The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (66 page)

“One day, Pat Eboli come up with another one of them short envelopes. I told Patsy that when he got back to New York, he was to tell Lansky and the rest of the guys that I was gettin’ into the picture business, that I signed a deal to have a picture made that was supposed to be about my life, but I had the last word and I was gonna make sure it didn’t hurt nobody. In a little while, I got word back to go ahead, that they didn’t have no objections.”

In December, Gosch returned to Naples, this time with Cresswell, to outline the script in more detail. Luciano was entranced, and was even more excited when Gosch told him that he had worked a way for Luciano to return, at least briefly, to New York, though he would explain no details until the script had been finished and approved.

By February, the screenplay was done, and on February 18, 1961, Gosch sat in the living room of Luciano’s Naples penthouse and for three hours read the script aloud. Then he handed a pen to Luciano and said, “Here, sign it.” Luciano signed his approval on the first and last pages and initialed each of the 175 pages in between.

Then Luciano looked up. “Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Now let’s have that secret about gettin’ me back into New York.”

Under the terms of his movie contract Luciano had given the producer the right to sue others in his name in case of any legal infringements. However, under New York State law, in cases of defamation and invasion of privacy, a suit could only be brought by the injured party. At that moment, the Columbia Broadcasting System was televising a weekly series called
Your Witness
that dealt with mock trials of underworld figures. The initial show, in 1960, had concerned Luciano. The dialogue spoken by the actor portraying the gangster had never been shown to Luciano for his sanction and so, according to a legal opinion Gosch had secured, Luciano could sue for invasion of privacy and such a suit “would be impregnable against dismissal” and Luciano “would be entitled to his day in court.” This meant that permission would have to be granted for Luciano to appear personally at the hearings in New York. That Luciano’s stay in Manhattan would be a brief one, during which he would be closely guarded and his movements tightly restricted, and that the suit would undoubtedly be thrown out of court seemed certain. Nevertheless, he would get his chance, however short, to return.

It was an idea that Luciano embraced enthusiastically. He talked about it with animation as he drove Gosch back to the airport, and talked, too, about the plans for the movie. Gosch asked him if he had any ideas about the casting of the title role. After a moment’s thought, Luciano said, “Cary Grant.” It was such a
strange choice that Gosch was stunned. “Okay — you got any ideas?” Luciano asked.

Gosch’s choice was the singer Dean Martin, who had begun to do some straight acting in films. But Gosch added that he did not know Martin and so it might be difficult to get a script to him.

“Don’t worry about that,” Luciano said. “I’ll take care of it right away.” Luciano took two copies of the script, one for himself and the other to be airmailed immediately to Hollywood. Later, he told Gosch that he had sent a copy directly to Frank Sinatra, who had delivered it to Martin.

Then Gosch was off, first to Madrid for a brief stopover, and then on to London and Paris to arrange both financing for the movie and a newspaper syndication of a Luciano life story, to be ghostwritten from old clippings.

On February 20, as Luciano was waiting for word from Gosch, he had another visitor. It was not a courier with the money he was expecting, however reduced the sum might be, nor his friend Pat Eboli. “I went to the airport and it turned out to be Tommy Eboli. He was lookin’ kinda sour.” Instead of money, Eboli brought orders — from Genovese in Atlanta, from Gambino, Joe Bonanno and even from Luciano’s close friend, Tommy Lucchese; from, in fact, the entire leadership of the American underworld, including Lansky. The pressures on Chesterfield cigarettes had so far failed to move the sponsor from backing
The Untouchables
. Therefore, the council had decided, that pressure would be increased, to include a boycott. The last thing the Unione wanted at this moment, Eboli informed Luciano, was a motion picture based on the life and times of the Sicilian-born underworld leader, which would put the light once again on a galaxy of Italian criminals.

“Tommy told me that this was not a request from nobody; he was givin’ me orders. He talked to me like I was some young punk. The more he opened his mouth, the madder I started to get. I told him to his face that I saved him from goin’ to the can, that if it hadn’t been for me, he would be in Atlanta with his dear friend, Don Vitone. It was like talkin’ to the wall. He told me not to get sore at him, because he was only deliverin’ a message — that if I didn’t give up the picture, I was gonna be cut off complete. Or
maybe I wouldn’t even be around to enjoy the profits. That’s how strong it was.

