The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (7 page)

With no honest citizen as a victim, the enforcers of the unpopular law could be persuaded to ignore it, especially if they could share in the profits of that deliberate ignorance. Protection could be purchased at all levels. “Within a year, we was buyin’ influence all over Manhattan, from lower Broadway all the way up to Harlem, and even across the Hudson beyond the Palisades in Jersey.”

Most of the money then, and for the next several years, was used, of course, to guarantee that there would be no interference with the bootlegging operations, and that those operations would have official protection. “When we made that first buy down in Philly, we almost hit the big time at the very beginnin’, like we started at the top and kept goin’ up from there. Of course, like in any big business, we hadda take care of the guys that could help us, so we greased the police and the politicians. It was all part of the overhead, just like any other business.”

It did not take them long to realize that the demand for liquor was enormous and that they could sell all they could obtain, and more. And so “Lansky’s Law” came into being. “It was no joke at first. Meyer was always readin’ books about business, economics, things like that. One day, he shows me a library book and he’s all excited about it.” The book was
Making Profits
, written in 1915 by Professor William Taussig of Harvard University.

“Charlie,” Lansky said, “there’s somethin’ very important in this book for us.”

“Meyer,” Lucania said, “I don’t need you around to quote to me from library books.”

“Will you please, for God’s sake, listen. You always talk about how you want to learn new things; now, I want to explain something that’s really important. This writer talks about a thing called the law of supply and demand. What he says applies to us right now. If you have a lot of what people want and can’t get, then you can supply the demand and shovel in the dough. In other words, that’s what we ought to do with whiskey — get plenty of it, good, uncut stuff right off the boat and then sell it at a high price to a bunch of people who don’t have brains enough not to drink it.”

That simple economic precept was quickly dubbed Lansky’s Law, and it would be the rule by which organized crime would live, just as society outside was ruled by it.

To understand and accept a basic economic principle was one thing; to put it to work in the most efficacious way required some hard decisions, and the necessity to make those decisions became urgent when Waxey Gordon offered them three thousand cases of top-quality, uncut Scotch. Their future depended on making the right choice. They could strike for quick and big profits by cutting
and watering down the Scotch until it was the cheap, barely drinkable rotgut served in the sleaziest speakeasies, a drink in which the original Scotch was an infinitesimal part. There would be no trouble selling the stuff and turning a huge profit, for the demand for liquor of any kind was unceasing. But if they took this road, they would have to pay a price: they would be tagged as purveyors of cheap booze and their clientele would be those in the lowest strata.

Or they could sell the Scotch as it was, uncut. They would still realize huge profits and at the same time they would win as customers the best speakeasies in midtown Manhattan and the most socially prominent private clients. Their reputation as big-timers, as class merchants, would be made; customers would flock to them, and these customers would be people with plenty of money. The choice was, then, really no choice for men whose eyes were on the top.

So they began meeting the demand for good-quality liquor in the best places in New York. And they began, too, moving in as the prime suppliers in another place where “we knew we could sell more whiskey than we’d ever be able to get our hands on if Prohibition lasted a hundred years.” This was in the garment center. In the world of ready-to-wear clothes, the out-of-town buyers on their annual or semiannual trips to New York, with open checkbooks, were the bosses. The manufacturers knew it and rained upon them a torrent of free dinners at the best restaurants, the best seats at the top hit shows, anything and everything that would persuade them to sign the order blanks and fill out those checks. If the male buyers wanted pretty girls, then pretty girls they would have. If the female buyers wanted men, then gigolos were supplied, with manufacturers picking up the tab. “Most of the lady buyers were ugly and dyin’ to get laid, and the garment district had more studs workin’ nights than Paris ever had. But if you seen some of them dames, you’d have to admit the guys earned their money.”

But, perhaps, what most of them wanted most of all were bottles of good Scotch. “If you was a manufacturer who could give somebody a case of real Scotch, you never had to worry about sellin’ ’em dresses, especially if the head of the store back home got some of
it. So we helped the manufacturers unload millions of garments and they paid us through the nose for uncut bottles of Scotch ‘right off the boat.’ We never cheated ’em on quality, but I can’t say the same for some of the clothes they made.” It was, in fact, Luciano’s view, expressed often, that there were no truly honest people in the world. “Everybody’s got larceny in ’em, only most of ’em don’t have the guts to do nothin’ about it. That’s the big difference between us and the guys who call themselves honest. We got the guts to do what they’d like to do only they’re too scared to.”

