The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (63 page)

“Anyway, for me and Costello and Lansky, at least we had Vito put way in a federal jug. The best he could do from there was give a few orders, but that didn’t mean they’d be followed. Tommy
Eboli had too many ambitions and Jerry Catena is a guy who just wants to live good; he don’t look for power or trouble. So, I still had to watch out for any moves.

“Then I got clobbered by somethin’ I couldn’t do nothin’ about.”

Early in 1958, with Luciano absorbed in the plot against Genovese that was reaching fruition, he was suddenly diverted by a more urgent demand for his time and attention. Once more, Igea’s energy and good humor were being drained and the pains and suspicious lumps in her left breast returned.

“This time, I took her to see Dr. Matteoli myself, and I went right in his office while he examined her. There was no question about it, she was really in pain. But he wouldn’t let on nothin’ to her, he just said, ‘Well, young lady, I think we should put you into the hospital and take out those little bumps.’ He was very cheerful and said she had nothin’ to worry about. He just called ’em tumors and she wasn’t to be frightened. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Charlie, why don’t you stay and let me give you an examination?’

“So I stayed behind and as soon as Igea left the office, I said to the doc, ‘All right, tell me, what’s wrong with her?’ He said, ‘I think she has cancer. It looks bad and I’m sorry we waited so long.’

“I almost got sick right there in the office. I said to him, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘No, I can’t be sure. But she has too many symptoms and we have to do an exploratory operation.’ I said to him, ‘But if she’s got cancer, does that mean she’s gonna die?’ He said, ‘Not necessarily. If we reach it in time, she’ll live a long life. But if the tumors are cancer, we’ll have to remove her breast.’ I said to him, ‘I don’t care what you gotta do, just save her life.’ ”

The next day, Igea was taken to the hospital and the following morning, when the pathology revealed carcinoma, her left breast was removed; the cancer had spread deep and so the excision was extensive.

The operation took several hours and Luciano paced the waiting room with an almost unbearable anxiety, waving away even the close friends who came by. “I just couldn’t stand to have nobody even near me. I smoked one butt after another and prayed. I promised God anythin’ if only He would make her better. Then Dr. Matteoli came out and told me it looked like the operation was a success. They hadda remove her breast, but he was hopeful they got all the cancer. One thing was sure. We had the best surgeons we could get in this part of Italy.

“They let me go into the recovery room and I sat down by Igea’s bed. She was still out and her face looked so little and pale that I felt like breakin’ my hand against the wall. As I looked at her, I just couldn’t help but feel that maybe it was my fault, my fault for meetin’ her ten years before, for gettin’ her tied up with me. The more I looked at her, layin’ there so helpless, knowin’ she was gonna wake up and find out that what she was scared of really happened, the more I realized how much I cared for her. I once said that I didn’t know what love is, but at that minute it come to me that I knew all along — love and Igea was the same thing for me.

“After about an hour, Igea woke up a little bit and asked me what happened. She was so groggy from the anaesthetic she could hardly open her eyes. I told her the surgeons said everythin’ was okay and that she was gonna get better. She went back to sleep again and I kept sittin’ there by her bed. Every couple minutes, the nurses come in and tried to get me to eat somethin’, but I couldn’t get it down; I just had a little coffee.

“Then Igea woke up again. She was a little more conscious this time and the first thing she noticed was all the heavy bandages around her chest, especially on the left side. She asked me, ‘They took off my breast?’

“All I could do was nod my head. My throat was so tight I couldn’t talk and when she asked me, ‘I have cancer, isn’t that right?’ she said it like it was a death sentence and then she started
to cry. What could I say? What could I do? I just told her the surgeons said they got it all and that she’d be okay. But the words stuck in my throat and she shook her head, like she knew it was a lie.”

When Igea returned to the penthouse after a few weeks, she was withdrawn and morose, shying from Luciano’s touch, apparently convinced that now she was less than a woman and no longer attractive to him. Himself filled with fear and concern, he tried without much success to raise her spirits, to make her feel needed and wanted. And he was helped from outside; the story of Igea’s illness reached the press and soon the apartment was filled with flowers from people all over Italy, from strangers.

