The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (19 page)

Lansky nodded. “That’s right. We’ve all been so busy we’ve been losin’ track of what’s really goin’ on. This thing between Masseria and Maranzano’s gonna bust open any day and there’ll be
a real war, not the penny-ante stuff. Charlie, we have to pick the winner now, and then go with him.”

“There you go again,” Siegel said, “always tryin’ to beat the odds. What the fuck do you think you are, some guy with a crystal ball? Between Masseria and Maranzano, it’s not even six to five. Go ahead, wise guy, you pick the winner.”

“I picked the winner a long time ago,” Lansky said. “Charlie Luciano. All we have to do is eliminate the two roadblocks and from then on, Charlie sits on top. That’s what we want, isn’t it?”

Luciano and his friends were convinced they had time to develop their plans, to choose the most propitious moment to put them into operation. Not so Tom Reina, who had come to a similar decision but was certain he had to move rapidly. The word of his meeting with Maranzano had gotten back to Masseria, he discovered, and knowing Joe the Boss’s reaction to any dealings with the enemy, he decided to seek the protection of Maranzano immediately. A few days after the Barbizon confrontation, Luciano received a call from his friend Tommy Lucchese, requesting an urgent meeting at a Turkish bath on upper Broadway where Lucchese had arranged for them to have the privacy of the steam room. Lucchese told Luciano that the switch was imminent. “So now I knew that Maranzano was gonna call Masseria’s hand and there was gonna be all-out war.

“I told Tommy to send out the word to Maranzano that I would finally agree to meet with him.” To set up the arrangements, Lucchese chose a Maranzano lieutenant named Tony Bender. “He was pretty good at workin’ both sides of the street and gettin’ away with it.” At the beginning of October 1929, Bender brought back the word that Maranzano was agreeable to a conference, to take place on Staten Island, a neutral territory controlled by Joe Profaci,
another Maranzano lieutenant but an old friend of Luciano’s from childhood. “I agreed to go, on the condition that Maranzano and I would come alone, and that’s the way it was set up. I figured that in spite of everythin’, Maranzano wanted me with him bad enough so he’d live up to his word.”

Just after midnight on October 17, Genovese picked up Luciano at the Barbizon. “He tried to keep me from goin’ alone; he even said he’d like to hide in the back under a blanket, but I told him to forget it.” Luciano drove himself to the Staten Island Ferry, rode across, and then went to a shipping pier about a half-mile away.

“Maranzano was already there, waitin’ for me. I got out of the car, we shook hands and he put his arm across my shoulder like he always did, and said, I’m so glad to see you again, bambino.’ We walked inside this big building on the pier. It was empty and dark. We found a couple boxes and sat down. There was a couple minutes of horseshit talk and then Maranzano said, ‘Charlie, I want you to come in with me.’

“I said, ‘I been thinkin’ about it.’ ”

“Good, good,” Maranzano replied. “You know, I always wanted you before and now is a good time for us to shake hands.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“But tell me, Charlie, why did you make that terrible mistake and go with Giuseppe? He’s not your kind. He has no sense of values.”

“Yeah, I found that out.”

“Now you have thought better of that decision?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Good. We will work it out together. It is a delicate matter and we will solve it. As I always said before, you will be the only one next to me. But, Charlie” — at this point, Luciano remembered, as he reconstructed the events of that night, Maranzano’s voice and manner lost their velvet and became sharp and dictatorial — “I have a condition.”

“What is it?”

Maranzano stared at him, his eyes flat, his voice emotionless. “You are going to kill Masseria.”

This, Luciano thought, was no condition at all, and he said, “Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that, too.”

“No, no, you don’t understand, Charlie. I mean you. You, personally, are going to kill Giuseppe Masseria.”

That condition, Luciano immediately realized, was a trap. In the tradition-laden Sicilian underworld, one cannot kill the leader personally and then succeed to his throne; the killer cannot expect more than a secondary role in the new hierarchy and more likely he can expect to be killed himself in revenge.

“You’re crazy.” He had hardly gotten the words out when something smashed against his skull and he blacked out.