The more important Lucania and his friends became in bootlegging, the more complex their business became, and so, to meet the growing problems, the leaders began to devote more and more of their time to special interests. In addition to his bootlegging with the group and in association with the Irish bootleg king Big Bill Dwyer, and in addition to his gambling interests in East Harlem and elsewhere, Costello was assiduously cultivating his connections in official circles, so as to guarantee complete protection for his and his partners’ interests. Lansky and Siegel formed what became known as the “Bug and Meyer Gang,” experts in transportation, with no job too dangerous, no requirement too complex or difficult. They hijacked or rode shotgun as protectors against hijacking, depending upon the exigencies of the moment or the special demands of Charlie Lucania. Joe Adonis was spreading out into a multiplicity of rackets and was even spreading his territory from Brooklyn and Manhattan, where he was earning a name as a leader of the “Broadway Mob,” into Fort Lee, New Jersey (where eventually he would buy a home and settle with his wife and family). And Charlie Lucania, in addition to his executive responsibilities in overseeing the operations, was devoting considerable effort to recruiting key personnel and forging new alliances.

In his old neighborhood, in Little Italy, Lucania found a young and ambitious hoodlum who was an obvious recruit and who rose rapidly to a position as a major aide in all Lucania’s enterprises. A short, muscular man with a round face and a wide smile, a secretive manner and a willingness to use a gun with no mercy, his name was Vito Genovese. “I never really liked him, but he did have moxie. I figured that if this Vito had even a part of Meyer’s
guts — remember, he was a little guy like Meyer — then I’d have a good man. When I first heard of him around the neighborhood, he was already makin’ a rep for himself. He was livin’ in a neighborhood where the Sicilians outnumbered everybody else ten to one; to us, anybody who didn’t come from Sicily was a dirty foreigner, and that made it tough, especially for a little guy like Vito, who was born in some town near Naples. But he could fight like a son of a bitch. I didn’t have to love him to use him. But I thought he’d be loyal. What a mistake! But I didn’t find that out until many, many years later.”

Through Joe Adonis, Lucania won the allegiance of Francesco Chiccio Scalise, a Sicilian who had settled in Brooklyn, and Frank “Cheech,” as he became known, provided an avenue of communications into the Brooklyn underworld. And Scalise recruited a fellow Brooklyn mobster, Carlo Gambino. “Someday,” Luciano would predict in 1961, “Gambino will be head of the whole outfit in the United States.” From Brooklyn, too, came a recent arrival from Italy, only just released from the Sing Sing death house when his conviction for murder had been overturned on appeal and the witnesses against him had vanished. His name was Albert Anastasia, a slight corruption of the real family name, Anastasio, made to save his relatives embarrassment when Albert first ran into trouble with the law. Almost from their first meeting, he developed an intense loyalty to Lucania, who responded with considerable affection. “Y’know, Charlie,” Anastasia once told him, “I’ll betcha I’m the only loudmouthed bum you really like.” Stocky and muscular, Anastasia was a violent man with few restraints; he could commit murder impulsively or by design — it meant little to him which — and so he developed naturally into the enforcer.

But the circle of friends, associates and allies was not limited to Italians. Lansky opened the lines of communication to a fellow Jew who was emerging as a major power in the garment-center rackets. One day he brought Louis Buchalter to meet Lucania and his friends at the private offices they maintained at the Claridge Hotel. “I took one look at him and all I could see was a guy with a fat face, a big head and so much muscle it was bulgin’ out of his sleeves. Somethin’ inside warned me that this guy was mostly strong-arm and very little brain. So I said to him, ‘Listen, Lou . . .’

“He stopped me and said, kinda nice, ‘You can call me Lepke.’

