The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (24 page)

When he left Chicago to return to New York, Charlie Lucky
Luciano had realized his dreams. He had organized crime throughout the United States and, at last, he stood atop the pyramid, undisputed, unchallenged.

Now the newspapers and the gossip columnists, when they wrote about him, called him “The Boss,” and his friends, associates and underlings, though they still called him Charlie or Charlie Lucky, thought of him as the boss. He continued to insist to everyone that he was the boss of nothing other than his own outfit, of no more importance in the Unione Siciliano than any other leader. But in spite of his protestations, the word in the underworld after the Chicago meeting invariably was “Charlie Lucky wants this” or “Charlie Lucky says do that.” And when Charlie Lucky wanted something, he got it without question.

The only outward sign that things had changed for him was a change of address. He had heard that the penthouse apartment atop the St. Moritz Hotel was available and he decided to lease it. But when Walter Winchell heard the rumors, he advised the hotel’s management that if it accepted Luciano as a resident, not only would Winchell move out but he would devote his column in the
Daily Mirror
to explaining why and to excoriating the hotel as a gangster hangout. The St. Moritz turned Luciano away.

“The funny thing was that Winchell wasn’t even payin’ rent. He got his apartment on the cuff for mentionin’ the St. Moritz in his column once in a while. And he talked about
me
bein’ a racketeer. Anyway, when the St. Moritz fell through, I decided to go all the way. I moved into a beautiful apartment way up in the Waldorf Towers. I kinda missed watchin’ the people skatin’ on the park and even the ducks swimmin’ on the lake. But the Towers was the best class address in New York. And then Frank Costello was livin’ in the hotel part of the Waldorf-Astoria for a long time.”

The Waldorf, indeed, had become a home away from home for Costello, where he could hold court instead of in his apartment on Central Park West. Every morning he appeared at the Waldorf barbershop for a shave, trim, massage and manicure, and for chats with those legitimate friends who always dropped in while he was being attended. “They give Costello a face like a baby’s ass. How the hell can anybody get a manicure six days a week, and all the rest of that junk? In my opinion, Frank was nuts. I wouldn’t let a barber get a razor that close to my face.” From the barbershop, Costello would usually repair to Peacock Alley, just off the main lobby, for lunch; it became something of an office for him, a place where at his regular corner table he could hold quiet discussions with political and business friends that would attract little notice because of the apparent openness.

“The Towers was part of the Waldorf setup, and my bein’ there made it easy for Frank to get to me. But the Towers was separated from the hotel and it was higher. I figured if everybody was gonna call me the boss, I was entitled to live in an apartment that was above Frank’s. It was kind of a joke, but I found out later it really burned him up.”

At the Waldorf Towers, Luciano was simply a gentleman named Mr. Charles Ross. In a time of economic depression when paying tenants were not all that easy to find, the Waldorf Towers accepted Mr. Ross without looking too closely. While many of the residents lived on a month-to-month basis, Luciano leased his suite — living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, master bath and powder room — by the year, and paid his rent — eight hundred dollars a month — in cash. He complained not at all about the service, or about anything, and left it to the management to furnish his apartment as it saw fit, just so long as it looked “classy.”

“I didn’t have no trouble with them until some idiot in my outfit came to see me one day. He didn’t know what number my apartment was, so he asked the desk clerk. But he didn’t ask for Mr. Ross — he asked for Charlie Lucky. The clerk came up to see me later in the afternoon. He said they was gettin’ all kinds of complaints from other people in the buildin’ about a notorious gangster livin’ there. Well, I knew the Towers wasn’t gonna throw me out. After all, I was payin’ my rent regular, which was more
than they could say about some of them bluebloods that was freeloadin’ there. So I figured it was payoff time. I didn’t even ask the clerk how much he wanted. I just reached into my pocket and peeled off two C-notes. And from then on I gave him two hundred every month, just for himself. I didn’t have no trouble after that and a couple of years later the guy did me a helluva favor.”

