By: Michelle Konstantinovsky
From Al Capone to John Dillinger, America has a long list of legendary gangsters who have been the subject of books, movies, and morbid curiosity for centuries. But one of them was different, and he introduced a government structure into the world of illegal bandits: Charles "lucky" Luciano.
Tim Newark, author of Lucky Luciano – The Real and the Fake Bandits, said in an email interview: "Charles... Lucky Luciano was originally an immigrant from Sicily named Selvato Lucania, who came to New York with his parents in 1907. Over the next 30 years, he grew from a juvenile gangster to a mob killer and eventually became the leader of organized crime in New York.
According to Christian Cipolini, an organized crime historian and founder of ganglandlegends.com, Luciano grew up in a particularly diverse part of New York, laying the groundwork for his future. Sipolini wrote by email: "His family settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where there was a mix of Jews and Italian immigrants." "It was there that he met other underworld young future stars, such as Benjamin Siegel and Meyer Lansky."
"Because of his childhood friendships with Jewish thugs, he was able to see the benefits of working with different people," Claire White, education program manager at the Mob Museum, said by email. This allowed him to consolidate power not only among Italian-American gangsters, but also in Manhattan and across the country — an important step in the creation and rule of the commission, the central coalition of Crime Families in New York.
"His family immigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old," White said. He rose to prominence in the Manhattan Five Point Gang and later held prominent positions in five Italian-American mafia families in New York. 201931, in the powerful Sepe· After the assassination of Joe Bosseseille and Salvador Maranzano, Luciano succeeded to the order, which was eventually known as the Genovese family.
But long before he was recognized by the big bosses, Luciano had apparently ruled the entire campus. Luciano tricked his classmates into paying protection fees to keep them from bullying, and if they didn't pay the money, he bullied them himself. After dropping out of school in 1914, he worked as a clerk in a hat company and began making friends with local gang members such as Lansky and Siegel.
In 1916, Luciano was arrested for trafficking heroin and served six months in a penitentiary. But it was in the 1920s that he embarked on the path of crime because of the prohibition of drinking. Luciano became one of the Big Six, a smuggling gang believed to be a key member of the illegal liquor trade on the East Coast.
"By introducing a new, shared mindset to organized crime at the end of Prohibition, Luciano laid the groundwork for mob control of gambling and other illegal activities throughout the 20th century," White said. Luciano is considered the founder of modern organized crime in the United States. In 1931, he ousted the old rulers of Sicily and formed a committee, a national criminal family group centered in New York. ”
After the assassination of the famous bandit "Duke" Servatore Maranzano, Luciano inherited the crime family and eventually became known as the Genovese family. "As a natural organizer, Luciano continued the commission established by Maranzano that would control the East Coast for decades," White said. "But Luciano didn't call himself 'the boss of the bosses,' as Maranzano did, but as chairman of the board."
In 1931, Luciano and Meyer Lansky established a committee of non-Italian Jews known as the "National Syndicate" or "Combination." "In the 1920s and 1930s, Luciano had significant and successful success in modernizing organized crime in New York," Newark said. "He operated along more efficient commercial lines, ending the destructive gang struggle between Sicilian gangs and abandoning the Old World Catholic prejudices that they did not cooperate with Jewish gangs."
Federico Varese, a professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, said by email: "Luciano's most important contribution to the Italian-American mafia is organizational." "He was behind the formation of the commission. He knew that if there was a boss who wanted to be capo di tutti I capi (i.e. 'boss of all bosses' or 'godfather'), the Italian-American mafia would continue to fight. ”
In 1936, a New York prosecutor named Thomas Dewey led police to raid brothels throughout the city, arresting more than 100 people and gathering information about Luciano's illegal trade. On June 6 of the same year, Luciano was convicted of 62 counts of forced prostitution and sentenced to 30 to 50 years in a state prison.
While you might think this is the end of Luciano's story, the ensuing global crisis has changed the seemingly established path of this bandit. During World War II, the government sought help from thugs to keep New York docks safe on strikes and sabotage. Authorities approached Luciano, who agreed to help, hoping his help would get him a commutation. After all, by that time, former prosecutor Dewey had become governor of New York and was entitled to give Luciano leniency.
"Luciano's role in World War II was fascinating," Newark said. Although in prison, he helped the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service protect the New York docks from Nazi damage, my archival research shows that his much-vaunted help with the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 was not as important as claimed. Just as the FBI and the Federal Narcotics Service (FBI) justified their budgets, they largely exaggerated his postwar reputation as an international gangster. There is tantalizing evidence, however, that Luciano may have been a useful informant in Sicily during the Cold War in 1947, helping the CIA thwart the Communist occupation of the island. ”
After the war, Dewey did mitigate Luciano's punishment on the condition that the mob had to leave the United States. Luciano agreed and returned to Italy as an deportee, but eventually came to Havana, Cuba (with someone like Frank Sinatra). The United States Government then forced the Cuban Government to repatriate Luciano to Italy, where he spent the rest of his life. Luciano died of a heart attack at a Naples airport in 1962 when he was on his way to meet a filmmaker to discuss adapting his life into a movie.
"Luciano has an innate leadership temperament, charisma and shrewd street intelligence," Cipolini said. But it turns out that these qualities are a distinction between good and bad. These traits not only helped him become a well-known and classless leader in his peers and the restructured American underworld, [they] also made him a 'poster boy' representing the issues of sin and crime, which the authorities took full advantage of from 1936 to the day of his death in 1962. ”
So where did the name "Lucky" come from? Luciano reportedly survived a kidnapping and attack in 1929 and earned the nickname. A group of people beat and stabbed him and then threw him on the beach on Staten Island to wait for his death, but a police officer found him at the scene and took him to a nearby hospital.
After Luciano died of a heart attack at Naples International Airport on January 26, 1962, a funeral was held in the city when his coffin was carried across the street by a black hearse. With the permission of the U.S. government, Luciano's relatives transported his body back to New York for burial. He was buried in St. John's Cemetery in Queens.