The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (9 page)

From that meeting, Lucania drove back uptown to the Claridge, telling his excited driver, who asked what had happened, “Nothin’ much. He just don’t like Jews, and he don’t know a fuckin’ thing about wine.”

“The next day, I sent my driver, Gino, back down to Minetta Street with a message: to thank Don Salvatore for his very nice
offer and just to say that this wasn’t the right time and we should sorta keep the door open. Along with the message, I sent a full case of a dozen quarts of the best twelve-year-old King’s Ransom Scotch. I knew that he would get it right away that I was salutin’ the health of the king. That goddamn case of pure Scotch meant over two grand to me, but it was worth even more just to show that old prick he wasn’t no better than me when it come to doin’ the right thing.”

There had been no question in Lucania’s mind that he would not accept Maranzano’s offer, and his decision was based not alone on his feelings about the man. Maranzano’s organization, like most branches of the Mafia at the time, was composed solely of Sicilians — in his case, natives of his hometown of Castellammare del Golfo, though he was willing to take other Sicilians as well. Even Neapolitans and mainland Italians from other areas were barred. Were Lucania to join Maranzano, no matter how important the capacity, it would mean breaking his ties with his closest friends, the Jews like Lansky, Siegel, Lepke and Rothstein, whom Maranzano despised, as well as the Calabrian Costello and the Neapolitans Genovese and Adonis. He was not about to abandon those valuable partnerships and friendships. “And it was just about the time that well-known people on the right side of society was gettin’ to know who I was and to show me some respect. I loved it, and I wasn’t gonna give that up to go with Maranzano, because I was sure I could make all the dough I ever wanted on my own.”

In succeeding years, the wisdom of that decision became ever more apparent as success piled upon success in the bootleg racket. His empire was expanding, particularly across the Hudson River into New Jersey. “But not Brooklyn, never Brooklyn for me personally. That was like a foreign country, and it was okay with me to let it stay there, with my good friends Adonis and Scalise to keep me posted on what was goin’ on.” Along with Costello, Adonis and Lansky, he made private investments down the “Sawdust Trail” of roadhouses just beyond the Jersey Palisades, places they supplied with liquor and whose gambling rooms had sawdust on the floor; they lined the roads in Fort Lee just a ferryboat ride from the 125th Street pier across the Hudson.

And he was gathering the allies who could give him the extra needed firepower to turn back any challenge, allies he would have been forced to forget had he gone with Maranzano. He knew he could always depend upon Zwillman and Moretti to implement the strength of the Bug and Meyer Gang, and he had at his disposal the guns of Albert Anastasia and the forces of Dutch Schultz and Lepke.

He was, too, becoming a figure of note. His booze was the best and his customers the finest. He was providing all the whiskey to the most exclusive speakeasies in Manhattan and his liquor was drunk wherever society gathered, even at the private parties on Park Avenue and in the mansions and estates of Westchester County and Long Island.

What pleased him most was that some of his customers sought out his friendship. He developed a passion for golf and earned himself a low handicap during rounds at exclusive country clubs in the suburbs, where, of course, his liquor stocked the bars. The police and the politicians were more than polite to him, especially those whose pockets Costello lined regularly. He was fawned upon and catered to, and he discovered that money could buy almost anything and almost anyone.

And the gates of some of the most exclusive homes swung open to Charlie Lucania, and once inside, he was the center of attraction. “One of my big-shot customers was a guy in that Whitney family, the stockbrokers. He was a polo player and he invited me out to this tremendous estate he had in Manhasset, Long Island, to watch him play polo and also to supply the party he was givin’ afterwards. All them society girls gathered around and asked me how we hijacked shipments and how sometimes we would shoot it out with the Feds, and stuff like that. They listened to me with their eyes wide open like I was some kind of movie star, like Douglas Fairbanks. I piled it on and they loved it.