“I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. I said, ‘What the fuck kinda name is that?’ He got all red and embarrassed and he explained that when he was a kid his mother used to call him by a pet Jewish name, Lepkele. So from then on, we all called him Lepke. How can you not like a guy who always thinks about his mother?”

Though Lucania had little faith in Lepke’s intelligence, he did admire the hoodlum’s guts and cunning and ambition, and Lepke was a key to entrance into the garment center. He was, as well, smart enough to listen to suggestions when they could benefit him. During that initial meeting at the Claridge and during subsequent ones, Lucania, Lansky and the others talked to Lepke about what they saw as his wasteful and unsystematic efforts in the garment center. He was selling protection and using strong-arm methods — a bottle of acid, a stick of dynamite, a sudden fire, a couple of goons — to persuade recalcitrant manufacturers to pay up. But there had been little planned method to his operations. A simple blueprint was drawn up for him to concentrate initially on securing a firm hold over small and vulnerable shops, then using that as a base to move against bigger and tougher targets. In this way, the protection racket could be turned into an orderly business — based, of course, on such old techniques as the wedge and the persuader — that would prosper and spread like a spider web into every corner of the garment district and beyond. Lepke bought the plan and so became a member of the Lucania hierarchy. And with his buying of it, Lucania and his partners had a solid foothold for the marketing of liquor in the garment center, and something they would later use to infiltrate the entire industry.

Lansky had brought in one Jew, Lepke; Frank Costello brought in another, Arthur Flegenheimer. As “Dutch Schultz,” he was an emperor in his own right, carving out a bootleg domain in the Bronx. Early in their careers, Lucania convened a meeting at the Claridge to discuss an affiliation with the Dutchman. “When Frank first brought up his name, Vito screamed, ‘What the hell is this! What’re you tryin’ to do, load us up with a bunch of Hebes?’ Before Benny or Meyer could even open their mouths, Frank
almost swung on him, and he said, very quiet, ‘Take it easy, Don Vitone, you’re nothin’ but a fuckin’ foreigner yourself.’

“The reason I remember that so clear is that two important things come out of it. Whenever anybody wanted to rub Vito’s nose in it, they’d call him ‘Don Vitone’ to his face, or behind his back. And Vito never forgave Frank for remindin’ him that he wasn’t a Sicilian and couldn’t ever really ‘belong.’ That prick Vito had a memory like an elephant and the patience of a lizard — and he waited thirty-five years for a chance to blast Frank’s head off.”

Despite Genovese’s outburst, Lucania and Schultz forged their alliance of equals, of barons, in their own nonconflicting realms, and it lasted beyond Prohibition. And Genovese’s hatred of Jews did not prevent Lucania and his partners from reaching another agreement with another Jew, Abner “Longie” Zwillman, emerging as one of the major bootleggers and racketeers in northern New Jersey, and Zwillman’s partner, Willie Moretti. Two more different men would have been hard to find. Zwillman was quiet, soft-spoken, studious, a book-reader and a man who aspired to respectability. In his later years, he carried on a long love affair with motion picture star Jean Harlow. Moretti had already won a reputation in New Jersey as a killer, and he was, like Capone, rash and headstrong and a woman-chaser; this proclivity would eventually leave him with syphilitic brain damage that made him such an irresponsible talker that his death was considered a necessity.

And then there was another Jew, whose influence on Lucania, and on the whole world of organized crime, was incalculable. His name was Arnold Rothstein, the prodigal son of a respectable Jewish family. Rothstein had early in his life become a gambler and loan shark, and he was rumored to be the brains behind the notorious 1919 Black Sox scandal, the fixing of the World Series. Gambling was his real passion and he was able to satisfy it and his zest for travel simultaneously, crisscrossing the Atlantic in never-ending poker games aboard luxury liners.

Soon after the start of Prohibition, Rothstein turned for a time to bootlegging, and he was the man who gave Waxey Gordon his start. “What Arnold did was really very smart. Everybody knows that them guys in Scotland are tight and love money, so Rothstein made legit contracts with them and laid down big deposits so he
would be guaranteed delivery. Then he went to Waxey Gordon to arrange for distribution of this liquid gold, with the condition that I should have first call on the buy. Naturally, I bought every drop of it.”