The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (57 page)

He began to give some heed to something Lansky had told him in Taormina, something the underworld treasurer had called his “laundry business.’ It was a simple operation. Money was skimmed off the top of gambling and other American operations and sent to Switzerland for deposit in numbered accounts. Then Lansky would arrange for some of the underworld’s legitimate operations — in real estate, legal gambling in Nevada, hotel-building and more — to borrow that money. “It was all nice and legit. We’d borrow money from ourselves and pay interest on that dollar right into our own pockets, only the interest was a business expense we could write off on American income taxes. It was like Lansky always said, ‘A lot of dough is nice, but it don’t do no good just lyin’ around. We have to work it the way the bankers do. They got money out, other people’s money, workin’ for ’em to make more money.’

“Of course, our way was better. It helped us take over legit businesses and get guys in hock to us. Meyer was sendin’ money from the outfits to Switzerland like an avalanche and bringin’ it back in loans and then sendin’ the interest back to Switzerland as part of the nontaxable profits. It was like we had a printin’ press for money. Back in ’51, it was just beginnin’, but you could see where it was goin’.

“Meyer told me I oughta get in on the system, take some of my dough that was comin’ in regular and whatever I could put aside from what I was makin’ in Italy and put it into one of them laundry accounts in Zurich. I said, okay, and that’s the way it started.

“Then I got word that Joe Adonis was comin’ with some money for me and I should meet him at the airport in Zurich where we could both do our bankin’. They got branches right at the airport
and all you have to do is step off the plane and walk right into your bank; you don’t even have to go through customs. This was the time when Joe A. was startin’ to have trouble; he got called in front of Kefauver, like Costello, Longie Zwillman and the rest of ’em, and then they started lookin’ into his gamblin’ in Jersey and his payoffs to the politicians, and then they even started to investigate where he was born; the fuckin’ idiot told ’em he was born in New York. He figured he had that covered pretty good but he wasn’t takin’ no chances that they might find out he wasn’t even a citizen. So that’s why he was goin’ to Zurich, to sock away a bundle nobody could find just in case he had to leave the States.

“I went to Zurich and hung around the airport until Joe’s plane come in from New York. He was still the same guy, standin’ on the ramp, combin’ his hair and posin’ like some movie star. It was the first time we seen each other since Havana and the meet was all happy and friendly. Joe’d been my pal for maybe thirty years, and between him and Frank and Meyer, they’re representin’ my outfit and tryin’ to keep a lid on that greedy pig, Vito.

“We walk over to one of the banks and Joe hands me an envelope for me to deposit. There’s a hundred grand in it, which I didn’t figure to be a helluva lot, not with the kind of business we was doin’ in the States. I maybe’d retired in Italy, but I was still the chairman when it came to the outfits in the States. Then Joe made out his own deposit. You know how much he dropped into the account? Three million bucks, that’s how much. It’s all sittin’ in this suitcase he’s got. He opens it up, counts it, and deposits it — three million. And I’m puttin’ in a measly hundred grand.

“I took him into a private room they have for personal depositors, and I was so fuckin’ mad I could’ve gone through the wall. I said to him, ‘Joe, what the hell’s goin’ on here? I get a hundred grand and you’re puttin’ in three million? You better explain that to me.’

“Joe A. says, ‘That’s the way it is, Charlie. The three million’s the dough I socked away all over the years. It’s my own personal money.’

“I said, ‘Joe, that’s bullshit. You live just as high as me and you spend whatever you get. I’m gettin’ a net of twenty-five grand a month from the States, besides this envelope you brought me
that’s been skimmed off the top of my own share. You guys are min tin’ money over there and you’re shortchangin’ me.’

“Joe says, ‘Listen, Charlie, the Little Man makes out all the sheets and he figures what everybody’s share of the pot is. If you got a complaint, take it up with Meyer.’

