The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (30 page)

Schultz had decreed his own death. But Luciano would not give the order on his own. “I called a meet of all the top guys of the council from everywhere. We took over the delicatessen early and we talked it over for almost six hours. This hadda be secret and not a word of it could get back to Dutch. You gotta remember that Schultz had made a lotta friends and this was the first time since Maranzano was rubbed out that we hadda face up to a unanimous decision of this kind. The council was either gonna work or the whole thing could fall apart right then and there. Everybody had a right to talk and everybody wanted to talk. But the vote was strictly Sicilian. Lansky made that point very clear;
and accordin’ to the way I’d expressed it out in Chicago more than three years before, I had only one vote, period.

“Durin’ the meet, Lansky took me aside and he said, ‘Charlie, as your Jewish
consigliere
, I want to remind you of something. Right now, Schultz is your cover. If Dutch is eliminated, you’re gonna stand out like a naked guy who just lost his clothes. The way La Guardia and the rest of them guys’ve been screamin’ about you, it’s ten to one they’ll be after you next.’ The way he said it to me, I really shivered. The only trouble was, things had gone too far and I realized we hadda get rid of the Dutchman, that I hadda think about everybody bein’ safe and not just myself. We only took one vote and nobody disagreed.”

The contract to murder Dutch Schultz was given to Charlie “The Bug” Workman, a killer who for some years had been one of Luciano’s most reliable chauffeurs and bodyguards. On the night of October 23, 1935, Schultz went to his favorite hangout, the Palace Chop House and Tavern, in Newark. With him were two bodyguards, Abe Landau and Bernard “Lulu” Rosencranz, and his wizard of the numbers, Abbadabba Berman. Late in the evening, as they sat around a table in the back room, Schultz rose to go to the men’s room.

A moment later, the tavern door opened and Bug Workman and a second killer, never identified, entered, walked to the rear and began shooting. Landau, Rosencranz and Berman were shot down in the fusillade; all died. Workman stood in the middle of the room, looking for the main target. He noticed the men’s-room door, walked to it, and pulled it open. Schultz was standing at the toilet, urinating. Calmly and unhurriedly, Workman aimed, shot the Dutchman once, then turned and walked rapidly out of the tavern. The carnage left behind was the bloodiest since the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago.

Mortally wounded, Schultz managed to stagger into the main room before collapsing. He lingered for a day, never telling who had shot him, never revealing any of his secrets. In his final hours, he accepted the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church.

More than six years later, Schultz’s killer, Charlie Workman, was arrested and tried for the murder. In the middle of his trial, he suddenly changed his plea to guilty and received a life sentence.
Freed on parole in 1964, he became in his last years, through the intercession of Tommy Lucchese, a notions salesman in New York’s garment district.

“Sometimes I think okayin’ the killin’ of the Dutchman was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I didn’t have no choice, the way he was headin’ — but look what happened. Once the Dutchman was dead — just like Lansky predicted — I was out in the open, as naked as a baby. And everybody who’d been after Dutch come lookin’ for me.”

“Even after Prohibition was dumped, I was runnin’ one of the biggest businesses in the world. We was in a hundred different things, legit and illegit. If you add it all up, we — I mean, the guys all over the country — we was doin’ a business that was grossin’ maybe a couple billion dollars a year. I was like the head of that big company, not as Boss of Bosses, but as a guy a lot of people came to for advice, a guy everybody expected to be in on the big decisions. But there was no way I could know what was goin’ on everywhere all the time.

“Take General Motors: Does the president of the company know what every fuckin’ car salesman is doin’ and sayin’? Does he even know half the time what’s goin’ on right outside his own office? People are runnin’ around doin’ and sayin’ things, and tellin’ other people they’re representin’ General Motors. The president at the top, a guy like Alfred Sloan in them years, don’t know a damn thing about it, and he don’t even get blamed when things go wrong. But with me and my outfit, whether I knew what was goin’ on or not, everybody blamed me for anythin’ and everythin’.