“When I realized that Meyer Lansky was right in the middle of this, that’s when I knew he had us all by a string. Why should Lansky, bein’ a Jew, give a shit whether or not some fuckin’ movie had a bunch of Italian names in it? Because he was pullin’ the wires and everybody was dancin’ to his tune on the other end, like a bunch of puppets. Lansky held the purse strings, too; he was the treasurer and he was really tryin’ to be the boss of everythin’. It was just as clear as crystal to me what that little bastard was doin’. He was so hungry for power behind the scenes he’d kiss anybody’s ass and do anythin’ he had to do so that in the end, he — Meyer Lansky, my old partner and a Jew — would wind up the real boss of bosses of all the Italians and the Jews — and without a single fuckin’ vote on the council. I never really knew what it meant when we was kids and I used to call him the Genius. But at the age of sixty-four, I finally got wise.”

Despite his rage, Luciano had no choice at that moment but to bow to the demands. He sent Eboli back to New York with the word that he would abandon the film.

In Naples the next day, however, Luciano came to two decisions. The first was to call Martin Gosch back from London, tell him there would be no film, and make him a counterproposal — to become the repository of the life and secrets of Charles Lucky Luciano, a life story Luciano felt might not have much longer to run because of the second decision. That was to emerge from his self-proclaimed retirement and challenge the powers across the Atlantic. A decade later, Adriana Rizzo would say, “Charlie said, ‘They’re tryin’ to cut me off and push me around like I’m some kid. They don’t even lemme retire, like they done with Costello. Now they wanna start this crap with me. Well, screw ’em. I’m gonna teach ’em a lesson.’ ”

At Rome airport on February 26, 1961, Luciano and Gosch reached their agreement. Then Luciano revealed his plans for the months ahead. “All these years,” he said, “I’ve been accused of bein’ the king of narcotics for the whole fuckin’ world. It was all bullshit. It’s been almost forty years since I got a quarter out of junk. But all that’s gonna end right now. Once I offered the United States government to really head up narcotics so I could help squash it, but they wouldn’t listen. Now I’m gonna do that, what they said I’ve been doin’ all along. I’m gonna take over the supply of narcotics once and for all. It’s the only way I know to teach my ‘friends’ in the United States that they can’t order me around, that I won’t sit still for it. But you’re not gonna know nothin’ about it, Marty. I’m gonna tell you the story of my life as far back as I can remember, but what I do from this point on has nothin’ to do with you and you’re out of it. What I do from now on may succeed or it may get me bumped off, but then at least one person in this world will know the whole truth.”

As soon as Gosch had left, Luciano began to implement his plan to organize the multitude of independent and disorganized growers, shippers, processers and sellers. A decade earlier, his proposal to do that to shut off the supply of narcotics had been ignored. Now he would do it to create an empire that would enable him to squeeze his onetime associates in the United States whom he had now come to see as his enemies. They would be forced to come to him for their supplies. He would make himself so indispensable to the heads of the drug traffic in the United States that his life and safety would be insured, that they would not dare attempt any reprisals.

“If they wanted to make a buy, they was gonna have to come to me. All them guys like Vito found it so easy to buy junk that
they never gave a thought to organizin’ anything but the sales; they always figured the suppliers couldn’t live without ’em. That’s the first lesson I was gonna teach ’em — that without the supply they could have all the demand in the world and it wouldn’t do ’em no fuckin’ good. That was my version of Lansky’s Law.”

Immediately, Luciano closed out his “laundry” account in Zurich, taking half of the remaining balance of fifty thousand dollars and depositing it in the Naples branch of the U.S. Bank of America. The other half, twenty-five thousand dollars, he held in cash in his apartment, as a fund for his agents who began to fan out to France, Germany, Turkey and other areas. They talked to poppy growers, small-boat owners, drug refiners, carrying the message that Charlie Lucky wanted to organize, that those who created the supply should have the same protection and bargaining strength as those who created the demand. Reports back to Luciano indicated that after initial suspicion, there was considerable enthusiasm.

