The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (55 page)

He went to Paris, too, to see shows, specifically the Folies-Bergère. “And they had some movie houses where you could hear American actors in English, not dubbed in Italian like in Italy. Just to sit in a damn movie house and listen to the original sound was worth the dough for the trip.”

Sometimes Igea would go with him, on rare occasions to London, for she did not like that city, and more often to Paris, where she would attend the ballet while Luciano was at the movies or the racetrack. “She used to get real sore at me when I told her I would do anythin’ for her but watch a bunch of fairies jump around in tights with their balls showin’.”

But on all his trips he studiously avoided the private gambling clubs. “All I hadda do was walk into one of them joints and somebody’d recognize me like a shot and four minutes later Scotland Yard or the French police or Interpol and every cop on duty would be givin’ me a free ride back to the airport. So I figured, it’s not worth it; besides, maybe I’d drop a bundle and that was somethin’ I didn’t need.”

Despite his freedom in the years after 1950 to travel outside Italy and, to a limited degree, within the country, Luciano never was far from feeling that he was teetering on disaster. His occasional sudden and unexplained absences almost invariably brought the
police down upon him on his return, brought more harassment and interrogation, and his silences led only to increased suspicion. The conviction of American and Italian authorities continued that he was the dominant figure not only in the organized rackets in the United States and Italy, but more particularly in the illegal narcotics trade around the world.

Then, early in 1951, Charles Siragusa arrived. He had been working as a narcotics agent for the United States Treasury Department in Paris, but he convinced Anslinger that his background, his ability to speak fluent Italian, both Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, and his knowledge of the underworld ambience, would suit him ideally for work as an undercover agent in Italy, would permit him to get Luciano. The Guardia di Finanza and Italian authorities in Rome agreed to cooperate, but local police officials in Naples were not advised, because they were considered eminently corruptible.

Siragusa initially centered his activities in Naples, posing as a well-to-do American narcotics buyer. Wherever he went and to whomever he talked, he tried to turn the conversation to Luciano, to develop evidence. But his efforts failed repeatedly.

Unfortunately for Siragusa, within hours of his arrival in Naples, Luciano’s informants advised him of the agent’s presence. “He no more’n opened his mouth in Naples when I knew all about it. I thought to myself, when the hell is that fuckin’ Asslinger gonna leave me alone? Then, a couple days later, I heard that Siragusa’s propositionin’ guys to say that they bought from me, and he was tryin’ to have me planted with packages. That was too much. So I arranged to have word reach the
questura
and they picked up the bastard and tossed him in the clink. They didn’t know who he was, only that he was an American in Italy tryin’ to buy dope. They interrogated him all night long, and that dumb son of a bitch was caught in the middle. If he opened up and told ’em who he was, that meant he blew his cover; if he kept his mouth shut, they could keep him under wraps for Christ knows how long. After a few hours, the shitheel broke and told ’em who he was. But the funny part was the Naples cops didn’t believe him, and it took a helluva lot of wires and calls back and forth to Rome before the Guardia di Finanza in Naples got a confirmation. Siragusa went
back to Rome with his tail between his legs, his face as red as a beet and showin’ a yellow streak a mile wide. After that, he hated me worse than Asslinger. Every few days, I kept gettin’ reports from different sources that he was tryin’ to nail me. As far as I was concerned, all he was gonna dig up was his own dirt.”

Siragusa, as it happened, already had reason enough for antipathy toward Luciano. They had battled at least once before, only then it had been at long range, before the narcotics agent’s arrival in Naples.

In 1950, Eugenio Giannini was a minor American hoodlum, a member of Tommy Lucchese’s outfit, an occasional courier to Europe and, often, a dope peddler for Vito Genovese. He was something else, too: for years he had been an informant for the narcotics bureau.

“After I got to Naples in 1950, this guy Giannini come down to see me one day from Rome. He brought me some money from New York and a couple messages from Tommy Lucchese and other guys. Then he gives me a proposition. He asks me to handle some black market money. I told him I’d think about it and I let him cool his heels for a couple days while I made some contacts. Somehow, this guy just didn’t sit right.”