The Towers suited Luciano perfectly. Its small entrance and foyer off Fiftieth Street just east of Park Avenue gave it a privacy in sharp contrast to the vast entrances and lobbies of the adjacent hotel. There were attendants on duty twenty-four hours a day to screen visitors, all of whom had to be announced before riding up in the elevators. Luciano could drive his car directly into the garage and then walk a few steps to a private elevator that served only the Towers.

By this time, late in 1931, Luciano’s life had fallen into an orderly pattern. One of the night people, he would rarely rise before noon. As he was finishing breakfast, his first business associates would begin to drop in. Adonis would come often and so would others of his inner circle — Genovese, Costello, Lansky, Torrio, Lucchese (now that Maranzano was dead, the Lucchese-Luciano friendship was in the open). Occasionally, Tony Bender would drop by, but unlike the others, he loved secrecy and so would ride the elevator to a different floor and then walk down several flights. Longie Zwillman would sometimes show up, for he and Luciano had much to discuss. They were partners in a growing number of businesses. They had their joint bootlegging and gambling interests and for himself and Luciano, Zwillman was heavily into the transportation of gambling equipment, slot machines, and pinball devices; he arranged the “fixing” of dice and crap tables at a warehouse in Fort Lee, and the distribution and collection from recalcitrant customers were his specialties. “We sometimes had to remind people that they were behind in their payments, or that we didn’t get our take from the tables we gave ’em. That kind of thing. Longie was very good at persuadin’ ’em to clear the books.”

By early afternoon, business had been concluded. If the horse racing season was in swing, Luciano would dress and head for his box at one of the local tracks.

If the tracks were closed and he had not followed the horses
south to Florida or elsewhere, he would usually remain at home, pick up the phone, and call Polly Adler. “She was the only madam in the whole city I could trust. If you told her or one of her girls somethin’, you knew it wouldn’t go no further.”

It was Luciano’s contention — and he maintained it strenuously through the years — that prostitution was one racket he knew about only as a customer. Any suggestion that he was the boss of that business as he was the boss of so many others filled him with an almost inarticulate rage. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that. Them broads wasn’t under me and I didn’t make a quarter out of ’em. Sure, I knew it was goin’ on. Who didn’t? But I always said that runnin’ whorehouses was the lowest thing a guy could do — worse than dope. It was one of the reasons a lotta guys never trusted Capone and a lot of ’em looked down their noses at Torrio, because they was mixed up in that. Maybe some of my guys was in it, but I couldn’t stop that no more than I could stop Vito or anybody else from handlin’ junk. It was their business and I told ’em that. I told ’em that I didn’t wanna know nothin’ about it, that it was a part of the business that didn’t belong to me, and I never took no part of it, not a nickel. I done a lot of things in my life, but I never had nothin’ to do with makin’ money outa whores.”

Luciano patronized Polly Adler and her girls because, unlike most of his friends, he shunned the idea of marriage. “As things got good, all the guys around me got married and started to raise families. Joe Adonis bought a place out in Jersey and he finally wound up with a couple of kids. Willie Moretti built a place in Jersey, too, that was like a fort, and he raised a family. In fact, out of everybody in my crowd, Frank Costello was the only guy who didn’t think there was some kind of Italian law that said he had to bang out a million kids. Actually, if you had all the dough Frank spent on broads — I mean in addition to his wife — and what later on he give to one particular girl friend, you could go around the world for the rest of your life on your own steamship.

“When I seen what was goin’ on with all them marriages, I knew that none of the guys was really happy because they didn’t have time to spend on a marriage. And that was my reason for never gettin’ married in those days. I just didn’t have time for a wife. Besides, I always figured that someday I was gonna wind up
on a slab and I didn’t want to leave a widow and kids cryin’ over me. So when I wanted to get some, I used to turn to Gay Orlova or Polly Adler.”

Perhaps the best-known madam of her time in New York, the short, stout Polly Adler operated from a townhouse in the West Fifties, just off Fifth Avenue, with little or no police interference. Her girls were uniformly beautiful and her clientele was the famous, the infamous and the rich. Later she would say that Charlie Lucky had been a favorite steady customer; the girls who were sent at his bidding were always what she called “straight.” “I didn’t go in for none of that leather and whip crap. I liked good-lookin’ girls who could screw good and that’s what Polly always sent me.”

