The Everything Mafia Book (13 page)

The Dream

Luciano, perhaps having been influenced by American democracy and corporate structure, rejected the title. He resolved that the five families would remain intact and, along with Meyer Lansky, formed the National Crime Syndicate, also known as “the Commission.” But Luciano’s vision of a multiethnic Mafia did not last that long. Pretty soon it was apparent that the Italians would take center stage in the ruling commission, leaving little room for anyone else. But other forces were working. Jewish immigrants were moving out of the teeming ethnic slums at a steady clip, leaving few recruits for the ranks. The Irish were moving uptown and splintering into smaller criminal gangs, while many were taking the opposite route and becoming police officers and municipal employees. But they were never totally out of the scene. While the Mafia remained strictly Italian, there was plenty of room for other ethnic groups to work, and profit, with them.

CHAPTER 7
Charlie “Lucky” Luciano

Lucky Luciano is credited with being the architect of the American Mafia. He took the old Sicilian organization, expunged the Old-World thinking, and created the modern Mafia. He envisioned an organization run more along the lines of a business than its Sicilian counterpart was at that time. Had he been a businessman he would have made millions—legitimately. He rose to prominence during the Castellammare War. Luciano survived the bullets and lived a long life as one of the most ruthless and successful gangsters of the twentieth century.

Luciano—The Early Years

Lucky Luciano was born Salvatore Luciana in Sicily in 1897. Like so many other millions of Europeans in the nineteenth century, who heard tales of a promised land where the streets were paved with gold, his family set sail for America only to learn that the hype did not match the reality. Nevertheless, it was a land of opportunity for those on both sides of the law.

Charlie got his first arrest when he was ten. It was for shoplifting. Not a particularly glamorous start. He also ran a juvenile “protection agency,” offering to protect the weaker boys for a few pennies. It was a no-win scenario for the boys—if they did not pay Charlie for protection, he promptly pummeled them.

The immigrant Mafiosi that came to America as boys and adolescents were raised in this atmosphere and were more willing to interact with other ethnic groups. In some ways this breaking down of the barriers enabled law-abiding immigrants to better assimilate into American culture, while it helped the criminals gain a stronger foothold in the existing American underworld.

While his protection racket was expanding, Luciano was getting involved in more serious crimes. While still a teen, he was on the New York Police Department’s short list as the suspect in several gangland murders. He was well known to the local beat cops. And he was a member of the infamous Five Points Gang.

Getting All the Boys Together

While Luciano was shaking down kids on the street corners for protection, one of the kids refused to pay up. This kind of bravery was one way for anonymous kids to get noticed, and also a way for them to make sure they didn’t remain a victim. This particular kid was another immigrant child, a Jewish kid from Poland named Meyer Lansky. Meyer stood up to Luciano, and they became fast friends and lifelong partners in crime. From this fateful meeting sprang the most successful crime outfit in American history.

Drugs and Booze

Lucky Luciano did time in a reform school for dealing heroin and morphine in 1915. This early foray into the business would expand in the coming years. In addition to drugs, booze was another profitable commodity. Every gangster was in the bootleg business during the 1920s, including Luciano. He mingled with other young hoodlums who formed a virtual Who’s Who of gangland: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Dutch Schultz, Arnold Rothstein, and an assortment of Irish gangsters. Luciano had no prejudices about mingling with hoods of all stripes. His fraternization with Irish and Jewish gangsters was unique for the time.

In Charge

After the Castellammarese War, Lucky Luciano was the top Mafia don. He did not get the nickname from surviving the near-fatal beating that left him with a fashionable scar on his cheek, an emblem befitting his status as a tough guy. He was called Lucky because of his handicapping acumen. He could pick winners at the racetrack with uncanny accuracy. And most of the time the races weren’t even fixed.

Lucky Luciano had the posthumous distinction of being named by Time magazine as one of the 100 “Builders and Titans” of the twentieth century. He was placed in the same company as Walt Disney and Bill Gates.

Mafia bosses do not have a wide circle of trusted friends; most of the time they are keeping an eye out for underlings with a little too much ambition. Luciano maintained business and personal relations with the tough little kid who steadfastly refused his shakedown intimidation. His business and personal relationship with Meyer Lansky was one of the key factors in helping him stay at the top of the Mafia heap.

Meyer Lansky, the role model for the character of Hymn Roth in
The Godfather II
, was a shrewd and savvy businessman. But instead of choosing a career in the corporate world, Lansky stayed true to his criminal roots and became a legendary mastermind of criminal activities, probably best illustrated by the lack of time he spent behind bars.

He was born in Poland, and his real name was Majer Suchowlinski. Gambling was his true passion, and his involvement in pre-Castro Cuban casinos, racetracks, wire services, and Las Vegas brought tens of millions of dollars into the wallets of wise guys from New York to Chicago. This cohesion of mob control over mob rackets was helped along by the Commission. Now that there was a gangland “syndicate” that spanned the country and united organized crime families across America, there needed to be a governing board.

The Mob Board of Directors

Luciano and Lansky maintained the basic structure of Maranzano’s Commission. The other East Coast boys were Joseph Bonanno, Vincent Mangano, Joseph Profaci, Tom Gagliano, and Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo. While the bigwigs were from New York’s five families, there were also representatives from Philadelphia and Chicago. The families in larger cities controlled families in smaller cities. For example, the Chicago boys controlled all the Midwest families in Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Detroit (though some say that Motor City boss Joe Zerilli was a Commission member for a time).

The last known meeting of the Commission took place in 2000 and was led by Bonanno boss Joe Massino as well as representatives from the other New York families. Although that was the last one that the feds know about, there may have been some since then. It’s supposed to be a secret after all.

Also there were various side meeting, like the La Stella meeting in Queens in the 1960s that featured Tampa boss Santo Trafficante Jr., New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello and his underlings, and some of the New York Commission members.

In the early years, the Commission was made up of mostly Italian and Jewish gangsters. The “Big Six” included Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Meyer Lansky, Tony Accardo, Jake Guzik, and Longy Zwillman. However, the Jewish influence faded over time as the sons of the Jewish gangsters, for the most part, did not follow in the family business. The next generation went into legitimate careers. Lansky even saw one of his sons go to West Point. The sociocultural phenomenon of Jewish gangsterism lasted just a single generation in America, although there are still some active Jewish associates of the Mafia.

There is a supposed tell-all book by Luciano. Entitled The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, by Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer, it is an account of the legendary gangster’s exploits he relayed to the authors before his death. Be forewarned, however, that many experts on the Mafia doubt the truthfulness of many of the authors’ claims that this information was all from Luciano’s mouth.

One of the reasons that the Commission was a long-lasting success was because it was structured as a board of directors, each with equal power and no one man in charge. There were men who came to be regarded as the “Boss of Bosses” from time to time, but all major decisions were voted on, and no one man had veto power. This also made is easier to try and smooth over differences before they erupted into all out war. This, of course, did not always happen.

Mediation and Murder

Much of the role of the Commission was to mediate and settle disputes between rival families in the United States, and to keep things running smoothly with the Sicilian Mafia in the old country. When things could not be worked out over a discussion, the problem was taken care of with a gun or garrote. At its height, the Commission represented about 1,700 made Mafia members in over two dozen families nationwide, not to mention all the associates that were under the made members.

The Dream Is Over

The legacy Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky had left behind suffered an irrevocable blow in 1986 when the heads of the five families were successfully prosecuted and convicted for their crimes by U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani. Of course, that wasn’t the deathblow to the Mafia, but it was finally official proof that the Commission existed and made decisions regarding the Mafia’s activities.