The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (25 page)

There were times when the office was too small, and too public, for meetings of Luciano’s board of directors, and so they would move nearby, to Dave Miller’s Delicatessen. Luciano would say, “Davey, close up the joint, we’re havin’ a meet.” Miller would hang a “closed” sign on the door, draw the blinds, set up a long table with Luciano’s favorite corned beef, pastrami, dill pickles, potato salad, cole slaw, black Greek olives, sliced rye bread and pumpernickel, and then depart. The men would make their own sandwiches, help themselves to cold drinks and beer and, Luciano said, have “one helluva kosher ball.” When they left, through the back door, Luciano would stick one or two hundred-dollar bills in Miller’s cash register.

Then would come a nightly ritual. Luciano would make his rounds of the speakeasies, supper clubs and cafés to which he was providing liquor and protection. He called this his “midnight jamboree.” His last stop would often be Dave’s Blue Room, for a late snack with a close friend, often Tommy Lucchese, and there they would discuss quietly the progress and problems of the loansharking racket. Dave’s Blue Room was a place where he could relax; the restaurant was open until dawn and was usually filled with show business celebrities, society, the underworld and gawking tourists.

“Around 1934, Tommy and me was sittin’ having somethin’ to eat in Dave’s — we wasn’t even talkin’ because we was both tired. Then who walks past our booth but a guy named Dave Rubinoff, who was famous all over the country; he was a big orchestra leader and he played a violin on the Eddie Cantor radio show. It seems that he borrowed ten grand from Tommy to buy one of those Stradivarius violins and he still owed Lucchese half. Tommy was no guy to owe money to. The place was kinda dark, but when Rubinoff spotted Tommy I could see his face turn white. Lucchese called him over and said, ‘How are ya, Ruby? Where ya been?’ Rubinoff just stands there and starts to shake.”

Lucchese told Rubinoff, “Ruby, you owe me some money. When are you gonna pay up?”

Rubinoff, his heavily Russian-accented voice quavering, said, “Tommy, listen to me — you don’t understand, I’m a little short right now.”

Lucchese reached out and took hold of Rubinoff’s left hand and began to massage the knuckles gently. “You got a nice hand there, Ruby. It makes beautiful music. And it makes you a lot of money. Now, you don’t want nothin’ to happen to that hand, do you, Ruby?”

“I never saw a guy shake like that in my life. Maybe it was because I knew Gay Orlova and she was Russian, or somethin’, but I sorta felt sorry for this guy with the accent, the way he looked at Lucchese like he was drawin’ his last breath. So I said to Rubinoff, ‘Do you really owe Mr. Lucchese money?’ ”

“Yes, Mr. Luciano, I do.”

“Well, ain’t you gonna pay him?”

“I will! I will! The first thing in the morning. Believe me.”

Lucchese stared at Rubinoff, and gestured toward Luciano. “Never mind askin’ him to believe you. I don’t believe you. So I’m gonna take you outside.”

“Right then and there, I saw that Tommy wasn’t kiddin’. He was really gonna let Rubinoff have it. Not kill him but maybe bust his knuckles, like on his right hand, not the good left hand that he picks the notes out with. So I put a stop to it and I told Rubinoff to get the hell out and take care of his payment before noon the next day. As a matter of fact, I happened to know that he got an
advance from Eddie Cantor, which was about the hardest thing in the world to do around Broadway, and he paid his bill.”

His day at an end, Luciano would leave Dave’s Blue Room, sometimes meeting Gay Orlova, and return either to her apartment or to the Waldorf Towers. Finally, he would get into his own bed, spread the newspapers out and read before going to sleep as the sun came up over Manhattan, the island empire he was now certain he controlled.

The mood of the nation in the first months of 1932 was grim and desperate. The panic and depression set off by the Wall Street crash of 1929 had deepened and the faith of millions in the viability of the American system, and of its political leaders, had been shattered. The cry was for change. Though at midyear, a dispirited Republican party renominated Herbert Clark Hoover for a second term in the White House, it was apparent even to Hoover’s supporters that defeat was virtually inevitable, that a President who seemed incapable of dealing with national crisis would be buried in a November electoral landslide.

