The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (33 page)

No.

Why not?

Bendix didn’t know. He had been planning to, when he went back to stealing, got caught, and was sent up to Sing Sing for life.

How had he come to be here in court, testifying?

He had read about the case in the newspapers and felt he ought to do his duty. He had written Dewey offering his services.

Had he been promised anything in return for his testimony?

Yes, Bendix said. He had been promised a reduction in sentence if he testified and helped convict Luciano.

Levy sat down. Some in the court thought he had cast considerable doubt on Bendix’s testimony, but those who looked at the jury and the judge were not so certain. It was as though both had been waiting for someone, no matter what his reputation, to come forward with an eyewitness account of Luciano’s involvement. Bendix had done just that and it was apparent to observers, including both Polakoff and Levy (if not to Luciano, who was convinced at that moment that no one could believe Bendix after Levy’s cross-examination), that the tide was running strongly against Luciano.

Dewey’s most devastating witness appeared the next day, May 22. Into the silent, tense courtroom, the name Florence Brown echoed. “The door opened, and we all turned around to look. This beat-up broad comes down the aisle to the stand. She looked like she’d
really been through the mill, like the gutter would’ve been a step up for her. Polakoff hits me in the arm hard, and he says, ‘Who’s she?’ I looked at her real close and I says to him, ‘How the fuck should I know? I ain’t never seen her before.’ Then Polakoff says to me, ‘Hold on, Charlie. I’ve got a feeling she’s real bad news.’ He didn’t say it strong enough, believe me.”

Florence Brown was known in the trade as Cokey Flo Brown, and sometimes as Flo Marten and Flo Marsten and at least a dozen other names. Since her mid-teens she had been a prostitute and, for almost as long, a drug addict. Until the February raid, she had been madam of one of the syndicate’s houses. Since then, thanks to Prosecutor Dewey and the Women’s House of Detention, she had finally managed to escape both prostitution and narcotics, and for the first time in her memory she could look to the future with some hope.

Dressed in a shabby, ill-fitting blue dress, worn shoes, her dark hair disheveled, Cokey Flo was in her mid-twenties, though her age would have been hard to guess. She looked like a waif, a girl defenseless against life’s cruelties and vicissitudes, who had been ill-used by the world and by its men. There was about her an aura of innocence destroyed and almost everyone in the courtroom seemed to feel an immediate sympathy for her. Dewey treated her gently; so did McCook, and the jury stared at her with pity and at the defense table, as she related her story, with obvious rage.

She had been, she said, Frederico’s girl, and he had enticed her into prostitution. Through him, she had met Luciano many times, had attended meetings of the rulers of the vice ring at which he presided and gave orders. At one of those meetings, she testified, Luciano had turned to her and said, “I’m gonna organize the cat-houses like the A&P.”

At another meeting of the top leaders, at which she had sat in, Luciano had expressed some fear of official investigations. He had said, Cokey Flo asserted, “Dewey’s investigating and we may get in trouble. It may get tough. I think we better fold up for a while.”

Betillo had argued against that move. “Betillo said, ‘Well, there’s been a lot of pinches and that took money out of the combination. But when we get them all in line, it’ll be okay.’

“Lucky said, ‘I’d like to quit awhile. Maybe then we could reopen and we could even syndicate like they did in Chicago. We could have one combination instead of three or four.’

“Betillo said, ‘I don’t think it’ll be so tough. The Dewey investigation won’t get us. They’ll just pick up a few bondsmen and let it go at that.’

“Luciano said, ‘We could syndicate the places on a large scale same as a chain store system. We could even put the madams on salary or commission. It would take a little time, but we could do it.’ ”

That, Cokey Flo said, was Luciano’s goal, the constant theme of the meetings she so often attended. He gave the orders for the beating, torturing, threatening and drugging of the girls to force them to work steadily and without complaint, for the use of strong-arm methods to bring madams and bookers into line. “First you got to step on them. Talking won’t do no good. You got to put the screws on,” she quoted him as saying.