“When I come to, I felt somebody splashin’ water in my face, and I was tied up and hangin’ by my wrists from a beam over me, with my toes just reachin’ the floor. There was some flashlights shinin’ at me and I could make out maybe a half-dozen guys with handkerchiefs coverin’ their faces, so that I couldn’t tell who anybody was.” Later, he said he was convinced that Tony Bender was behind one of these masks, though Lucchese told him he was wrong. “I could make out Maranzano. He was standin’ near me and didn’t say a word. But I could tell what he was thinkin’, and I just said, ‘I ain’t gonna do it.’ So he gave a signal and those pricks without the guts to show who they was began to work on me. They did a pretty good job, with belts and clubs and cigarette butts — until I passed out again.

“I don’t know how long I was out or when I came to, but this time my hands felt like they was on fire. Because when I looked up I saw that I was practically hangin’ by my thumbs.” The more Luciano was beaten and tortured, the more stubborn he became, and the more determined that if he survived, which at that moment he very much doubted, he would make certain that Maranzano’s days would be short. The beating continued; Maranzano watched silently, occasionally calling a pause as he stepped forward to say, “Charlie, this is so stupid. You can end this now if you will just agree. It is no big thing to kill a man, and you know he is going to die anyway. Why do you have to go through this, Charlie? Why are you so stubborn? All you have to do is kill him, kill him yourself. That you must do, kill him yourself. But, Charlie, I promise you, if you do not do it, then you are dead.”

Luciano remembered later that the repetition of Maranzano’s demands, the almost ritual aspect of the beating, gave him a sudden spurt of strength and he lashed out with his feet, catching Maranzano in the groin. Maranzano doubled over, fell to the ground, and began to scream with pain and rage: “Kill him! Kill him! Cut him down and kill him!” But before that could be done, Maranzano himself staggered to his feet, grabbed a knife one of his men was holding and slashed Luciano’s face, severing the muscles across his right cheek to the bone. Luciano would bear the scars to his death, and would forever have a slightly drooping right eye that gave him a sinister look.

As Maranzano slashed at Luciano again, opening a long gash across his chest, one of the masked assailants took out a gun and aimed it at Luciano. Suddenly Maranzano calmed, snapped, “No! Let him live. He’ll do what has to be done or we will see him again.”

“Somebody cut me down and I felt like every square inch of me had a knife in it. I couldn’t even move. But I never passed out completely. A few of the guys picked me up and threw me into the back of a car and about three or four minutes later they tossed me out on the road like I was a sack of potatoes. I must’ve laid there for a good fifteen minutes before I could crawl to a little streetlight down the block. It was about two in the mornin’. Then I passed out.”

A few minutes later, a police car cruising along Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island spotted Luciano lying in the street, picked him up, and drove him to the hospital. It took fifty-five stitches to close his wounds. “I don’t think there was a part of me that didn’t have marks or that wasn’t covered by bandages.” To add to his indignity, the Staten Island police, when Luciano refused to give an explanation of what had happened, booked him on the charge of grand larceny, for the theft of a car. The charge was quickly dismissed.

Until he related, this story in 1961, Luciano had never given a satisfactory explanation of that October night. He once told a story, and soon dropped it, that he had been “taken for a ride” by a gang of masked men who had beaten him and then thrown him out on the road in exchange for a promise to pay them ten thousand
dollars. In his refusal to talk about that night, rumors spread; that he had been kidnapped by a rival gang at the corner of Broadway and Fiftieth Street, beaten as a warning to stop encroaching on its territory, and then dumped on Staten Island; that he had been seized at that Broadway corner by Maranzano’s men and rescued at the Staten Island Ferry by Lansky and Siegel, who found him badly battered and who then left him on Staten Island to create a mystery; that he had been assaulted by federal agents who discovered him waiting for a narcotics or whiskey shipment on Staten Island; and that he had been beaten by a cop, the father of a girl he had made pregnant.

All Luciano himself would ever say was, ‘I’ll take care of this in my own way.”

Still the rumor spread and was credited by many that he had been taken for a ride and had returned, perhaps the only gangster in history to survive that experience. People began to talk about his good luck, that he was “Lucky” Luciano; the nickname stuck.