That certainty was not lost on Luciano and his friends in the underworld. “In a way, it was kind of like a guy who shoots crap. When everything’s goin’ good and all his numbers are comin’ up, and the stickman is payin’ him on the line and in back of the line, and he’s makin’ all his sixes and eights the hard way, he don’t let nobody touch them dice for dear life. But let him throw a couple of boxcars and snake eyes and he’ll throw them dice right down the toilet. That’s the way it was in politics. The crumbs didn’t have a pot to piss in. To them, Hoover and the Republicans was the dice that was comin’ up losers every time, and it was logical to ditch ’em.”

At the Claridge Hotel, early in 1932, Luciano, Costello, Lansky
and the other major underworld leaders gathered to consider the coming political campaign, their stakes in it, and how best to exert their influence on those who would take office when the votes were counted. It was apparent to them, as it was to the political experts, that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination had narrowed to three candidates: John Nance Garner of Texas, then the speaker of the House of Representatives; Al Smith of New York, the former governor and defeated presidential candidate they had supported four years earlier; and Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, the amiable Hyde Park patrician. Of Garner they knew little, only that he was from the Wild West of cowboys and Indians, that he wielded enormous political clout in Washington, and that he had the backing of William Randolph Hearst and the Hearst newspapers. But with the prejudices of the urban East, they discounted the chances of a Southwesterner. They were certain that when the Democratic Convention met in Chicago, in June, the choice would be between Smith and Roosevelt, the two once friendly but now bitterly antagonistic New Yorkers.

If this reading was correct, they were convinced they could become a major influence on the convention and, later, on the White House itself. Smith had deep support in the party, particularly among his fellow big-city Catholics and the machine politicians. He had risen through the ranks, had labored long and hard for the party, putting many of its leaders in his debt. He had been around so long by then that he had become something of an admired legend. On some issues, such as repeal of Prohibition, he had never equivocated, and now the majority of the country was with him.

Smith’s major liability in the view of the experts was his Catholicism, which had contributed to his 1928 defeat. The hope of his supporters was that in the climate of the Depression, that could be overcome, and they worked diligently during the first half of 1932 to that end, attempting to gather support wherever it could be found. “One day, I got a call on my private number at the Waldorf from Philadelphia. This voice said, ‘Is this Mr. Luciano?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, who’s callin’?’ And the voice says, ‘Just a minute. The Cardinal wants to talk to you.’ The next thing I know I’m on the phone havin’ a conversation with Cardinal Daugherty of Philadelphia. Holy mackerel! He said to me that the Vatican wouldn’t
really object if the Cardinal wanted to do some campaignin’ and he was callin’ to remind me that I once supported Al Smith and it was very important for the public to know that Smith was a great man, not only a Catholic.

“So I said, ‘Well, Cardinal Daugherty, how can I help, on account of I’m a Catholic?’

“I heard him kind of laugh and he said, ‘But you’re not a very good Catholic, are you, my son?’

“And I said, ‘No, Cardinal. You got me. But I understand why you’re callin’ me, and I give you my word that I’ll help Al Smith.’

“The Cardinal thanked me very much and before he hung up he said, ‘My friends tell me that you live very close to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Why don’t you pay a visit there sometime?’

“I said to him, ‘Your Eminence, I’ll make good on my promise about Smith, but please don’t hold me to that walk over to St. Patrick’s.’

“He sorta laughed and said, ‘Try to find the way. Bless you.’ And then he hung up.”

Cardinal Daugherty had merely strengthened Luciano’s bias toward Smith. But despite that leaning, he was not completely ready to write off Roosevelt. The New York governor was then relatively untried and unknown. He did have some public recognition — as Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, as the Democratic candidate for Vice President in the disastrous 1920 campaign, as a man stricken with polio who had recovered sufficiently to nominate Al Smith at the 1924 convention and later to win election as governor on his own — but it was more vague and amorphous than sharply focused, revolving around a seemingly enlightened if not daring philosophy, a patrician bearing, a beaming smile and great personal courage.

