Manhattan Mafia Guide (16 page)

Spending his nights in empty apartments and pool halls, Luciano began engaging in very adult criminal activities to get by. He fell into a crowd that introduced him to the opium dens of Chinatown, getting hooked on the drug that he would allegedly exploit for immeasurable riches throughout the rest of his life. Along with other neighborhood toughs, Luciano began pickpocketing immigrants, burglarizing apartments and forming a small protection racket that terrorized local school kids. It was about this time that he began using the name Charles or Charlie—some say because people started calling him “Sally” (short for Salvatore), which sounded too feminine for the ambitious gangster.

Luciano’s first adult arrest came in 1916, under the name “Charles Lucania,” for the possession of a small amount of heroin that he was said to be pushing for a neighborhood dealer. He served six months of a one-year sentence behind bars, which did nothing to curb Luciano’s criminal ambitions. By this time, Salvatore from Fourteenth Street was making a name for himself in the local underworld. He earned respect for not ratting out his supplier and began spending more time in the pool halls and social clubs of Little Italy. As Luciano’s social circle grew, so did his opportunities, branching out from street-level heroin peddling and strong-arming to operating small gambling operations on the East Side. As mob legend has it, it was during this time that Luciano formed relationships with local racketeers like Arnold Rothstein and Johnny Torrio, who was based in Little Italy before focusing on the Brooklyn waterfront and, ultimately, traveling to Chicago to make gangster history with protégé Al Capone.

According to
The Luciano Story
, it was about 1922 when Charlie Lucky was courted by the Mafia and, more specifically, Giuseppe Masseria, who was preparing for what would become a bloody war for control of the profitable East Side alcohol trade. Luciano started out by overseeing various gaming operations and collecting kickbacks from olive oil–importing and produce enterprises, but the clever mobster rapidly gained Masseria’s trust and was brought into the boss’s inner circle as a trusted adviser (before reportedly having him killed in 1931).

The story of Luciano planning the assassination of dozens of old-line Mafia bosses in an underworld purge and establishing a ruling criminal commission in 1931 is not true, yet it has been packaged as fact by lazy researchers for decades. The only thing we can absolutely rely on as being accurate is Luciano’s long and colorful criminal record:

June 27, 1916:
narcotics violation (New York); served six months and paroled

December 15, 1921:
weapons violation (Jersey City); dismissed

August 28, 1922:
business code violation (New York); fined five dollars

June 1923:
narcotics violation (New York); discharged

August 5, 1924:
business code violation (New York); fined three dollars

December 9, 1924:
business code violation (New York); fined two dollars

June 4, 1925:
business code violation (New York); fined two dollars

February 7, 1926:
business code violation (New York); fined two dollars

July 20, 1926:
driving without a license (New York); sentence suspended;

July 27, 1926:
weapons violation (New York); discharged;

October 14, 1926:
business code violation (New York); fined two dollars

December 16, 1926:
business code violation (New York); fined five dollars

December 28, 1926:
felonious assault (New York); discharged

July 6, 1927:
disorderly conduct stemming from gambling (New York); discharged

July 28, 1927:
material witness, Supreme Court (New York); discharged

August 3, 1927:
Prohibition Act violation (New York); discharged

November 17, 1928:
armed robbery and assault (New York); discharged

October 17, 1929:
grand larceny (New York); discharged

February 28, 1930:
gaming, vagrancy, weapons violations (Miami); fined $1,000

February 8, 1931:
felonious assault (New York); dismissed

July 4, 1931:
apprehended for investigation (Cleveland); released

April 21, 1932:
disorderly conduct, along with Meyer Lansky (Chicago); discharged

July 11, 1932:
business code violation (New York); fined five dollars

December 28, 1935:
weapons violation (Miami); dropped

April 1, 1936:
compulsory prostitution (Hot Springs); convicted

We do know that Charlie Lucky almost became a footnote in criminal history in October 1929 when he survived a brutal assault that left him bruised, swollen and with several stab wounds in his back. The common assertion that Luciano earned the nickname Lucky after the assault can be disproved by simply looking at original reports from the incident, which cite the fact that the police already knew of him as Lucky. The moniker was more than likely earned in childhood, as a lazy derivation of his last name.

Charlie “Lucky” Luciano arrest record, 1931.

There is no denying that by the 1930s, Luciano was one of the most influential mobsters in this city. He had formed powerful political ties that kept him out of jail and allowed his rackets to thrive. At the end of Prohibition, that meant everything from large-scale loan-sharking, narcotics and extortion rackets to gambling, nightclub and alleged prostitution operations, which ultimately landed the vice kingpin in prison and eventually deported. Historians have been polarized for decades about Luciano’s actual role in the sex trade; many wholeheartedly believe it was a bum rap.