“Well, I was gettin’ madder and madder, not only because I know I’m bein’ rooked but even more because I know that this old pal is gonna get on the plane and go back to the States, to New York, to the Copa with all them beautiful broads around him, and the best I can do is go back to Naples and once in a while go to a crummy nightclub like the Snake Pit or the San Francisco, which are so dirty they have to keep the lights low so the customers won’t get a good look and vomit. And here’s a guy who’s got a big mansion over in Jersey and he’s a big American patriot who’s always talkin’ about how his kid’s gonna go to West Point, just like Meyer was talkin’ about his kid, and I couldn’t help but think about how Igea and me’re livin’, how we can’t have kids because I’m supposed to be the big boss and they watch me twenty-four hours a day, while Joe A. is shakin’ hands with senators and congressmen and all the big shots every night at the Copa.

“So I tell Joe that he oughta split that three million with me. I explain to him about me and Igea, how we wanna set up a decent life and it’s the first time I ever cared for anybody like that. I said to him, ‘Joe, if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have a fuckin’ quarter. I started you, all the way back from the time I took you down to Philly and put up the dough for you to buy that Scotch from Waxey Gordon. Your memory stinks, Joe. Don’t you know I made you?’

“You know what he said? He said, ‘Maybe you did, Charlie, but you can’t break me.’

“Thirty years of friendship went right down the crapper, then and there. I never trusted the son of a bitch again.

“When I got back to Naples, I sat down and wrote a letter to Lansky askin’ what the fuck was goin’ on. I let Meyer know, quiet and easy, that I wanted some good accountin’, right away. Meyer sent word that he would come to see me, personal, and he did. He said that what Joe A. told me at the Zurich airport was right. For a
couple years he had been worried that he was gonna get deported, so he’d been savin’ every nickel and bankin’ it all for the rainy day. Even though I still trusted Meyer in them days, and I figured maybe there was some truth in what he explained, I still wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t buy the whole story and it never changed the way I felt about Joe A. after that time.”

For the next few years, Luciano made regular trips to Zurich to deposit more money in that laundry account (later, he would be forced to withdraw it, when his funds ran short and the supply from the United States dried up). “But every time I went up there, I remembered that time with Joe A. and I would get mad at the bastard all over again.”

Then suddenly, in 1955, those trips — and all foreign travel — were over. Siragusa had become the European director of the United States Bureau of Narcotics. One day, he called in the press to issue another denunciation of Luciano and another demand that something be done about him. This time there was a response. Luciano was ordered to appear before the Naples Warning Commission, a kind of municipal morality board. The hearing was scheduled for November 5, and he was told to be prepared to answer all questions and give a detailed accounting of his sources of income.

In the weeks before the hearing, American and Italian authorities began to feed the press with a variety of stories about Luciano. He was, it was said, a potential danger to American military security, a danger that grew from his wide contacts with sailors and officers of the fleet anchored in Naples and his seemingly free access to goods from the PX and to APO mail channels. Naples Police Chief Florita joined the chorus with a ringing denunciation of Luciano, saying that recent investigations had turned up a variety of nefarious deeds that could be traced to him. Siragusa offered his congratulations and added, “I collaborated with the Naples police at their request.” The demands that the commission, when it met, do something about Luciano even came from across the Atlantic. New Hampshire’s Republican Senator Charles Tobey, a member of the Kefauver committee, declared, “There
are men whose conduct offends the nostrils of other American citizens, and in my judgment, Lucky Luciano heads the list.”

The commission met, heard Luciano in his own defense and the authorities against him, and then retired. Within a few months, it announced its decision. Luciano, it said, was “socially dangerous,” and as such was, for the next two years, to be barred from leaving his home between dusk and dawn, from traveling more than sixteen miles outside Naples, and from frequenting places such as nightclubs and the Agnano racetrack. Certain minor exceptions, however, were made: he and Igea were allowed to go to the beach resort at Ostia outside Rome for a vacation, and he was permitted to go to his farm at Santa Marinella, forty miles northwest of Rome.

His life had become a frustrating cycle, spinning endlessly between times of limited freedom and times of stringent restriction, between moments of power and moments of impotence. What was worse, for a man who once believed he controlled his destiny and the events around him, he seemed prey to the whims of others, he had little ability to influence the forces that moved around him, to shift the tide.

