the Italians was tryin’ to stick the needle into Uncle Sam for tellin’ ’em that American loans would have to go for military defense and never mind the food. Shit, at that point the Italian people just wanted to eat and they didn’t give a fuck about buildin’ a new army.”

With passport in hand, Luciano quickly became a European traveler. “I never used the visas for Belgium or Spain, but I did go to England and France and Switzerland. Lansky had opened an account for me in Zurich when he was up there on his honeymoon and I wanted to see what it was all about. I didn’t have too much in the account, maybe a couple hundred thousand, but at least I wanted to make sure nobody was foolin’ around with that nest egg.

“Another time, I went up to see the races at Longchamps, outside of Paris. I went all by myself and nobody bothered me and I came back in a couple of days. I had never been to Paris before, and even though I was only there for about forty-eight hours, it took me two months to tell Igea every little detail. The first question she asked me when I got home was did I go to the ballet. I burst out laughin’ and she started to cry and wouldn’t talk to me for a whole day.

“The first trip I made to London was to meet Meyer there. I stayed at a quiet little hotel next to a park. It was called the White House — can you imagine Lucky Luciano sleepin’ at the White House? I even thought about maybe sendin’ a bunch of picture postcards to all the guys in the outfits in the U.S.A. to let ’em see where I was stayin’. So I spent a few days up there just before Christmas in 1950 and I bought some presents for Igea, looked over the territory that Meyer and me figured we might move in on, and so forth. That was the time gamblin’ still wasn’t legal in London, but it didn’t hurt none to get a feel for the place. Then I bought a lotta cloth for suits and I went to that famous French store on Bond Street, Sulka, and I got a dozen bolts of material for shirts. I had all that stuff made up in Italy, but Sulka made ties to order and they sent ’em to me by airmail.”

In the next few years, until his passport was lifted in 1955, Luciano traveled often. He would go to London a few times a year, “just to listen to the Limeys talk English and get clothes. Also about the weather up there. I never liked the cold weather when
I was in New York, and I’d always head for Florida in the winter when I could. But once you’ve been livin’ in Italy, you miss everythin’ about New York, the weather included. Then I found that the cold in London was just like New York. There was days I used to stand on the street corner in London and just let the wind blow across my face, stand there freezin’ and lovin’ every minute of it. There was people walkin’ by, speakin’ a language I could understand, and the cold — it was great.”