The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (8 page)

But there was more that attracted Lucania and Rothstein. “He taught me how to dress, how not to wear loud things but to have good taste; he taught me how to use knives and forks, and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin’ a door open for a girl, or helpin’ her sit down by holdin’ the chair. If Arnold had lived a little longer, he could’ve made me pretty elegant; he was the best etiquette teacher a guy could ever have — real smooth.

“I did lots of favors for Rothstein, too. I used to back him in poker games. We both made money. But he could spend it so fast just livin’ that it even made my head spin, and I was a pretty good spender myself. All he hadda do was ask me for the dough he owed; I’d’ve sent it right over.” On November 4, 1928, Rothstein was shot to death at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan, where he resided. “All I knew about it was that he’d welshed on a bet. That was the rumor. Of course, the cops called me in and they grilled me, but I never knew who done it.”

With the organization growing, with customers waiting in line for their good liquor, with business growing at an almost unbelievable pace, there was an urgent necessity to insure the sources of good whiskey. Much was being purchased in Canada, from men like Samuel Bronfman, later head of the Seagram Corporation and one of Canada’s richest and most philanthropic citizens, but then, as Luciano noted, a man who “was bootleggin’ enough whiskey across the Canadian border to double the size of Lake Erie.” If there was no problem in lining up supplies in Canada, there were problems in getting them from the border to market, by truck. “Plenty of the goods was hijacked by other mobs, and we lost a lot more because the trucks would break down. In them days, hundreds of trucks was stranded all over the East Coast.”

Even without the dangers and the mechanical troubles, there was never enough uncut whiskey, from Canada or Scotland, to fill the ever-increasing demand. It did not take Lucania and his friends long to realize that if the bottles looked the same, the
labels were identical, the quality high and the taste close, the customers would buy the booze wherever it was bottled and distilled and assume it was the real thing; and if sources close at hand could be found for such quality liquor, the market could be expanded. “I figured on account of that we had such a good contact in Philadelphia with Waxey Gordon, it was the place to make the move, for one reason: they had a lotta companies down there turnin’ out pure grain alcohol.” Without that alcohol, there could be no whiskey; with that alcohol, real whiskey could be cut and the result would still be pretty good whiskey that most drinkers couldn’t tell from the real thing.

The manufacture of such alcohol was legally permitted in small quantities under a loophole in the Volstead Act. While consumption of alcoholic beverages for the general public was outlawed, liquor could still be drunk for medicinal purposes and purchased under a doctor’s prescription. Somebody had to make it, and government licenses were handed out to a number of companies, several in Philadelphia. Such companies immediately became the target for underworld infiltration, and the legitimate owners usually capitulated without a murmur, either because threatened violence left them with no choice or because the acquisition of underworld partners meant sharply increased business and profits. In these distilleries, the alcohol, some unaged whiskey, and a little caramel for coloring could turn one bottle of Scotch or Canadian whiskey, American rye or bourbon into several bottles of the parent whiskey with little quality loss.

Lucania’s interests and those of Gordon’s merged, their friendship and cooperation growing as both became richer, as each became assured of the other’s competence and trustworthiness, as they operated in noncompeting spheres. “I never had a real problem with Waxey Gordon from the day we met down in Philly. We shook hands and in about a half an hour, it was all settled — prices, splits of goods, profits, the whole deal.” From that moment on, Lucania and his friends would buy their illegal liquor from Gordon and his friends, would arrange to have their own illegal liquor shipments cut, blended, rebottled and relabeled in Gordon’s Philadelphia and south Jersey plants, and then would arrange delivery all along the East Coast.

Most in demand was Scotch. Before Prohibition, the Scottish distilleries sold their product for seventeen dollars a twelve-bottle case, F.O.B. Glasgow. Once Prohibition arrived, and the demand in the United States for Scotch soared, the distillers “didn’t mind puttin’ the squeeze on us, because they knew we was bootleggers and gangsters. And then they was only deliverin’ the stuff to a point in the ocean outside the three-mile limit, that is if they was deliverin’ it at all; lots of us, and Rothstein was the first, hadda charter our own ships to carry the Scotch to the three-mile limit. Then we hadda take all the chances of runnin’ the goods in to shore in speedboats. That’s how the name Rum Row and the rum-runners got started — runnin’ the boats from Cuba with rum, or anythin’ else we could buy and land.”