As far as Luciano himself was concerned, it was not the press or the world at large that gave him that nickname; it was Meyer Lansky. When he came back from Staten Island, still battered and forced to spend some days in bed in seclusion, Costello and Lansky visited him. To them he related the entire story of the beating. “I guess I’m just lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah,” Lansky replied, “lucky. That’s you — ‘Lucky Luciano.’ ”

“Lyin’ in bed, I had a little time to think over what happened. For a couple days I couldn’t understand why the fuckin’ bastard went to all that trouble and then let me live. Finally, I figured it out. Masseria was guarded like the Philadelphia Mint; nobody could get close to him unless you was part of the outfit. Maranzano knew that because he tried a couple times and come up empty. That meant he had to have somebody close to Joe. So why should Maranzano knock me off when I’m the logical guy he needs? But it was typical of the Sicilian touch of ‘Mister Julius Caesar,’ that if I knocked off Masseria personally, that would be the end of my so-called career as a top man.”

Looking back on the event more than thirty years later, Luciano was able to be a little philosophical. “In a way, I don’t blame Maranzano, because maybe he knew — or maybe he didn’t know
— what I was plannin’. But if he did, then he should’ve killed me. For three days, every time I even moved my pinky, it hurt so bad I could hardly stand it. That’s the only time in my life I ever took narcotics. Joe A. used to come twice a day and shoot me full of morphine. Whenever I got one of them shots, I’d figure out a new way to bump off Don Salvatore Maranzano.”

It was late October before Luciano was ready to leave his suite at the Barbizon. On the twenty-eighth, Lansky and Costello stopped by late in the morning, and the three strolled through Central Park in the glow of Indian summer. They talked about the troubled pregnancy of Lansky’s wife, Anna, which was making him distraught. They talked about the stock market, which was sliding faster than the ticker tape could keep track. “None of us guys was in the market. What the hell, we didn’t have to be. But Meyer was very interested in what was goin’ on and he said, ‘If we’re smart, we’ll hold on to all our cash. When the bottom falls out of the market the whole fuckin’ country’s gonna need money and they’ll pay through the nose for it. We’ll have the garment district by the balls; they won’t be able to live without us.’ ”

Costello pointed out that it wasn’t just the garment industry that would need them. They would be indispensable to the politicians and the police: “Every one of them idiots has been playin’ the market, tryin’ to make the big scene. The funny thing is they’re all gamblin’ with our free money. Yesterday, around noon, Whalen [Police Commissioner Grover Whalen] called me. He was desperate for thirty grand to cover his margin. What could I do? I hadda give it to him. We own him.”

Into this talk of national economics and its impact on them, Luciano suddenly brought up the names of Masseria and Maranzano. “Screw them,” Lansky said. “Knockin’ off Joe and Maranzano
is the easiest thing in the world; all we’ve gotta do is figure it out like Charlie says: make ’em kill each other.”

“It was one of the few times I ever heard Lansky really laugh, one that comes up from the belly. He really enjoyed the idea of playin’ checkers with two big shots. Even Frank laughed, and for him that was almost unbelievable.”

The next day, October 29, catastrophe overtook the United States. The stock market, which had been falling chaotically every day, crashed, carrying with it fortunes and hopes. Fear and despair settled like a shroud over the nation, and it would be years before they lifted. The decade-long boom of the Roaring Twenties was over; the Great Depression had begun.

The world of the bootleggers and the racketeers was not unaffected. “One day, everybody was buyin’ cases of booze. And the next day they was glad to have enough dough to buy a pint. Every angle of our business was hit. Like by a tornado. The jewelry heists that Adonis loved didn’t mean a thing no more. All them rich broads was out of diamonds; they had everything in hock. Costello’s slots still did some business, but it was down to less than half. The only place where we didn’t have a drop-off was in Harlem and wherever the numbers was runnin’. The little guy who was sellin’ apples still wanted to put a few pennies on a number, prayin’ he’d hit somethin’, not a big bundle, just somethin’. So what happened was that pennies became the backbone of our dollars, our bread and butter. On the other stuff, we took a bath along with the other losers.”