The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (65 page)

“So it went along just like before, except for one thing. I never could lay my hands on a big hunk of dough; there always seemed to be some reason, some excuse why Lansky couldn’t arrange it. There was this friend of mine from the old neighborhood when I was a kid, the guy Coppola who lived with me in the cold-water room. When his wife died and his two kids moved away and he was alone and too old to work — the guy was always legit — I thought it would be a nice idea to bring him over to Naples and set him up in a little store like we used to have down on the East Side, the Two Cents Plain kind of candy store. I started to look around for a spot in Naples where I could put up a nice place to sell good candy and homemade ice cream, American style. By the time I got through, it would’ve cost me fifty, sixty thousand bucks, and I just didn’t have that kind of dough to lay out in one hunk. It was drivin’ me crazy. I had already tapped the laundry account in Zurich for a load of money. Igea had been sick for almost a year and the bills for the hospital and the doctors and surgeons and nurses was sky-high, but I wanted her to have the best.”

For months, Luciano sent back urgent messages to his friends in New York, by mail and through the couriers who regularly came to him, that he wanted a large sum of money, in one payment, for the personal reasons he laid out. But the money did not come. So Luciano began to turn away the couriers without answering the questions they brought to him, with refusals to send along any advice. “All I did was send back the word that I was retired and to leave me alone. But those bastards in America still wouldn’t believe me.

“But you know who did believe me? The Italian police. And my lawyer, Giovanni Passeggio, he believed me, too.” (Passeggio, who would later become a close adviser to Italian President Giovanni Leone, talked privately to Italian authorities in Luciano’s behalf and helped convince them that he was just as inactive in American affairs as he had been for years in Italian ones.)

“Some of the newspaper guys believed me, too, and some of ’em even began to talk about me as a kind of Bernie Baruch, like I was a senior citizen doin’ nothin’ but sittin’ on a park bench. One guy from the New York
Herald Tribune
named Barrett McGurn wrote a very nice and honest thing about me bein’ retired and it was printed all over Italy and the States. It helped things ease up for me, helped me get over that bad heart attack and start livin’ again. But I was always burnin’ up about the sixty grand I wanted to open a store for Coppola in Naples. That’s how the whole thing about a movie of my life got started.”

During all the years he had been in Italy, Luciano had received an endless series of offers from European and American motion picture producers seeking his cooperation and approval for a film on his life. He had spurned them all. But at this moment in 1959, he began to reconsider. That summer, he was introduced to a producer from New York who made a proposal of the kind Luciano had heard so often in the past. Initially, Luciano turned him away.

“By September of 1959, I was still feelin’ pretty lousy. The pinch on my money from New York was causin’ me a lot of tension and the doc said that it was aggravatin’ my heart condition. I began to have what he called angina pains in my chest and I was takin’ a lot of nitroglycerin pills for that and other kind of pills because my blood pressure was goin’ up. Everything was pretty rotten. So this producer hit me again at the right time. I guess he must’ve understood that I needed money, so he made me a proposition that sounded okay. He would get a script started right away and as soon as they began to start filmin’, I would get a hundred thousand dollars, cash on the barrelhead. Then I was also supposed to get ten per cent of the profits. And if I didn’t like what he was doin’, I had the right to call the whole thing off.” On Capri at the beginning of October, Luciano signed a contract giving an option to make his life story, with the provision that the picture had to be completed within three years.

If the movie was started, Luciano would have the money he wanted. Meanwhile, the pressures on him from New York mounted. In mid-October, Luciano’s close friend Pat Eboli arrived as a courier with money and a number of messages. The
council in New York wanted Luciano’s views on how to handle what seemed like an impending war in Brooklyn, revolving around the aging and ill Joe Profaci. Then, there was still a problem with Vito Genovese. In his cell in Atlanta, he had apparently come to the conclusion that Luciano had been in some way responsible for his predicament, and so he had dispatched orders to Tommy Eboli and Gerry Catena to “do something about Charlie Lucky.” Genovese, Pat Eboli said, was openly insisting that he would get Luciano if it was the last thing he ever did.