While Giannini was waiting, he was picked up by Italian police for smuggling penicillin into Italy. “They didn’t give a shit about the black market in money, but when it come to medicine and some son of a bitch was tryin’ to gouge a guy’s eyes out for a dose of penicillin, that really got ’em sore. Then, the minute Giannini landed in the clink, he started screamin’ for help, and the guy he starts screamin’ for is Siragusa. It didn’t take me long to add it up. Siragusa would’ve used Giannini to frame me. So I sent back word to New York that Giannini was a fink and they should get him when the Italian cops threw him outa the country. There was no question to me that Siragusa was plannin’ to use that idiot Giannini to get me if he could.”

On September 20, 1952, Giannini was shot in the head in East Harlem.

Lack of success did not prevent Siragusa from sending back a report to Washington on his findings. “Ever since his arrival here,” he wrote, “Luciano has been in touch with the most notorious delinquents
of the United States in various ways. Especially through the chiefs of the underworld who visit Italy. We can prove that Luciano has received big sums of money from these visitors.”

And he kept searching for a break. In April of 1951, he thought he had found one. An Italian police captain named Giulano Oliva received a tip that a plane from Milan to Palermo, with several stops, would contain a passenger named Frank Callace, whose luggage would contain three kilos — a little over six and a half pounds — of pure heroin, bound for America. When the plane landed at Rome, police removed an American named Frank Callace. They found nothing in his luggage, and then became a little suspicious, for the tip had said Callace would be in his fifties; the man they had taken into custody was in his thirties. Wires were sent to the next stop, Naples, and as the passengers debarked, the police spotted a man answering the original description. They detained him. He was traveling under the name Nick Cappo, but almost immediately he admitted that he was the real Frank Callace and the man arrested in Rome was his nephew. Trapped, Callace began to sing, and his song was that he had received the heroin found in his suitcase from a Frenchman named Cheveaux during a visit to Milan. He was taking it to Palermo to sell to a friend. An investigation could turn up no Cheveaux and revealed that Callace’s Sicilian friend had been dead for two months. Callace was tried, convicted, and sent to jail for two years; on his release, he disappeared, turning up in New York in 1954 in a parked car with three bullets in his head.

There was nothing in the case to indicate any tie to Luciano, except vague word from the original informant that Callace’s source of supply had been an old friend of Luciano’s named Joe Biondo. This did not deter Siragusa. He declared that Luciano must be involved, demanded that he be arrested and his suite at the Turistico be searched. The Naples police did as asked, but when nothing incriminating was found and no ties to Callace could be developed, Luciano was released. As he left the Guardia di Finanza, one of the officials mentioned Siragusa and pointed to his head, saying he had become
“pazzo”
when it came to Luciano.

But still Siragusa was determined to have some satisfaction, however slight. He had noticed Luciano’s Buick and now he demanded
that police investigate to see if he had any right to own it. Luciano was soon haled into court and charged with failure to register his new automobile with its New Jersey license plates. He was fined thirty-two thousand lire — fifty dollars.

“These things was doing terrible things to Igea. After they searched our place, I sat down with her and told her that this kind of life was not for her. She was entitled to peace and a decent way of livin’ and she could never have it with me. I pleaded with her to go back to Milan; I told her she would never have to worry about money for the rest of her life. It was like talkin’ to the wall; she just ran over to me and held me so tight that I finally stopped talkin’.

“That’s when I decided to do somethin’ radical. I decided to go to the source of my problems, to Mr. Harry Asslinger. Around the end of April, I sent him a proposition in writing. I had somebody write it for me, in good English. I told him I would agree to solve his whole goddamn narcotics problem, or at least a fuckin’ good part of it, if he would pull the wires that could get me back to the States. I said even though he knew that I didn’t deal in junk, that I had the reputation for bein’ the head of it because of the publicity he and Kefauver and the rest of them guys was givin’ me. So I would use that position to do somethin’ that he never had the brains to think of and that I was probably the only guy in the world who could do. I explained that the United States narcotics business was strictly import, with all the stuff comin’ out of Europe and the Middle East. So, I agreed to go to the source, as the only way to shut off the supply to America. I said I would round up and organize the suppliers, which nobody had ever thought of doin’, maybe because they was so spread out in different countries. Naturally, I didn’t tell Asslinger that every one of them pipelines had been tied together by Vito and all I hadda do was step in and talk to them bums. Once I had the suppliers together, I told him, I would go to the States and tell all the guys in the outfits around the country that I was gonna burn the junk unless they got out of the business.