By the time pure Scotch reached the American shore, the price to the bootleggers was somewhere around $2.20 a fifth. Some was sold directly to important customers at about $30 a fifth. The rest was cut in Gordon’s plants, or plants established by Lucania and his partners. “We made what we called ‘Scotch right off the boat,’ and that original Scotch would bring us as high as a thousand bucks a case. That case cost us, if you forget the danger part of it, only around twenty-five bucks. But what the hell, we took all the gambles. That three miles of ocean was loaded with sharks — federal men, hijackers with speedboats. A guy could easily get killed at that time for a case of Scotch. And, of course, sometimes we’d lose a truck or even a whole shipment to the Feds or to some hijackers, and we’d have to write it off.”

It was not enough just to get the Scotch and other whiskey to shore, nor was it enough in addition to control the grain alcohol with which to cut it. There had to be plants to cut it in, and there had to be bottles, looking exactly like the originals, to rebottle it. So they went into the bottle business. They needed labels identical to the original Johnnie Walker, Haig & Haig, Dewar’s and the rest, so they went into the printing business, buying huge color presses and becoming major consumers of papers and inks. The bottles had to be stored in warehouses, so they went into the real estate business. The crates had to be shipped, so they became proprietors of sprawling trucking combines.

What none of them sensed initially was that they were not just
in the liquor business. When it was all put together, a relatively small group of men, led by Charlie Lucania, had forged an illegal empire that rivaled any legitimate one. “I’ll bet in the days when me and my guys got our whiskey business together, we had a bigger company than Henry Ford. We controlled plants, warehouses, all kinds of manufacturin’; we had a fantastic shipping business, and our drivers hadda drive good and shoot straight. We had bookkeepers that Lansky used to watch over like a hawk, and these wasn’t little guys with green eyeshades. These guys — and we even had plenty of girls as bookkeepers — was guys with photographic memories because not too much of their numbers ever got on paper. We had exporters and importers, all kinds of help that any corporation needs, only we had more. And we had lawyers by the carload, and they was on call twenty-four hours a day. Guys always told me later that I should’ve put my brains to runnin’ a legit business and I’d have been a tremendous success. But I wouldn’t’ve enjoyed it like what I was doin’.”

By 1923, at the age of twenty-six, foreign-born, as a child poor to the point of poverty, unable even to communicate then in the language of his new country, the self-educated Charlie Lucania was on top of a pyramid far grander than any of his earlier dreams. He had nearly reached the pinnacle predicted by Capone; if not the king of booze in New York, he was certainly close to the throne. Around him were his friends and allies, many of them rulers in their own limited spheres, and they accepted his leadership as the wisest course to the future.

Now a power in his own right, he began to attract overtures from his competitors, the major figures in the Italian underworld. At the dawn of Prohibition, their names — Giuseppe “Joe the
Boss” Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, Ciro Terranova and others — were unknown outside the ghettos, except to certain policemen and politicians, some on their payrolls. They were older, had come to the United States as grown men, waxed in the tradition of the Mafia of their native Sicily, and never more than partially emerged from the traditions, closeness and security of the Little Italys.

To many Americans they often appeared, if they appeared at all, as outlandish and quaint men, not to be taken with complete seriousness; with their bulging bellies hanging over their pants, their thick thighs, their flowing mustaches, their somber, dated clothes, their old-country manner, their clannishness, their guttural and almost unintelligible accents, they seemed almost cartoon characters. Compared with the younger, more Americanized Charlie Lucania and his friends and allies, the old Dons remained for most of the nation, even for most New Yorkers, little more than shadowy figures about whom there were hardly even rumors.

“When Torrio knocked off Big Jim Colosimo in Chicago, Frank and I thought that’d help us. We figured it’d be like a sign to them old fat bastards in New York that some of the younger guys was movin’ up. That’s one time we was dead wrong, because we forgot how to read our own kind. Masseria, Maranzano, and all the rest of them pricks had been like kings. They ran everything in Little Italy.” The old Dons had cornered the market and controlled the prices of all the necessities and luxuries of Italian life — olive oil, artichokes, cheese, the Italian lottery and all forms of gambling. “I remember once a neighbor of ours by the name of Forzano had a little penny-ante poker game in his kitchen once a week. Would you believe that them dirty Dons sent one of their boys to draw off a dollar a week from the pot, for expenses.”