“I was spendin’ money hand over fist, wherever I could dig it up, but I was makin’ a lot of progress. One of the things that gimme a big kick was that most of them European suppliers was the same guys who’d been Vito’s original contacts as far back as the thirties, before the war when he was in Italy. Half my life, the name Charlie Lucky was supposed to carry a lotta weight, but I never gave it much thought. This time, the guys kept reportin’ back that the minute my name was mentioned, them guys in Turkey and Italy and Egypt and Germany practically scraped the ground. I figured I’d have the whole thing all set up and workin’ by the end of summer.”

With his goal in sight, Luciano sent back word to his associates in New York that he had taken steps to make their purchases of narcotics a more simplified and organized operation. Henceforth, they would have to deal only with him, and, he said, any attempt by them, individually or as a group, to bypass him he would take most unkindly.

It took only a few days before Luciano had his first response. He began to receive what he called “poison pen letters” from all over the United States. “Them letters all looked like they was written by me. I mean, with lousy grammar, like I have. Maybe I
don’t know how to use good grammar and that stuff, but I sure can recognize it when it’s written right. All them letters said the same thing, that I was makin’ a big mistake and that if I knew what was good for me, I would just keep my nose clean. Naturally, none of this advice had no return addresses and they wasn’t signed, and they didn’t say what it was all about. The postmarks was from weird little towns in the States where I never knew nobody and there was just no way to trace ’em. I mean, what cop could find out that Joe Profaci sent me a letter if it was postmarked Marion, Ohio?”

At first, Luciano was amused. With the arrival of each piece of hate mail, he would turn to Adriana and say, “Let’s see where the Black Hand is this week.” Even his health seemed to improve.

But late in the spring, the fun died. Pat Eboli arrived in Naples. “He had only a couple grand for me from New York, but he had plenty of messages. He told me when the word got back that I was gonna tie up the junk supply in Europe, everybody really got violent. He said when Tommy brought the news down to Vito in Atlanta, Genovese practically had a hemorrhage right in the visitors’ room and demanded that I was to get hit right away, without no delay. I told Pat if that kind of threat come from Joe Profaci, I’d take it serious. But I knew that little pig too goddamn well, and the way his mind worked. He was gonna try to do somethin’ different. AU I hadda do was figure out what it meant by different.”

As he had done often in the past, Luciano tried to put himself into Genovese’s mind. He came to the conclusion that the reprisal against him would be of the same kind he and the others had used to send Genovese to prison. It would be totally apart from whatever moves the other leaders of the organization might take, for Genovese, Luciano was certain, would want his own revenge. And Luciano concluded that it would probably entail an attempt to get Charlie Lucky on a narcotics charge.

Now Luciano began to worry, convinced that two major adversaries were about to descend upon him — the combined forces of the American underworld bent on his murder, and the forces of Genovese determined to see him imprisoned for the rest of his life. Luciano went into partial seclusion in his penthouse. His
chest pains returned, more severe than ever, his blood pressure rose, and he began taking increasing quantities of medicine. He would sit for hours staring out the window, his body sagging, his face drawn and ashen. He saw no one but his closest and most trusted friends.

On his frequent visits, Gosch became aware of the deepening depression, as Luciano talked of a sudden yearning to see his family. He had even sent for his sister Fannie and she was due to arrive within a few days. During one of these sessions, Gosch made a proposal that he hoped would turn Luciano from his current drive and would, at the same time, provide him with the money he needed. He told Luciano that he had recently been approached in Madrid with a proposition to develop the Algarve coastline in Portugal into a major resort area, complete with hotels and gambling casinos. Gosch had arranged for options on beachfront land where a luxury hotel, marina and casino would be built. Perhaps Luciano might be interested in acquiring a percentage of the casino operation. Luciano told Gosch he would, indeed, give the matter some thought and let him know later.