But what was perhaps the most important news brought by Pat Eboli dealt with the organization’s response to a new campaign in the press, supported by Washington, against the so-called American Mafia. “Pat told me that a plan was bein’ worked out all around the country to do somethin’ about a television program called
The Untouchables
. It was a big hit and all it did was use some of the newspaper files about the old Chicago mob in the Capone days and maybe change a couple names. The program was really goin’ over with the public, and the sponsor, Chesterfield cigarettes, was as happy as a kid with a new toy. So the council had a meet about it and one of the guys in Profaci’s outfit, named Joe Colombo, come up with the idea of formin’ a legitimate association of Americans with Italian backgrounds to start a campaign against usin’ just Italian names for them gangsters in the TV shows and movies. The whole idea was to try to get
The Untouchables
off the fuckin’ air. Pat was told to get my point of view and see if I could recommend the right guy to head up the new association.

“I thought about the whole thing for a day or so, while Pat was still there, and I couldn’t see nothin’ wrong with the idea, on condition that nobody connected with any outfit have his name involved. It had to be strictly legit on the surface or it would fall into the shithouse before it ever got off the ground. I looked over the list of names they sent me and finally I agreed on Santangelo.” Congressman Alfred Santangelo, New York Democrat, was soon named New York State president of the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations and headed a nationwide campaign to force
The Untouchables
off the air through a boycott of the sponsor, Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company. That campaign
finally paid off on March 14, 1961, when the cigarette manufacturer announced it was withdrawing its sponsorship because of the pressures. According to Luciano, “Santangelo knew from the beginnin’ that the whole thing was dreamed up and supported by the outfits.

“After we got all through talkin’ about that, I asked Pat about why the envelope he handed me was a little short inside. He looked kind of embarrassed and he said, ‘The Little Man didn’t have everything in order when I was ready to leave, so he told me to bring what he gave me.’ That’s when I knew — I mean, when I was sure — that Lansky was the only one in the States who took me seriously when I said I wanted to retire. So the dirty son of a bitch was startin’ to slice me into a fuckin’ two-bit pension. I didn’t say nothin’ to Pat about it. I just let it ride, to see what would happen the next time somebody come with my dough. And I was dead right. A few weeks later, I get an envelope with a little bit less — I think it was down to about ten grand. Only this time, there was a message from Lansky that was a load of shit. He said things was goin’ bad in the States and everybody was tightenin’ their belts. Castro had taken over Cuba, which was knockin’ our treasury out of about six million a year, and there wasn’t nothin’ to replace it yet.

“That little bastard knew goddamn fuckin’ well that London was already runnin’ good and that the second new casino in the Bahamas was jammed every night; even after the British government’s taxes and the private payoffs, the profits was beautiful, up in the millions. So all my partners was cuttin’ up the numbers high up in the seven figures and I’m sittin’ on my ass in Naples without enough dough to open a goddamn candy store.”

There was something else, closer to home, that bothered Luciano, too. Siragusa had been transferred out of Italy, which was good news for Luciano, even though he began to get a fill-in on exactly what Siragusa had been doing for nearly a decade. “Guys I knew in the Guardia di Finanza and the
carabinieri
told me all kinds of little stories about how this son of a bitch had tried to nail me.”

The departure of Siragusa, however, did not mean that the Americans had abandoned their attempts to nail Luciano. It
merely indicated a change in tactics. The new chief of the campaign was another Italian-American, this time attached to the Central Intelligence Agency, named Henry Manfredi. “He was a lot smoother than Siragusa, and he had plenty of savvy. He took it easy and he wasn’t gonna be a wise guy to run down to Naples wearin’ dirty old clothes and tryin’ to make believe he was a drug buyer. He was too smart for that. Instead, he used a guy who called himself Mike Cerra, only I was told that wasn’t his real name. Cerra was a big, good-lookin’ guy in his thirties and he passed himself off as a major in the U.S. Air Force. I was tipped off about him the day he arrived in Naples and my contacts suggested that maybe this time I oughta string him along, let him think I believed him, maybe even let him get little things from the PX for me. That way, he wouldn’t get no ideas that I was on to him, and we could use the guy. If he didn’t get wise, we figured we could feed him all kinds of crap and really screw things up back in Rome and Washington, which is what we did. Every once in a while, me and Momo or Joe Di Giorgio would cook up a little scene and let Cerra think he was on to somethin’ big. Boy, would I like to see the crap he wrote up in his files from the stuff I was throwin’ him.

