The Everything Mafia Book (29 page)

Just as the Sicilian Mafia had problems when the fascist government of Mussolini came to power, so too did Chinese organized crime fail after the Chinese communist revolution of 1949. The peasant class suffered either way, whether it was from the menace of the criminals or the cruelty of the totalitarian regime.

Just Say Yes

Even before the Supreme Court decision made these drugs illegal, the Mafia had dabbled in drugs. Mafiosi acted as though it was beneath them, but they greedily salivated at the money to be made. The New Orleans Mafia was dealing drugs, including marijuana, in the nineteenth century. Marijuana was popular in the local African-American community in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The Mafia talked a lot about keeping it away from children and from Italian and Sicilian neighborhoods. There was always racism within the Mafia in addition to its deep insularity, so it did not much care what drugs did to destroy other ethnic groups.

Business Opportunity

The Mafia crime families in the North were slower to jump on the narcotics bandwagon. The old guard from the Old World wanted nothing to do with it. There was plenty of money to be made in the bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution rackets. These were regarded as “harmless” vices by many people, even law enforcement officials, who often turned a blind eye when these activities were going on right under their noses.

Drug trafficking was another matter altogether. When the Young Turks wiped out the old guard in the Castellammarese War, the new leaders of the Mafia reconsidered staying out of the drug trade. They had a peripheral role in the business anyway. Their Jewish pals such as Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond were already involved in the heroin business in the 1920s. The new Boss of Bosses, Lucky Luciano, decided that the Italians should get a piece of the action.

Meyer Lansky

Courtesy of AP Images

The vagrancy charges against Meyer Lansky, fifty-five-year-old gambler and who is reputed to have large gambling interests in Cuba, were dismissed, February 26, 1958, after a short trial before magistrate Reuben Levy in New York City’s Manhattan Arrest Court. When Lansky arrived from Cuba on February 11, he was followed by a detective to midtown Manhattan where he was taken into custody and charged with vagrancy.

The Bureau

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Mafia turned its sights on the heroin racket. The decision made good business sense. Though there were fewer drug addicts than drinkers in the country, the profit margin would be much higher, and drugs would be easier to smuggle. Packets of powder do not noisily clink-clank in crates when being unloaded off ships in the dead of night.

As the Mafia’s power and influence has dwindled, other forces have moved in to take up the slack. The Mexican cartels are supplanting the Colombians as suppliers of cocaine. Outlaw motorcycle gangs are manufacturing methamphetamine. Israeli mobsters control the ecstasy trade. Italian-based crime groups control both cocaine and heroin in Europe.

Part of Luciano’s plan was to turn the approximately 1,200 prostitutes (who earned him $10 million a year) under his control into heroin addicts. They would not create problems, and they could be easily manipulated that way. The prostitutes would work to support their habit and buy the product from the Mafia. They would be immediately returning the pittance they earned back into the pockets of their Mafia masters. During his exile in Italy, Lucky Luciano masterminded the modern heroin trade.

Cops in the Know

The first federal law enforcement agency to realize that the Mafia were the new bad boys on the block was not the FBI, but rather the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), the precursor to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The FBN compiled extensive lists of major drug dealers and financiers across the country. In addition, rather than hiring all Ivy League WASPs, the BNR hired agents of Italian, Middle Eastern, and Asian descent to effectively infiltrate the drug underworld. By the 1960s the FBN had a far more extensive database of mobsters than any other law enforcement agency.

The Italian Connection

The United States government thought they were getting rid of a rotten apple when they deported Lucky Luciano back to Italy. What they really did was send him off to the old homestead so he could organize a very efficient and effective drug trafficking empire. They kicked him out, and he sent back tons of heroin that filled the Mafia’s coffers. Luciano immediately renewed old acquaintances in the Sicilian Mafia when he returned to the Mediterranean region.

Middle East Mayhem

It was a labyrinthine trail that took the heroin from its source to its destination as nickel bags in American cities and towns. And Lucky Luciano oversaw the whole sordid affair until his death in 1962. It is estimated that the number of heroin addicts in the United States increased from 20,000 to 150,000 in the twenty years after World War II.

The trek began in the Middle East, where it was in its morphine base form. Luciano’s main source for the morphine base was a shady character in Beirut, Lebanon. Sami El-Khoury secured the raw opium from Turkey, oversaw its transformation into morphine base in Lebanon, and sent it along to the laboratories in Sicily and Marseilles, France, for its final metamorphosis into heroin. It seems that just about everyone in Lebanon was on the take. Members of the police force and airport and customs officials were generously bribed, which enabled the trafficking to run smoothly with no interference from pesky law enforcement officials.

On to Sicily

In Sicily, Lucky Luciano had several secret laboratories where morphine was processed into heroin. Luciano had minimal interference from the law from 1949 to 1954 until some investigative journalists ran some pictures and a story in a Rome newspaper. One lab was shut down, but the impact to the business as a whole was negligible. Luciano’s ties with other major mob drug figures, like Santo Sorge and Santo Trafficante Jr., helped him maintain control.

Luciano was not the only Mafioso who was deported after World War II. More than a hundred big and little fish were kicked out of the United States, but their penchant for larceny did not diminish. Nor did they all return to Italy when deported. Luciano had his men placed in big cities throughout Europe. Therefore he had many agents and operations in places across the European continent. If one tentacle of his hydra-like empire was cut off, it would not have jeopardized the enterprise as a whole.

The Mafia’s involvement with drugs and the increasing number of snitches is directly connected. Since drug trafficking carried very serious jail time and law enforcement officials were less likely to look the other way, low-level hoods were more likely to cut deals.

Back in the USA

Meanwhile, Luciano had stayed in close contact with his old pals back in America. Meyer Lansky was controlling Luciano’s interests in America, and Lansky organized the American end of the drug empire. Lansky worked with the Trafficante crime family of Florida to oversee drug smuggling from the Caribbean and Cuba. Smugglers also delivered through Canada, and some audaciously unloaded their product right off the shores of New York City, much as they had done in the bootlegging days. The Cotroni family was the major player in the Great White North.

Luciano was not allowed back into the United States, but nothing prevented him from visiting Cuba, a mere ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Cuba was a haven for the Mafia until 1959. Luciano went to Cuba in 1947 for a meeting with the American crime bosses to discuss their plans. The famous Havana conference had representatives from almost every mob family in the country. The Mafia bribed the entire corrupt government of Cuba and secured their services in making Cuba the last stop before drug distribution in the United States. The United States government was well aware of Luciano’s presence in Cuba, and it put pressure on the Cuban government to revoke Luciano’s visa and force him to return to Italy. He did return there, but not before he had accomplished his goals. The distribution network in America was established.

The French Connection

Vast poppy fields stretched for miles in areas like Turkey and Afghanistan. When the poppy bloomed, the head was cut off and the juice was cultivated. The raw materials were then transported over land or by boat to either the tiny island of Corsica or the port city of Marseilles. There the French Connection took over. The French Connection was not just the name of a famous action movie, it was an operation overseen by Coriscan crime lords, French intelligence, the Mafia, and various middlemen.

Pure Product, Pure Profit

In the mid-1950s a kilogram of pure heroin was smuggled into Marseilles at a cost of $500. It was then sold to a middleman for $1,500 in Marseilles. The heroin was then cut at least twice with milk powder or sugar. By the time the final product reached the street the value of a kilo came to over $20,000. That kind of money brought attention from the underworld, as well as from law enforcement. The Corsican mob was bringing in over 5,000 pounds of heroin into the United States.