If the girl who arrived at the Waldorf Towers for an afternoon of fun and games with Luciano thought she was going to be paid more than Polly Adler’s standard twenty-dollar fee, she was invariably disappointed. The only extra was a five-dollar tip Luciano would shove into the girl’s brassiere as she dressed. “I didn’t want to do nothin’ different. What do you think I was gonna do — spoil it for everybody?”

When the girl had departed, Luciano would relax for a time before dressing for the long night ahead. Then he would select his clothes with care from a huge and fashionable wardrobe. He had dozens of shirts of the best cottons and silks, all made to measure with hand-embroidered initials, “C.L.” in small letters on the breast pocket; he had silk underwear by the carload — “I used to get that fancy stuff from broads and I’d give away most of it to guys in my outfit, so they wound up wearin’ more expensive underwear than I did.” His shoes were handmade, and he bought his suits in lots of a dozen or more every couple of months. “I gave away the old ones to my guys, friends, or anybody who looked like he needed a boost and was my size. I didn’t have no choice. In a hotel, you just don’t have enough closets.”

Dressed, Luciano looked almost like a prosperous, conservative banker, nothing of the movie gangster about him. Then he would leave for dinner, usually at a favorite Italian restaurant like the Villanova on West Forty-fifth Street, or one of the small bistros in Little Italy, on Mulberry or Minetta Street. Sometimes he would call his friend Jimmy Durante to join him, or some other entertainer
whose company he enjoyed, like Lou Clayton, Durante’s partner, or Phil Baker or Frank Fay, Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Joe Cook and others — he preferred comics.

Then he would pick up his dinner companions and drive to the restaurant, where they would often be joined by Lucchese, Costello, Anastasia, Lansky or others. And after dinner, they would drive to Little Italy, to an ice cream parlor for dessert. “I loved that stuff — spumoni, tortoni, Italian ice. But not like they made it in the fancy joints. Only the old guys in the little places knew how to make the real ice cream.”

Luciano’s dinner guests would be sent on their way, and then he and his associates would head uptown for the start of serious business. He still maintained his Claridge Hotel offices, but used them only for very private matters. New offices had been rented, two sparsely furnished rooms on Broadway near Moe Ducore’s drugstore at Fifty-first Street. The location was ideal for one of Luciano’s avocations; it was in the center of the first-run movie district. “Lots of times after dinner, somethin’ would be botherin’ me and I didn’t know how to work it out. The best way to clear my mind was to see a movie.”

When the office was first rented, there was some discussion about putting some title on the door. “Bugsy Siegel says to me, ‘What name should we put on the door?’ Costello says, ‘Washroom.’ We all got a big laugh out of that. Then I said, ‘No, make it “Ladies.” ’ But we ended up by puttin’ nothin’ on the door. It was just a blank and I had the only key. Nobody went in there when I wasn’t around.”

There was, though, little to hide; only a few chairs, a sofa and a desk. “We couldn’t keep nothin’ there. We wasn’t crazy. If we got raided, all they would find was a coupla guys sittin’ around talkin’.”

It was to this office, in the hours after midnight, that those seeking audience with Charlie Lucky came — for permission to open a policy drop, run some handbooks, operate pinballs or slot machines or juke boxes, put money on the street as loan sharks, have plans for a fur or jewelry heist checked. They would wait in the outer office until summoned inside for a brief talk with the boss, for his approval or rejection.

And to this office came those with the weekly payoff reports, checking in on schedule. They never brought money with them; everything was oral, the figures for the takes from various enterprises recited by rote. The money itself was cached in safe places — wall safes, safety deposit boxes, even tin cans — where it would be available when needed. “Every guy that come up, I knew within a dollar what he was supposed to gimme, and he knew I knew. So if some guy reported in short of what he should’ve some week, he hadda bring a good explanation.”

The police, of course, were well aware of the new office; Luciano himself furnished them with that information, more for his own protection than to provide them with special knowledge. “After all, I was no different than any other citizen. I was entitled to police protection in case some guy wanted to have a try at me. Well, maybe I wasn’t an ordinary citizen. Them guys paid taxes; I paid the cops direct.”