The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (11 page)

Costello had said nothing up to this point; now he raised an eyebrow at Lucania. Lucania nodded, turned to Maranzano, and said, “You’re talkin’ like we’re on top of a Sicilian mountain, Maranzano. Let’s get down to the ground. What do you want?”

“The young are always in such a hurry,” he sighed. What he wanted he thought quite acceptable, only that all the proceeds become part of a common treasury shared equally. To compensate Lucania for the loss that such a division of the liquor spoils would entail, he proposed that Lucania receive a reasonable — not a large, but a reasonable — percentage of all proceeds from all the other Maranzano interests — from the Italian lottery, well-planned loft and warehouse robberies, and all the rest. And, he noted, “We have considerable legitimate sources of proceeds: we own much real estate in Manhattan, including a substantial interest in the Flatiron Building, in both the land and the building. We are very large importers of foods to satisfy the tastes of our Italian brothers, and our olive oil imports, we anticipate, can be greatly increased with the elimination of an unfriendly Italian competitor in the
Bronx.” That competitor was Mafia racketeer Ciro Terranova, sometimes called the Artichoke King.

“All durin’ his speech, he was walkin’ around the room. When he finished, he turned to us like he was expectin’ us to applaud him, like he was wearin’ a toga and just finished one of them big orations in the Roman Senate. That’s the way he always made me feel, like he was Caesar and I was shit. Frank and I just sat there and we didn’t say nothin’.”

When Maranzano realized there would be no immediate response, he told Lucania to take his time, to go back and discuss the deal with his associates; such a discussion would reveal the generosity of the offer and the wisdom of a favorable answer.

“I already knew, speakin’ for myself, that I’d have to turn the deal down. But I never tried to push my guys into a thing just because I said so.” Back uptown at the Claridge, Lucania called a meeting of himself, Costello, Lansky, Siegel, Adonis and Genovese, explained the deal, and asked for their opinions. Adonis turned to Costello and asked, because he had been at the meeting with Maranzano, what he thought. “It’s a helluva deal, and now, because of Charlie, somebody besides a Sicilian will be equal.”

“I looked at all my smart friends, and I could see that everybody agreed with Frank, except Lansky. So I said, ‘What’s on your mind, Little Meyer?’ He said, ‘It stinks.’

“Everybody got all excited. Frank was sore as hell and turned on Lansky. ‘Even with that adding-machine head of yours,’ he says, ‘you can’t count the dough we can all make in this setup.’ I stopped him there and I said to all of them, ‘What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you know the deal won’t last two days? You don’t have to be a big brain or an addin’ machine or nothin’ else to know that the minute we join up with Maranzano, that fat old son of a bitch will have us knocked off.’ ”

There was a silence, broken finally by Genovese. “Charlie has to be right. Maranzano can’t afford to let a guy with a brain like Charlie’s run around loose.”

If not Lucania’s brain, Maranzano was clearly worried about his ambition. It was apparent that Lucania was on the way up, was determined to reach the top, to use whatever means were necessary to get there. Anyone who even potentially stood in his way would
be in very great danger one day. If Lucania’s assumption was correct, Maranzano resolved to eliminate him while he was still vulnerable, and such an elimination would be a lot easier if Lucania was under his control rather than an independent surrounded and protected by strong allies.

For his friends, Lucania spelled out his own personal feelings about Maranzano and asked them to decide whether his personal sense that the offer should be rejected was based only on his revulsion or whether his reasoning was solidly based. There was a unanimous verdict that in this case the emotions and the realities coincided.

“So,” he asked, “are we afraid of this guy?” It was a serious question, and one with potentially fatal consequences if the answer was wrong, for despite their success and growing power, they were still not strong enough to come to combat with Maranzano’s power, influence and troops, and they knew it.

“Benny Siegel stood up then. After the Dempsey fight, he started to dress like me and I felt like he was sorta my kid brother. He said, ‘If there’s gonna be a war, they’ll have to get over me first.’ That was typical of Benny. He loved to fight and he didn’t care who the hell with. He was ready to go in swingin’. Of course, I didn’t want to take on Maranzano in a fight right then, but I knew that sooner or later, Maranzano would have to go. As long as he was alive, he would stand in our way, my way to the top. But when I took him on, it was gonna be on my terms.”