In the midst of Igea’s illness, however, there was some good news. In early February, one of Italy’s most famous lawyers, Giovanni Passeggio, telephoned Luciano from Rome. He had become intrigued by Luciano’s almost endless problems with Italian and American authorities and suggested that perhaps he might be of some help. A meeting was arranged for the following day in Naples.

At that session, Passeggio told Luciano that during a recent trial he was handling in Rome, he had learned that John Cusack, head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Narcotics Bureau in Rome and immediate superior to Charles Siragusa, was still pressuring Italian authorities to do something about the exiled gangster, and that pressure seemed to be mounting in the wake of the sympathetic stories in the press about Igea. It had reached a point, Passeggio said, where police magistrates in Naples had been issued orders to summon Luciano before them to reopen inquiries about his activities. If Luciano desired it, Passeggio concluded, he would be willing to appear as his counsel.

“I could hardly believe my ears. This guy was one of the most important legal brains in Italy, with plenty of muscle in the government, and he comes to me first without even bein’ approached. It seemed to be a sign of good luck.”

The hearing on Luciano opened on February 24 before a police magistrates’ tribunal headed by Judge Attilio Zanotti. On the bench were two other magistrates, the Naples police chief and a
carabinieri
official. It was not a friendly group. Pointed questions were asked about Luciano’s business, about his income, about whether he might, in fact, be “socially dangerous.” Judge Zanotti seemed particularly displeased with reports that since the partial lifting of restrictions and curfew, Luciano had been spending his evenings in nightclubs and at the Agnano racetrack; it was, the court suggested, “beneath the dignity” of a supposedly retired gangster to be seen at public places where there was gambling and seminude entertainment. It might be a good idea, the tribunal said, if investigators dug deeply into Luciano’s finances and activities to see whether there was anything to the demands from the American Embassy in Rome that he was so dangerous he ought to be exiled from a major city such as Naples.

Passeggio was indignant. Instead of judging Luciano by his past, he said, the court ought to be concerned with his present. Luciano was an honest businessman and his work was all for the benefit of society; he was selling medical supplies, heading a company that produced equipment for schools, and devoting his spare time to the construction of Father Scarpato’s desperately needed Clinica di Lourdes.

When Passeggio had finished, Judge Zanotti declared that the matter would remain open and under investigation. “Giovanni,” Luciano said to his lawyer, “do you think they’ll ever leave me alone?”

“Be patient,” Passeggio said, putting his hand on Luciano’s shoulder. “We have only now begun to fight.” He smiled. “That’s a famous expression from your American history, no?”

“I wouldn’t know who said it,” Luciano answered, “but I sure like the sound of it comin’ from you about me.”

The tribunal’s investigation lasted nearly a month. On March 20, it reconvened to announce the results of its thorough examination of Luciano’s activities since his deportation in 1946, an inquiry that had dealt with his circle of American friends, his knowledge of and whereabouts at the time of the Anastasia murder, his legitimate business interests in Italy, and reports that “dear friends” in America provided him with a “comfortable” but not a “luxurious” living. The Italian authorities and the court said that while Luciano was seen from time to time in the company
of Italian-American “undesirables” who had been deported from the United States — something he freely admitted — there was nothing harmful to the state or to the Italian people in such relationships. The government’s prosecutor, Antonio De Franciscis, told the court that there was no evidence to warrant any further prosecution, though he asked permission to continue the investigation of the sources of Luciano’s income — and it was granted. Then the court announced its decision. Luciano, it said, was “a free citizen who, as has been proved, conducts a perfectly regular life which gives no grounds for censure.”

Under normal circumstances, the decision might have been cause for celebration. But Igea was still ill. She had, however, rallied enough to permit limited travel, so Luciano immediately took her to Capri, back to the small house by the sea. There, for a time, some happiness seemed possible. Then, one morning in the middle of April, Luciano awoke to find Igea sobbing bitterly. For a moment he thought she might once again be in pain from the operation. But she lowered the right side of her nightgown and pointed to her breast — there were several small but visible red lumps on it.