Regardless, the wheels of Luciano’s downfall were set in motion early in 1935 when several extorted merchants decided to fight back against being terrorized. After hearing tale after tale of threats and violence against business owners, a New York County grand jury petitioned Governor Herbert H. Lehman to appoint a special prosecutor dedicated to investigating the city’s protection rackets. Lehman approached several powerful lawyers for the position, but they all declined the offer. When thirty-three-year-old Thomas E. Dewey’s name came up, the governor doubted that the young former U.S. district attorney had the gravitas or experience to handle such an operation. However, Dewey had just made a name for himself with the high-profile prosecution of gangster/bootlegger “Waxey” Gordon, and many colleagues insisted he was the right man for the job.

In July 1935, Dewey traded in his cushy $50,000-a-year private practice for a $17,000 prosecutor’s salary. He had less than $300,000 at his disposal to form a team and devise a plan to take on a powerful criminal network with almost unlimited resources. Right away, he made it clear very publicly that he was not interested in low-level crooks—he was gunning for the very top bosses, which would soon lead him to Charlie Lucky.

Dewey’s team of young lawyers set up headquarters in a soundproof room at the Woolworth Building (233 Broadway) and immediately made a radio appeal for people to come forward with information regarding extortion rackets. To Dewey’s surprise, hundreds of tips a day came pouring in; however, most of them were bogus.

When business owners refused to talk out of fear of retaliation, he got tough, using his power of subpoena to investigate their books and force a testimonial. If business owners refused to talk, he threw them in jail. Eventually, many folded, and Dewey got the information he needed. The case blossomed into much more than he anticipated, and soon over one hundred separate rackets were being investigated, from prostitution and loan-sharking to stolen goods and extortion.

On October 24, 1935, the
New York Times
published an article naming the “Big Six,” criminals whom it believed to be the top crime bosses in the country, including Jacob Shapiro, Abe “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Charles “Buck” Siegel (Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel), Louis “Lefty” Buckhouse (Louis Buchalter) and, of course, Charles “Lucky” Luciano. With full support of the press, Dewey’s investigation seemed to be gaining steam.

Dewey concentrated on the loan sharks first and scored a big victory on October 31, 1935, when thirty-eight shylocks were arrested and sent to prison for up to five years. Next, he turned his attention to prostitution and began large-scale raids of parlors throughout the city, arresting several high-profile madams like Cokie Flo, “Cold-Potato” Annie, Jenny “the Factory,” “Hungarian” Helen and Sadie “the Chink.” Dozens of drug-addicted prostitutes were rounded up and forced to go cold turkey at the newly erected Women’s House of Detention (now the Jefferson Street Market Library, at 425 Sixth Avenue). Many witnesses started to come forward as the investigation went on, and one name kept coming up: Charlie.

The Jefferson Market women’s prison in 1905. Today, the building functions as a library.
Library of Congress
.

The prosecutors knew “there was only one ‘Charlie’” and put a warrant out for Luciano’s arrest. The gangster turned up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was arrested on April 1, 1936. Luciano posted $5,000 bond, was released from county jail within a few hours and then made a crafty preemptive move to thwart extradition to New York by having his lawyers obtain a new warrant for his arrest. The strategy worked for a short time, but after several days of tense negotiations between New York and Arkansas attorneys, Luciano’s lawyers failed to file the proper paperwork in time that would keep him out of Dewey’s reach. Luciano was whisked from his jail cell at 12:01 a.m. on April 17 and thrown on the first train to New York, where he was met by forty-eight police officers and escorted to jail.

Taking no chances, Dewey brought Luciano to trial as quickly as possible. He was officially charged, along with twelve top-level associates, on several counts of compulsory prostitution, just hours after arriving to New York on April 18, and held on $350,000 bail. Dewey had lined up over one hundred witnesses to testify against the powerful vice lord, whose prostitution racket was suspected of grossing more than $12 million a year.

The heavily guarded jury selection process began on Monday, May 11, 1936. Before the first day of the trial ended, three codefendants pleaded guilty, leaving Luciano and nine others to face the scrutiny of a jury. Over the next four weeks, a parade of witnesses took the stand. Sex workers were offered immunity in exchange for their testimonies. Some claimed that women who worked for Luciano routinely had their tongues cut or feet burned with cigarettes if they squealed. Businessmen told tales of being forced to pay exorbitant interest rates on loans they didn’t want in the first place or face certain vandalism, arson or bodily harm. Luciano remained defiant and believed he would be acquitted of all charges, despite overwhelming evidence piling up against him.

Under pressure, a fourth codefendant pleaded guilty on June 1. Luciano broke down under the pressure of Dewey’s cross-examination while taking the stand on June 3. During the grueling four-hour interrogation, Luciano became so tripped up by the prosecutor’s barrage of questions that he admitted to just about everything
but
running the prostitution ring. The flustered gangster was forced to admit that he had lied under oath, sold narcotics, was a former bootlegger, organized gambling operations, failed to pay taxes (ever) and much more, but he would not bend on the prostitution charges. Luciano also admitted to knowing Giuseppe Masseria, Louis Buchalter, Jacob Shapiro, Benjamin Siegel and others but denied any association with veteran criminal Ciro Terranova, even when faced with the record of several phone calls placed from Luciano’s hotel room to the “Artichoke King’s” private phone number.