Word was sent back to Maranzano, politely declining the offer and telling him that for the time being at least, Charlie Lucania had decided to continue on his own. Then they waited for the reaction. There was none. There was no increase in the hijackings of whiskey shipments, no increased pressure on Lucania’s customers to buy their booze from Maranzano, no sudden rise in the number of arrests of Lucania’s people by Maranzano’s friends on the police force. There were no attempts on the lives of Lucania, Costello or the others. And when they met, as Charlie Lucania and Maranzano were bound to from time to time, Maranzano was as outwardly pleasant and cultured as he had always been, acting as though nothing had happened, never failing to call Lucania his “bambino.”

“I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just have us bumped off, or at least try to then, when we was still small potatoes. He had the boys to do it and there was plenty of opportunities. But he never moved a muscle. I think that was what scared us bad in the beginnin’, when nothin’ happened, and we just sat there and waited for him to lower the boom. Then we got mad and we said, ‘Screw him. We’ll take our chances.’ ”

Lucania’s rejection of this second Maranzano offer without any serious consequences spread quickly through the underworld and won Lucania increased respect from his elders and peers. He was wooed and entertained by the Mangano brothers, Philip and Vincent, and others of his age who were emerging as powers in Brooklyn. Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, boss of Atlantic City, and Moe Dalitz and Johnny Scalise, the bootleg powers in Cleveland, began cutting him in on some of their deals. Such illegal liquor suppliers as Sam Bronfman in Canada and Lewis Rosenstiel (who, a decade later, would celebrate the end of Prohibition by turning his bootleg enterprise into the Schenley Corporation) wooed him assiduously.

And perhaps most important, it resulted in some tentative feelers from Giuseppe Masseria, the self-proclaimed and generally acknowledged “Boss of Bosses” of the Italian-Sicilian underworld. Between the ascetic, intellectual Maranzano and the gross, earthy and uncouth Masseria there had long been great animosity, made greater as Maranzano hardly disguised his ambition to claim the title of “Boss of Bosses” of the Mafia and often sent his own troops in forays against Joe the Boss’s enterprises. It was apparent that one day a war to the death would erupt between the two.

The first probe toward Lucania came through Dutch Schultz. He sent to the Claridge Hotel, to meet Lucania, Genovese and their associates, a major underworld leader in the Bronx and ally of Masseria’s named Gaetano “Tom” Reina. The conversation was a guarded and oblique one, with Reina saying he had come only to meet a fellow Sicilian who was becoming so important, and perhaps to strike a friendship that could lead in the future to some alliances. Lucania listened, was cordial and noncommittal.

That meeting opened the door a crack, and it swung a little wider a couple of months later. “I thought at the time the way
the whole thing happened was kind of an accident, but later I found out that without tellin’ me a thing about it, Vito set it up on his own.” Along with Siegel, several other friends and some girls, Lucania had gone to the opening of George White’s Scandals as guests of the impresario (“We always gave George a few bucks as an investment in his shows; not much, but just enough to make sure we got openin’ night tickets”), and then had gone on to Jack & Charlie’s 21 Club. They had hardly been seated when Masseria, with some of his lieutenants and a train of pretty girls, walked in, spotted Lucania across the room, and hailed him in Sicilian. Masseria walked over and invited Charlie Lucania and his friends to join the Masseria party, insisted on it. Several large tables were put together and bottles of whiskey were brought out. Everyone was in a jovial, expansive mood, and Masseria drank heavily. At one point, Lucania leaned across the table and asked Masseria how he liked the whiskey.

Masseria smiled and nodded happily. “Best I ever tasted.”

“It oughta be. It’s mine.”

Masseria peered at him, looked closely at the bottle and the label, sipped again. “It’s real,” he said.

“Damn right. It’s my private stock.”

If Lucania was serving straight, uncut whiskey in a speakeasy, then perhaps he was even more powerful and successful than Masseria had thought, and this would make him even more valuable as a recruit. Masseria talked expansively about how good business must be for Lucania, how it was apparent that big things were in store for him, that his future was unlimited. Perhaps, he said, it might be a good thing if they got together for a private talk, perhaps even the next day.

“It was almost the same kind of situation that took place between Maranzano and me and Costello a couple of months before, except for one big difference. Masseria didn’t have the background and the education of a guy like Maranzano; he didn’t have no culture. So, between bein’ short, fat and havin’ a round face that was first cousin to a pig, the words that come out of his kisser was rough and straight to the point: he hated Maranzano’s fuckin’ guts and he knew that Maranzano felt the same way about him.”