“Durin’ them years, there was a lotta different guys under their lieutenants who had their own things goin’ for them. Outside of
junk, the one sideline that bothered me most of all was prostitution. But I was like the president of General Motors. I couldn’t keep tabs on what every guy was doin’ on his own. There was guys goin’ around, like Little Davie Betillo and Tommy Pennochio and Ralph Liguori, who’d been with us through the years, and they started tryin’ to organize the whores. They was tellin’ the madams and the broads, ‘Charlie Lucky wants you to do this,’ and ‘Remember, this has Charlie Lucky’s okay’ — things like that. Before you knew it, they was runnin’ a whole string of cathouses in New York and I’m supposed to be the boss.

“If I’d been the boss of General Motors, I could’ve fired them guys when I heard about it. But how could I fire Betillo or Pennochio or the rest of them guys? They was valuable to me; they’d been with me for a long time and they was always loyal. When the booze business got killed off, they looked for a way to make dough. What was I supposed to do, tell ’em they hadda starve? Or kill ’em? What I did was to tell ’em to cut out all that crap. If they wanted to run whores, that was their business, but I didn’t want no part of it. I ordered ’em to stop tellin’ people that Charlie Lucky was behind it, because I wasn’t. I made it an order.

“Maybe I should’ve stepped on ’em hard, but I didn’t have time, and I didn’t figure they’d keep goin’ after I told ’em to stop. It wasn’t until later that I realized what had been goin’ on right under my nose. Believe it or not, the first real facts and figures I ever got actually come from Tom Dewey. If anybody had ever stopped to think about it right, they’d have realized that to a Sicilian boss, a guy in the cathouse racket was the lowest of the low. But nobody ever bothered to analyze it that way, and nobody gave a damn.”

Luciano had been arrested many times over the years. But after 1916, no arrest had been other than a minor or temporary inconvenience. And after his 1923 arrest by federal narcotics agents, he had never believed that the shadow of the penitentiary could cloud his future. His only fear, he said, if he had any at all, was of the guns of enemies among his own kind. His business flourished and he assumed that there would be no interruptions. If La Guardia and Valentine went on a rampage against Costello’s slot machines, well, Huey Long in Louisiana had an insatiable
desire for them and it was a simple matter to ship them to New Orleans.

During the summer of 1935, Luciano, as had become his habit, journeyed north with his society friends to watch the horses run at Saratoga and to watch these friends gamble away their money at the tables in which he had a major interest. “It was kind of a joke. There we was in Saratoga, the tables goin’ full steam, the money right out in the open, and nobody doin’ nothin’ to stop it. Albany was only about fifty, sixty miles away. In the daytime, Governor Lehman’s whole crime staff was screamin’ about gamblin’, the underworld, and how we all oughta be closed down. But at night, those same crime-busters was in Saratoga, gamblin’ like everybody else. It was no different later on when Dewey got to be governor and was braggin’ about how he broke the rackets and threw all the racketeers in jail. Saratoga kept operatin’ just like before. Nobody moved a finger to stop it.”

But Luciano’s reign as king of the underworld was not so secure as he believed in the waning months of 1935. As Lansky had predicted, with the murder of Schultz, Luciano had become the target of Dewey. But it was no simple thing to hit that target. To know that Luciano was the boss of the rackets was one thing; to get the proof, enough proof to send him to jail, was something else again. As he had often said, Luciano had built his empire on a corporate model, and by the mid-thirties, there were layers upon layers between him and the actual perpetration of crimes. There was always someone else — never Luciano or any of his close associates — just above the man Dewey questioned. Nobody seemed able to point directly to Luciano and say, “I took my orders from Charlie Lucky,” “I gave money to Charlie Lucky.” Luciano was the boss; the public knew it, the law knew it, but where was the evidence that would stand up in court?

All the investigations seemed to run into that dead end — all, that is, but one. Assistant District Attorney Eunice Carter, one of the few women prosecutors on the public payroll, had been given the dubious assignment by District Attorney Dodge of presenting the city’s case against prostitutes. It was a thankless job, for prostitution cases were uniformly tried in magistrate’s court, and the
Seabury investigation had revealed that those courts were practically owned by the underworld.