With the coming of Prohibition, the old Dons saw the opportunities just as did the younger men, and with their hold on the ghettos they had a built-in source of supply in the homemade stills that were a fixture in many an Italian household, and whose output could be sharply increased to supply a multitude of low-class speakeasies. Further, they began to move out of the ghettos to go after the bigger American market for illegal booze.

As they did so, they tried to eliminate competition, and one way
was to take over some of their competitors. The first overture to Lucania came from Salvatore Maranzano, a major aspirant to American Mafia rule. “I always knew, I felt it in my bones, that someday this old bastard was gonna get in touch with me. But I always knew that no matter what that guy would offer me, I was gonna turn it down. When he first come to this country, right after the war, and I was just startin’ out, that old shitheel would come around the neighborhood once in a while and hold up his hands, spread out like he was a Pope givin’ the people on the street a blessin’. But Maranzano was a guy with plenty of education; he spoke five languages and he really knew a lotta culture. And me, just because I had no good schoolin’, I made myself feel like dirt every time I had any contact with him. Of course, he helped.”

But when the summons came, Lucania was flattered. “The meet took place in the back room of a small restaurant that used to be called Il Palermo, just off Minetta Street in Little Italy. When I walked into the room, Maranzano comes over to me with his arms up in the air — and there he goes, startin’ that fuckin’ Pope routine again. He puts his arms around me and he says that his name is Salvatore, like mine, that I’m his namesake, the ‘young Caesar.’ Then he starts quotin’ Julius Caesar to me, in Latin, for chrissake. If he had somethin’ nice to say to me, why the hell couldn’t he have said it in English? So I told him that, and he started to laugh. And I’ll never forget what he answered. He said, ‘My son, words of praise are only meant for the great, and you will do great things.’ Shit. I could’ve spit in his face.

“Then he said to me, ‘I understand you now like to be called Charlie. Somehow, I find it difficult to think of you as anything but Salvatore. Tell me, my name was not good enough for you to keep? There is something about it which shames you?’

“I was just about to answer him and explain how I didn’t like to be called Sallie. But he started to wave his right hand around, and on his pinky finger where most of them old Dons used to wear a diamond that would choke a horse, all Maranzano had was what they call a signet ring with his initials, ‘S.M.’ He held out his right hand and I really couldn’t tell if he was pleadin’ with me to change my name back, or all he wanted me to do was kiss his lousy ring. It was amazin’ to me that the old man couldn’t see that I was disgusted
with him. He started to go on and on about how he’d been watchin’ the things I was doin’ and that he was very impressed with me, and he thought that I was brave and I had lots of brains and imagination. And then he threw in a zinger. He tells me he don’t like the guys I’m associatin’ with.

“So I said, ‘Well, Don Salvatore, that’s too bad. You’re talkin’ about friends of mine, and that ain’t nice.’ ”

Maranzano retreated, told Lucania it was something they could talk about later. What he had in mind at this point was an offer. “The world is changing and there are new opportunities for those who are ready to reach out and seize them, who are ready to join forces with those who are stronger and more experienced. Come into my organization and I promise you that you will prosper along with it. I will make an important place for you, my son.” Then Maranzano told Lucania to think about it before deciding.

But before Lucania left, Maranzano had one final bit of business. “He snaps his fingers and a waiter comes rushin’ in to open a bottle of red wine, and pours out a little bit for the old guy to sample. I can see him smellin’ the cork and rollin’ the wine around in his mouth to check the flavor and all that crap. Then he waves his signet ring at the waiter and the guy pours out two glasses, and Maranzano says to me, ‘My dear young man, we will conclude the ceremonies with a toast to our mutual good health, and it is symbolic that the gesture of our friendship and mutual understanding be made with the finest Sicilian wine. Here, Charlie Lucania, I wish you long life.’ That was the way the guy always talked, and it used to drive me nuts. He raised his glass and I raised mine and shoveled out the same old long life, good health and all that, and then I drunk the wine. It was absolutely sour. With all his culture and five languages, that was one dago you could give piss or vinegar and he would’ve drunk it, as long as it was red and come from Sicily.”