“About four in the mornin’, one of these broads, a really beautiful girl, dragged me away and made me drive her home in her car, which was a Locomobile about a block long. When we got to her old man’s estate, we drove through the gates and there was about a mile of grass on both sides of the driveway. She reaches over and turns off the ignition, pulls me outa the car and practically made
me screw her right there on the grass in the dark. And all the time we’re doin’ it, she’s yellin’, ‘Hijack me! Hijack me!’ ”

So Charlie Lucania was becoming an increasingly familiar figure in all the right places, not just the homes of the rich but in the best nightspots in Manhattan. Almost every night, he toured them with a showgirl on his arm. He loved the scene, supplied the clubs with their liquor, and owned a piece of many. The girls were often those introduced to him by Joe Adonis, whose eye for beautiful women was already becoming a legend that would eventually put him in command of the home of beautiful showgirls, New York’s Copacabana. “In the early days, Joe would fix me up with some dame from the Follies or George White’s Scandals or the Vanities, and we’d make the rounds. That’s how the rumors started about me and broads. I was long over the clap by then, but sometimes I’d go out with one of them girls and take her home without tryin’ to lay her. The next day it was all over that Big Shot Charlie Lucania couldn’t get it up. Actually, for a couple of years after the doctor told me I was cured, once in a while I’d get a pain in the groin or maybe my balls would hurt, and it would scare me to death. Let’s say that some night I’d be with a beautiful girl and I’m dyin’ to lay her, and I know I can, then all of a sudden I’d feel a pain and I’d be afraid that maybe if I screwed her, it might start the clap all over again. I know it was stupid. The doc explained it to me a thousand times, but it didn’t do no good. I lost plenty of good tail that way.”

Charlie Lucania had reached a plateau of great importance in his world. He wore good clothes. He mixed with honest people (and some just dishonest enough to render favors in exchange for payment). He was often in public, smiling, approachable and soft-spoken. He had learned well Arnold Rothstein’s continuing lessons in manners. He had molded for himself the façade of a gentleman.

But that was the surface. There was another side. He was the boss of a gang, and not a boss who sat behind a desk just giving orders for others to carry out. He still carried a gun when a business trip demanded it; it would have been insane in his business not to, and not to be prepared to use it. Hijackings, and even many
regular liquor shipments, were rarely peaceful affairs, especially when a shipment of quality liquor might be worth a hundred thousand dollars or more, and the hijacking could accomplish two purposes: getting the liquor to fill orders and at the same time seriously damaging a competitor. On most hijackings, shots were fired, blood was spilled and often someone was killed. “Did I ever kill anybody myself? That depends on how you look at it. If it means, did I ever pull the trigger and actually knock somebody off myself, then the answer is no. Nobody ever died from my gun. I managed to hurt a few people pretty bad, but no murder. On the other hand, if you look at it from the strict letter of the law, where an accessory or a guy who gives the orders to make a hit is just as guilty as the guy who pulls the trigger, then I guess I done my share.”

It was a time when Lucania developed a supreme confidence in himself, in his own invincibility. He understood that one of the necessities of being in the rackets was to be subjected to an occasional arrest, and he would be brought to the nearest police station for questioning when some crime had been committed or when some public official wanted a little publicity as a scourge of the underworld and had howled too loudly about the crime in the streets of New York. The interrogations were rarely more than formalities; he would not be held long, and then the charges would be dropped, if, indeed, there had been any charges at all. His release was invariably accompanied by an apology for the inconvenience.

“When the fix was in, it was a breeze, nothin’ to it. After all, that’s what Costello and the Buy-Bank was makin’ sure of. Most of the time, if I ever got picked up, it was because some precinct captain wanted to talk to me private about a raise in pay. Except there was one time, at Christmas in 1922.” A large liquor shipment had landed the night before, and Lucania had gone down to the Jersey coast to supervise. On the way back to New York, he stopped off to meet with Willie Moretti, to collect twenty-five thousand dollars Moretti and Longie Zwillman owed as their share of the cost of the load. “I met Willie that afternoon in a diner on the outskirts of Jersey City. My car was loaded with presents for my whole family, and I promised my mother I’d be there for turkey dinner about four o’clock. She was makin’ it special for me; she
wanted to prove she could cook American. If I disappointed her, I knew my old man would murder me.”