“To tell the truth, though, I kinda took to this Mike Cerra, or whatever his real name is. He was a likable fella even though I know that everythin’ he tells me is strictly bullshit. Actually, we had some nice talks and a couple times I invited him to the farm at Santa Marinella and to my apartment, but never when Adriana was around; I told her about him and she couldn’t hide things, so I think she would’ve spit in his eye.”

Playing with Cerra was an amusing game. But there were other problems not quite so frivolous. Luciano was greatly worried about his health and his finances. He was concerned, too, about Adriana. He even suggested to her that she leave him and return to her family and her old boy friend when doctors advised him to abstain from sex. But Adriana, even with Luciano’s promise to provide for her, would hear none of this. Instead, she became ever more attentive to his needs, and she attempted to serve as a buffer between him and the mounting outside pressures.

By the fall of 1959, Luciano was growing increasingly disenchanted with the movie project. The producer seemed unable to come up with a script to Luciano’s liking; all the ideas were merely reprises of old gangster movies from the 1930’s. “It looked like I made a bum decision. I told him if he couldn’t do better right way, we might as well forget the whole thing. I needed the money and I didn’t want to fool around no more.”

In Madrid to make another film, the producer met Martin Gosch, one of the authors of this book, a former Hollywood producer and screenwriter who was then running his own production company in Spain. Gosch agreed to try his hand at a new screenplay and then to work as coproducer of the film, conditional on a meeting with Luciano and securing his approval and agreement to cooperate.

A meeting was arranged. In October, Gosch and his wife de-toured from a trip to New York to call on Luciano in Naples. Gosch’s idea of a film on the years in exile appealed to Luciano. Furthermore, during the early 1940’s, Gosch had produced and had been one of the writers on the Abbott and Costello radio program. “When I was in the can up at Great Meadow in 1943,” Luciano told him, “I used to love to listen to that program every Thursday night, even though I knew that fat bastard Costello was a no-good prick. He come from over in Jersey and all the guys in the outfit over there knew him. The minute he made it big, he started to act like his shit was gold. I figure anybody who could make a nice guy out of a shit like Lou Costello should certainly be able to handle me and tell my story fair and decent.”

Before leaving Naples, Gosch gave Luciano an outline of the script he proposed: it would be almost wholly fictionalized, based on the relationship between an exiled American gangster and an
Italian girl he falls in love with, and centering around attempts by the American underworld to gain possession of a diary in which the gangster, supposedly Luciano, had recorded all the secrets of his life; of necessity, there would be scenes dealing with major and well-publicized events in the United States, such as the attempt on Frank Costello and the assassination of Albert Anastasia.

“Your contract gives you the right to turn down anything I prepare for any reason whatever,” Gosch told Luciano. “That’s a big gamble for me, in time, effort and money.”

“It’s a good gamble, Marty,” Luciano said. “I think you should take it.”

So Gosch went off to work on the screenplay. To collaborate with him, he hired an English writer named John Cresswell, for he had been told that nobody in America would be willing to do a script that would deal even partially sympathetically with a man of Luciano’s notoriety.

While Gosch and Cresswell worked, Luciano’s money was still coming from New York, but each courier seemed to bring less than the one before. There was enough, barely enough, for his own needs, but now he found himself unable to hand out the weekly allotments to the army of deportees and impecunious Italians who depended upon him. Among them seemed to be every needy prostitute in Naples. “All over the world I was the big white slaver, the guy who beat up broads and made ’em whores. So here I am in Naples givin’ ’em money just so’s they can eat. I’d like Tom Dewey to know about that. But when the dough got so short, I couldn’t face all them people. I began to spend more and more time up on the farm in Santa Marinella so I wouldn’t have to see ’em and tell ’em there was no money this week or next week. I really felt lousy that I hadda go and hide.