Totally frustrated in her attempts to see justice done, Mrs. Carter became conscious of an unsettling pattern in the courts. When the prostitutes took the stand, they all told almost identical stories in almost identical words: that they were innocent working girls from out of town, say Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Baltimore, who had been picked up while visiting old friends at houses whose purpose they were unaware of. The stories were so well rehearsed that Mrs. Carter was convinced there must be a conspiracy. She became more certain when she noticed that lawyers from the same firm almost invariably represented these girls and that hovering in the background, often in deep conversation with the girls before their appearances, was a disbarred lawyer named Abraham Karp, known to be close to the underworld. And when fines were assessed, the same people always were on hand to pay them.

Mrs. Carter became convinced that the whores had been organized, that a syndicate had taken over and was running the business in New York. At the district attorney’s office, however, her suspicions were ignored or ridiculed. So she carried them to Special Prosecutor Dewey and his staff. Dewey was intrigued enough to hire Mrs. Carter away from Dodge, and to put her to work with two crack young attorneys on his staff, Sol Gelb and Murray Gurfein (now a United States district judge in New York). As they began to dig, they kept turning up the same names — Ralph “The Pimp” Liguori, a small-time punk long known to be a member of the Luciano outfit; James Frederico, Meyer Berkman, Jesse Jacobs, Benny Spiller, Abe Wahrman, Tommy “The Bull” Pennochio, Peter Harris, David Miller, Al Weiner, and, with an almost astonishing regularity, Little Davie Betillo.

As the investigation dug deeper — and Dewey kept releasing more and more attorneys to join in the digging, men such as Frank Hogan (later, for many years, Manhattan District Attorney), Harry Cole, Charles Grimes, Stanley Fuld and Charles D. Breitel (the last two later New York State Court of Appeals judges) — the aim became sharper: to tie Luciano to the vice syndicate. If they could find evidence that Luciano was giving authorization
for the syndicate to operate, was getting a share of the proceeds, then they had him nailed even if he never directly dealt with a whore, a pimp or a madam. But if they could actually find a tie with the simple workers it would make Dewey’s case that much neater. The key, they were sure, was Betillo, the man who was seemingly the boss of the ring. He was a known member of the Luciano organization. Would he, Dewey’s investigators asked themselves, do anything without his boss’s approval? They were certain the answer was no.

By the end of January 1936, enough evidence had been gathered to establish the existence of the vice ring and to identify some of its organizers — if not yet Luciano. Dewey’s staff coordinated with Commissioner Valentine’s special vice unit under Detective Captain Bernard Dowd, and on the evening of February 1, detectives and patrolmen fanned out across New York and simultaneously raided brothels, rounding up more than a hundred prostitutes and madams. They moved against the hangouts of the higher-ups and arrested Liguori, Pennochio and Betillo. For the moment, no other action was taken against the main objective, Luciano.

During the next weeks, working in shifts around the clock at specially rented hotel suites and offices, the Dewey staff questioned the whores and their benefactors. What quickly became evident to those under interrogation was that as far as Dewey and his people were concerned, they were unimportant. The name Luciano was mentioned repeatedly, and those being questioned soon realized that if they could talk about Charlie Lucky, somehow ring him in, all would go well with them. Not only would charges against them be dropped, not only would they be granted immunity from prosecution if they testified at a trial, but once Luciano was safely in jail, they might find living a lot easier. And the same message made its way into the prisons around the state where there might be other potential witnesses. The choice between jail for silence and freedom for testimony stirred forgotten memories.

Though Luciano was well aware that Dewey and his staff were after him, he was confident through the early months of 1936 that he had nothing to fear, that there was no way Dewey could develop a strong winning case against him for anything. He continued
to move in his usual circles, kept up his usual rounds with little variation.

Then one evening, toward the end of March, “my payoff at the Waldorf Towers come through, that two hundred a month turned into a good investment.” He was alone in his suite when his friend in the manager’s office called excitedly saying that some men who looked like detectives were on their way up to see “Mr. Ross.” It looked like trouble, he added.