“One of our little dogs was named Bambi. Igea loved that Walt Disney picture about Bambi, so she named the dog after it. He was never out of her sight; Bambi even slept on our bed no matter where we was. Well, Igea started huggin’ that dog and cryin’. Of course, I realized why she was so upset. It was the fear of another operation and that maybe they would have to remove her right breast, too. I put my arms around her and I said all that mattered was for her to be well, that was all that counted to me.”

Luciano hurried Igea back to Naples, back to the hospital where, as both had feared, her right breast was removed. “Dr. Matteoli came out after they finished and he just kind of shook his head at me. He couldn’t talk. Then he finally gimme the bad news. After they opened her up they found the cancer had spread too far and they couldn’t get it all. I said to him, ‘Are you tryin’ to tell me that Igea is gonna die?’

“He said, ‘Yes, Charlie, there’s nothing more we can do. There is cobalt, but I don’t think it will have much effect. The disease is spreading all the time.’

“I asked him how long she had and he said he didn’t know; she could die in a couple weeks or maybe she could last a few months, but not longer than that. At that minute, I had the feelin’ that he was the most thoughtful man I ever knew. He never stopped tryin’ to help. After I took Igea back to the apartment, there wasn’t a day he didn’t come there and spend some time with her or do everythin’ he could to keep her from havin’ pain, like she was part of his own family and not just another patient. Finally, though, the pain got so bad that even the big shots of morphine didn’t help.

“Don Cheech came all the time and prayed. Sometimes there would be a dozen friends in our livin’ room, all of ’em hoodlums, deportees, the roughest kind of guys you could think of, accordin’ to the police, and they’d get down on their knees and cry as they prayed along with Father Scarpato. Everybody loved Igea. I thought Johnny Cockeye would go out of his mind; every time he saw me, he’d look deep into my face and then run away. He told me later he couldn’t stand to look into my eyes, they was always so full of tears.”

During the brief periods when pain abated enough so that she could talk with a smile, she would insist that Luciano not sit around the apartment, that he get out and be with people. He would go to the California, but return quickly. “When Igea and I could talk, what made me so sad was that all she ever wanted to think about was how I was gonna make out after she died. It was like a knife in me and I would tell her not to worry about that. I ordered her not to die; I ordered her to get better. But she was too smart to buy that crap. About the middle of the summer, she said she wanted to see Giovanni Passeggio the next time he come to Naples. I brought him about a week later. What do you think she said to him? She wanted him to arrange with the police so that I could go up and live with her folks in Milan after she died. Jesus Christ. He told her that he’d arrange anythin’ she wanted if she promised not to think such thoughts. And I told her that she’d been with me, like a wife, for ten years and I just couldn’t think of bein’ nowhere without her. Near the end, she told me she wanted to be buried at the Cimiterio di Musocco in Milan, in the family plot. I made her that promise.”

In September of 1958, Igea fell into a coma. She lingered for several days. On the advice of the doctors, Luciano telephoned her father, Giovanni Lissoni, and he immediately flew to Naples. In those final days, Luciano rarely left Igea’s bedside, sitting next to her, watching her intently for hours. He ate nothing and the lines in his face were etched deeper.

Early in the morning of September 27, Igea awoke briefly from the coma. She recognized Luciano, moved her hand slightly toward her father. She tried to form some words, then said distinctly, “
Caro mio
.” She lapsed into unconsciousness again and within an hour, at the age of thirty-seven, Igea Lissoni was dead.

The body was taken to Milan for burial, and in the obituary section of the
Corriere della Sera
of Milan on September 30, a black-bordered notice appeared:

Solaced by religious comfort, after a trying illness, her soul given to God, IGEA LISSONI, 37. Advising of the sad news are her Papa, her adored Charlie, sister Daria with her husband, niece Danila, uncles, aunts, cousins, and all relatives. Funeral will take place Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 14 hours, leaving the house at Via Rosalino Pilo, 14. Everyone who will attend the ceremony is thanked in advance. Milan, 27 September, 1958.