“The worst thing that could’ve happened to me was they would knock me off. But I figured such a drastic thing on my part would make the guys in the States realize I was serious and later on they’d
all respect me for helpin’ all of ’em, the whole outfit. As far as the Narcotics Bureau in Washington was concerned, the rest would be up to them; they would have the biggest part of that fuckin’ business in their hands; they wouldn’t have to worry about the States if they had the right kind of moxie to force all the countries where the supply was comin’ from to clamp down on what I would organize. It sounds wild but I just felt inside me that I could make it work.

“I didn’t tell Igea about all this. What was the use of gettin’ her excited? I know my offer got to Washington and I know Siragusa knew about it. But I never received no answer from neither one of ’em. The only thing I could figure was that either Asslinger and his boy Siragusa was fruity on the subject of Luciano and didn’t want to hear nothin’ good from me, or somebody in Washington figured they’d rather have the narcotics business keep goin’ instead of Lucky Luciano settin’ foot in the United States again.”

Luciano not only failed to receive a reply to his offer, but he also found himself, in the aftermath, the object of increased pressure from Siragusa. The surveillance was tightened, his telephone tapped, his visitors photographed by telephoto lenses. And then Siragusa found a staunch ally in Naples, the new police chief, Giovanni Florita.

“I was warned the day Florita was appointed that he was gonna be trouble for me. Only a couple days later, Siragusa shows up and I get the word that him and Florita are together like two peas in a pod. One of the guys from the Guardia meets me in secret and he tells me that I gotta watch out for Siragusa, because he made a deal with Florita to work together to get me for bein’ the head of junk. Both of ’em figure if they can get me they’ll become big men in one jump.”

For the next eighteen months, Florita and Siragusa labored, fruitlessly, to trap Luciano. “They pulled a lotta stupid things. One time, there was a countess in Naples whose husband had a good title, only he didn’t have no money to go with it. She was really good-lookin’. It was durin’ the time of the Callace mess and Igea and I had a fight about me gettin’ out of the rackets and I felt rotten about it because it’s the first time we ever had an argument. I left the hotel and I’m walkin’ over toward the piazza when
a fella walks alongside me and hands me a note and then runs like hell. It’s in a lady’s handwritin’ and it was signed by this contessa. She invited me over to the Hotel Londres to have an aperitif with her. I walk into this little bar and she’s sittin’ there waitin’ for me. Right away, I figure this has to be a plant, but I don’t say nothin’ and I wait for her to make the move. In a couple minutes, after we do a little chitchat, she comes up with the proposition. She says that everybody in Naples knows I’m the head of the black market and she’s been runnin’ money and cigarettes, helpin’ certain guys, back and forth between Naples and Tangier. She says there ain’t enough dough in this and she’s gotta make more money.

“Then she comes out with it. She says she’s willin’ to take some risks if I could use her services. When she says the word ‘services,’ I know she means I can take her right upstairs and lay her as a kind of goodwill down payment. I don’t bat an eye and finally I says to her, very polite, ‘Contessa, I’ve been lookin’ at you from far away with the greatest desire. I can’t hold back no more.’ She practically pulls me to my feet and drags me over to the elevator and we wind up in a nice room overlookin’ the piazza. As soon as I lock the door, I turn to her, grab her dress by the neck and tear it right off.

“And then I clipped her right on the jaw and knocked her across the bed. Her eyes almost popped. I was so mad I could’ve torn her apart. She was practically naked, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. I said to her, ‘I got a girl who’s worth a thousand of you. I wouldn’t touch you with Florita’s prick. Tell me why you’re tryin’ to set me up.’ Well, I finally convinced her to tell me the truth. She said that Florita and Siragusa give her the money to stage this little play and she was supposed to let me carry some junk for her.”