Through the spring of 1932, Roosevelt’s agents fanned out across the country attempting to round up delegates for his run at the presidency. As the convention approached, Roosevelt had captured a clear majority. But that was not enough. Under the rules then in force, he would need two-thirds of the delegate votes at Chicago to win the nomination, and getting those last votes would not be easy. If he were to persuade the holdouts that he was indeed a viable and winning candidate, he would need the solid support
of his home state, New York — not just upstate, which was already committed to him, but New York City as well, where Tammany Hall held sway and where the base of Al Smith’s support appeared solid.

“There wasn’t a chance for Roosevelt to get the delegates from the city without makin’ a deal with Tammany, and in 1932 the guys who ran Tammany was run by me and Frank Costello. That’s what we was waitin’ for, because I had a funny feelin’ about Roosevelt. Sure, I liked Smith and he was the guy I wanted, but he didn’t talk no better than me and I sorta hated that anybody should be in the White House talkin’ like a guy from the Lower East Side. I had a feelin’ that maybe when it came down to it, Roosevelt would have the edge. I respected him because he came from that group of society guys I got to know real well down in Palm Beach and up in Saratoga, and they was educated people. But there was somethin’ in my bones that told me not to trust Roosevelt. I told this to Costello and Lansky and they laughed at me. Costello said, ‘Charlie, you don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about. I live with these politicians day in and day out, a lot more than you do. And I wanna tell you right now that Mr. Roosevelt wants to be President so bad he’ll do anythin’, includin’ kissin’ your ass in Macy’s window if it’d help him.’ ”

So they were certain that Roosevelt would eventually be forced to come to Tammany, and so to them. When he did, they knew exactly what kind of terms they would exact. The corruption that had flourished in New York City had reached the point during the administration of Mayor James J. Walker where it could no longer be ignored. Judge Samuel Seabury, a distinguished Democrat who years before had lost a bid for his party’s gubernatorial nomination when Tammany turned against him, had been appointed to investigate civic corruption, and his revelations were making newspaper headlines.

“Every goddamn fuckin’ move we made was gettin’ into the newspapers, and that bastard Seabury was really diggin’ deep. He was lookin’ into our deals with the judges and he was tryin’ to prove that me and Costello and Dutch Schultz, Lepke and lots of political big shots like Jimmy Walker and Jimmy Hines of Tammany — that the whole bunch of us was all tied up together. It
was almost like you couldn’t pick up the newspapers in ’31 and the beginnin’ of ’32 without readin’ about some new scandal Seabury dug up, about Walker or the cops or the courts. The heat was on and gettin’ hotter. If somethin’ wasn’t done to stop Seabury from cleanin’ up the town, it was gonna hurt our business bad. Besides, some of our guys, like Schultz and Vito and a few others, maybe includin’ me and Frank, could take a rap.

“The first thing we did was put together a bundle of over two million in cash to buy off Seabury, to let him take a vacation and let things cool down. The bastard not only turned us down cold but he gave the story to the New York
Times
and there we was on the front page again.

“The only guy who could control Seabury was Roosevelt, and we figured that’s where we had our ace. We had most of the city’s delegates to the convention in our pocket, so we could stop the Governor from winnin’ the state of New York; maybe that’d cost him the nomination — if a guy couldn’t carry his own state, he looked like a bum. But there wasn’t much we could do but wait. Then, about the middle of May, a guy stops at Frank’s table in Peacock Alley for no more’n a minute, makin’ it look like an accident. He was a big lawyer who lived up near Roosevelt, someplace around Tuxedo Park, and he never had nothin’ to do with us before, or after. All the guy said to Frank was he would very much like to talk to him and me at my place that afternoon at three o’clock. Frank just nodded and the guy walked away.

“We had the meet and it was just like three businessmen talkin’, with everybody knowin’ what the other guy wants without havin’ to say it out loud. This fellow’s blood was so blue you could’ve used it in your fountain pen. He says to Frank, ‘You know the Governor is running for the presidential nomination.’ And Frank says, ‘Yeah, I know. I read about it in the papers every day.’ So I said, ‘It costs a lotta money to run for President. If your guy wins the nomination — which is gonna be very tough — he’s gonna need a lotta dough for advertisements, billboards and stuff like that.’