In the early 1950’s in Italy, Luciano could only sit before his television screen, or in the darkness of a movie theater, and watch with horror the same scenes that were fascinating television viewers in America — the sudden light shining brightly on the organization he had created, as his old friends were dragged from the dark corners where they had hidden, from behind the respectable fronts they had assumed, and exposed as the masters of the organized underworld. Unlike honest American citizens, Luciano found nothing enthralling in Estes Kefauver, the drawling Tennessee senator some called a Rhodes Scholar in a coonskin cap, or
his touring Senate crime investigating committee as it opened a few windows on the underworld’s corruption and control of American cities. He was not amused at the shocked incredulity of the aging Senator Tobey who castigated the “rats” testifying before the committee and demanded of their attorneys an answer to his question why any self-respecting lawyer would represent such “scum.” He was not fascinated or captivated by the sharp questions and lisping voice of committee counsel Rudolph Halley.

Americans may have been hypnotized, but Luciano was sickened at the sight of the nervously clenching and unclenching hands of Frank Costello (he refused to permit his face to be televised), his rasping voice barely audible as he refused to answer questions on advice of counsel, one of Luciano’s old lawyers, George Wolf. Costello was the star of the show, the heavy, along with Virginia Hill, the comic relief, good for a laugh (though not from Luciano) with her self-portrait of an innocent, dumb, naïve blonde who knew nothing about anything. There was the long parade of his old friends, their faces suddenly no longer anonymous — Joe Adonis, Longie Zwillman, Meyer Lansky (with Moses Polakoff, another Luciano lawyer, at his side), Willie Moretti, Albert Anastasia, the whole underworld hierarchy — professing shocked surprise at being called and questioned, feigning ignorance of any wrongdoing, alternating with sullen silence, devious evasion and outright refusal to answer. There was even former New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer, by then United States Ambassador to Mexico, sweating, fidgeting, attempting to minimize the import of his relationship with Costello, Luciano and others that was being laid before him and the public. Perhaps the only satisfaction for Luciano was the portrait of New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey arrogantly refusing to testify in public before the committee about the release of Luciano or about the open gambling at Saratoga.

“For me, it was like a nightmare. Them investigations, when they was all over, didn’t make a dent in nothin’ back in the States, except puttin’ the spotlight a little brighter on some of the guys. But, for me, every time my name got mentioned, the Italian cops kept pullin’ me in for questionin’, makin’ my life miserable. I was already out of all the rackets in Italy, tryin’ to live up to my word
to Igea, but that didn’t stop ’em. Siragusa was in there pushin’ every fuckin’ day and pushin’ Florita to keep roustin’ me.

“It just didn’t let up, and things came to a kind of head around ’54. There was an election for governor in New York and the Democrats was throwin’ a lotta stuff at Dewey about makin’ a deal with me to let me go and Dewey was sayin’ he let me go because of the secret work I done for the government durin’ the war, which he couldn’t talk about. Things got so hot that the Italians set up an open court in Palermo to find out whether I really helped the United States and they took me down there to testify. I knew nobody wanted to hear the truth; they just wanted me to stand up and tell all the lies, so I put on an act for ’em. You’d have thought I was General Eisenhower, the way I told ’em what a big American patriot I’d been, how I got all the Italians and Sicilians in the States workin’ to knock out the Nazis and how I got everybody in Sicily helpin’ the Americans during 1943, which is why the invasion was such a big success. It was all shit, but it was what they wanted to hear and they loved it. I was so good on that witness stand, I could’ve won an Academy Award.”

But there was more to Luciano’s decision to perpetuate and expand the fictions. He knew that had he told the truth, he could have inflicted some wounds on Dewey and thus earned a measure of revenge. But such revenge would not have come cheap. The rumors of his contributions to the war effort had won him considerable popularity with ordinary Italians and had brought him the assistance of many reputable and influential Italian politicians and businessmen. While the truth might have hurt Dewey, it might also have dissipated Luciano’s popularity and lost him some of his powerful friends. He was not willing to take that risk.