The meeting took place in a small office on the second floor of
a little restaurant building not a half-dozen blocks from Maranzano’s social club, and throughout the session, every time Masseria looked out the window, his eyes and face contorted as he looked toward the Maranzano bastion. He shook his finger at Lucania and bellowed, “You listen to me. One day, maybe tomorrow, there’s gonna be war. I know what that louse is tryin’ to do. He wants to keep you on ice, because that way he thinks he can beat me. And that, Charlie, is where he outsmarts himself. You come with me and we’ll knock the shit out of him together, once and for all.”

Lucania had little doubt that Masseria was right, but he did not wish to be hurried or pressured into a quick decision, and so his response was almost casual. “You may be right. Maybe Maranzano thinks he’s still fightin’ one of them Roman battles, like Julius Caesar.”

“He’s gonna kill himself with that crap,” Masseria said. “When are you gonna wake up? Don’t you know the only reason he didn’t knock you off, and all them punk kids with you, is because he needs you? Get smart. Come in with me, and then you can be the first lieutenant of the real Sicilian boss of this whole fuckin’ city, of the country. You want money? I’ll make more money for you than you can count. Just say the word.” Masseria’s words were spoken almost in a guttural growl. He relished speaking English, but his accent was heavy and crude, and Lucania, as he listened, compared the suaveness of Maranzano to the boorishness of Masseria. At that moment, he was uncertain which man represented, in fact, the greater strength, which appealed to him more as a potential ally.

“Maybe it was right at that minute when I knew that eventually both of these guys hadda go. We’d already been talkin’ about rubbin’ out Maranzano when the time come. But this meet with Masseria made it pretty clear to me that these two guys eventually would try to carve me up. I hadda have time, and so I stalled. I told him it wasn’t the right time, I had a lot of things bein’ developed that involved all my guys and I hadda talk to them. He beefed a lot about it, about me not goin’ in with him right then and there, but I wasn’t gonna get caught in no squeeze play. I knew I could do more and go further by bein’ independent and free and let the two of ’em kiss my ass for a while, until I was sure
that I couldn’t stall ’em no longer. The best I could do was to walk a tightrope and keep the door open a little bit.”

Within days of the meeting, and Lucania’s rejection of Masseria’s offer, several of his whiskey shipments were hijacked in the Jersey woods near Atlantic City while en route to Philadelphia, and two of his warehouses in upper Manhattan were raided by federal Prohibition agents. These were, of course, the hazards of the business and he could not expect to be totally free of some losses. But the hijackings created a shortage of his supplies for the first time. He had practically no Scotch left and his customers were demanding Scotch. He could not tell his customers that he couldn’t fill their orders, that he didn’t have any more Scotch and they would have to wait for the next shipment. This would seriously damage his standing as the man who could always deliver and deliver on short notice. And it would force those customers to turn to someone else, like Maranzano or Masseria, to get what they needed.

Lucania was desperate. And at that moment, he received a telephone call from Nucky Johnson in Atlantic City, perhaps Johnson’s attempt to repay the favor of the tickets for the Dempsey-Firpo fight. It was suggested that Lucania drive down to Atlantic City and bring Adonis with him for a private meeting. A summons from Johnson was, in those days, like a command, for Nucky Johnson was the man who ran Atlantic City with an iron hand, controlling its politics and its very existence. Nothing happened there, or in the area around the wide-open resort, without Johnson’s knowledge and permission. He imported and distributed, and dictated who sold the liquor consumed there; he had a piece of all the gambling and the newly popular slot machines that had been introduced by Frank Costello; he had an interest even in the sale of jobs at every level of the police force. And he prided himself on his neutrality; he was above the battle of the warring underworld organizations from outside who used Atlantic City, with his permission and for a price, to import their liquor, store it in warehouses he either owned or controlled in the woods up from the beach, and cut it in distilleries in the neighborhood. Nobody crossed Nucky Johnson, and nobody even tried; to do anything in Atlantic City without his permission would not only have closed
off the area to the miscreant but would have meant all-out war with Johnson, and, said Luciano, “He would’ve come down on you from every side, includin’ the whole Atlantic Ocean.”