As Lucania and Moretti left the diner, two New Jersey state cops were waiting, “and I’m carryin’ a gun on account of the job the night before. They took us all the way to the State Police Headquarters in Newark. In the back room, there’s a guy in fancy uniform like a general. He gets up and shakes hands with Willie, and it turns out he’s one of Willie’s ‘protectors.’ He says, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Willie, but I’m going to have to book you for being with a man who’s carryin’ a gun.’ Moretti just says, ‘That’s okay,’ and I laugh and say, ‘Boy, Lieutenant, am I glad you’re a friend of Moretti’s,’ and he says, ‘You bet I am.’ Then he gives me a hard look and he says, ‘But I’m not a friend of yours. You landed a lot of stuff in my state last night.’

“So I know what I gotta do; either I buy myself a new friend or it’s gonna take me all night to get outa there, and it’s almost four o’clock already and I can already hear my old man givin’ the Sicilian jab about me to my mother. So the guy books us, which he hadda do, and then I paid him ten grand of Willie’s money, and the charges was dropped and I got the hell outa there.”

It was seven o’clock before Lucania reached his parents’ home on the Lower East Side. “Nobody says a word; they’re all lookin’ at my father, and he’s lookin’ at this big turkey that’s sittin’ in the middle of the table, all cold and shriveled up like it’s been out in the snow. I’m standin’ there with an armful of Christmas presents, so I drop them on the floor and I say, ‘These are for everybody,’ and I hand my brother Bart an envelope with money in it and tell him, ‘Give this to Pop when he ain’t so mad,’ and I turn around and walk out. My father didn’t talk to me for another six months.”

By 1923, so convinced was Lucania of the venality of the law and his own untouchableness that “I did somethin’ I never done before or afterwards; I got money-hungry, like I wasn’t already makin’ a fortune, most of it from booze, but a lot from gamblin’ and the jobs our boys would pull a couple of times a week that would leave us with a pile of jewelry and furs. Then I got greedy and I walked right into my own trap, like a goddamn fool.”

In June of 1923, “Vito brought a guy to see me, name of Charley Lagaipa; they called him ‘Big Nose Charley’ because he was sniffin’
the stuff he was sellin’. I told Vito, ‘Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to get mixed up with junk. Once is enough.’ ”

But Genovese told Lucania there was nothing to worry about. Lagaipa needed twenty thousand dollars to make a narcotics buy that would return a hundred and fifty thousand on the street. If Lucania would put up the money, he would get sixty per cent. It seemed without risk; the heroin was already packaged and Genovese said, “You can have some of it checked out over at Joe A.’s place in Brooklyn.”

Lucania fell in with the plan, and almost immediately discovered how wrong his and Genovese’s assessment had been. On June 5, 1923, he was arrested on Fourteenth Street with several packages of pure heroin in his pocket. “I must’ve been crazy, like a loose nut. I could’ve sent any one of fifty guys; like a jerk, I decided to take the stuff over to Joe A.’s myself.”

His and Costello’s contacts in the police department and with Prohibition agents were useless. The Narcotics Bureau was not for sale. “With one junk conviction already on my record, and with everybody knowin’ my puss, it looked like I was goin’ up for a long stay in the federal pen. I tried everythin’; I offered them three bastards anythin’ they could name, but they wouldn’t even look at me. For the first time I really had things goin’ good and now my own greed was gonna chop my legs off.”

When all his efforts at bribery and cajolery had been spurned, Lucania came up with another idea. It would cost him seventy-five thousand dollars at least, all the profits he had figured on making from the narcotics deal and more. “If I couldn’t buy them guys, maybe I could hand ’em somethin’ that would help me make a deal. When we got to the station, they let me make a telephone call. I didn’t call my lawyer. I called my brother Bart, and I talked to him in Sicilian. I told him that I wanted him to do an errand, exactly like I explained, with no changes. I told him to go to a certain place in Little Italy and move a box, like a small trunk, made outa cardboard, from one place to another. He wasn’t to look inside.”

Then, for more than an hour, in the basement of a precinct, Lucania was interrogated by local and federal officers. Late in the afternoon, when he was certain that Bartolo had finished moving
the box, Lucania suddenly told his questioners that he had a deal for them; if they would drop the narcotics charges, he would direct them to a trunk filled with pounds of pure heroin.