When Cokey Flo had finished, Dewey sat down contentedly. Her story had shocked the court and horrified her listeners, and it had tied Luciano directly into the racket. There was about Dewey at that moment, those in the courtroom would later say, the air of a man who knew his case was won.

The depression at the defense table did not lift during Levy’s cross-examination. No matter how hard he pressed, Cokey Flo could not be shaken. She stuck by her story, repeating it almost by rote as Levy attacked, tried to shatter her confidence, destroy her credibility. She maintained that she had told only the truth. Much of Levy’s power was blunted by Dewey’s constant objections, many sustained by McCook, who began to appear to some observers as her self-appointed protector.

Eventually, Levy turned away in frustration and disgust. “I could see he was really worried. They started tellin’ me that things didn’t look good. So I began to get worried, too, even though I couldn’t understand how anyone could believe Flo Brown’s testimony. She sounded like Dewey’d rehearsed her for the leadin’ part in ‘Bertha, the Sewin’-Machine Girl.’ ”

Four days later, Dewey had another shock for Luciano and the defense. He called twenty-six-year-old Nancy Presser, a hard, sharp-faced,
buxom, faded woman who had practiced her profession since the age of thirteen and had degenerated from high-priced call girl into common laborer in a two-dollar Harlem whorehouse, a whore who was not even acceptable to the male “madam” of the house, James Russo, but was foisted on him at the orders of her pimp, Ralph Liguori. While still a teenager, she testified, she had been at various times the mistress and playmate of Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Ciro Terranova, Joe Adonis, even of Joe the Boss Masseria. It was Joe the Boss, she said, who had introduced her to Charlie Lucky; it had been a casual meeting but she had been much taken with him, though he seemed immune to her charms.

Three years later, at Kean’s Tavern near Madison Square Garden, she had renewed old acquaintances and had given Luciano her telephone number. But he didn’t call, and in the meantime she met Ralph Liguori and became first his girl and then his whore. Until that moment, she had been high class, charging her customers fifty or a hundred dollars. Liguori put a stop to that. He booked her into Russo’s brothel and told her, “Low prices but big volume.” And Liguori did something else. He switched her from the opium pipe she had been smoking for some time to the needle and morphine, and it was downhill all the way from there. (Like those who had preceded her to the stand, Nancy Presser said that thanks to Dewey, she had given up the habit after February 1.)

Under Liguori’s constant harassment, she said, she felt as if she was working on an assembly line. Every ten minutes he would beat on her door and order her to finish the customer she had and get ready for the next. Then, she testified, at the lowest moment of her life, the phone rang and it was Luciano.

“I couldn’t believe it when she started that story. It was like somebody hit me on the head with a baseball bat. Can you imagine me callin’ a beat-up broad like that, who was workin’ in a two-dollar cathouse? But when I looked around, I could see that the goddamn judge and jury really believed her.”

Luciano, Nancy Presser said, asked her to come to his Waldorf Towers apartment, suite 39-C. She went, then and often thereafter, and nobody ever questioned her or stopped her; she would just walk through the entrance, get on the elevator, ride up, and
go to his door. With Dewey prodding, she gave a detailed description of the suite, the couches, chairs, colors, arrangement, a description that seemed to impress judge and jury, who watched her closely. That first time, Nancy Presser testified, Luciano listened to her troubles and told her he would fix things up with Liguori. Then, she said, she got into his bed while he slept on the couch. And that was the pattern that was invariably repeated on all her many visits.

Didn’t anything at all happen between them? Dewey asked.

“When Charlie called me over, he’d give me a hundred dollars, but we’d just talk. That’s all. We never went to bed together. Charlie couldn’t. You know what I mean?”

Luciano started at her aghast and enraged, and even a quarter of a century later the memory filled him with fury. “Here was an ugly broad who probably’d been throwin’ her fanny around fifty thousand times with different guys, and she’s layin’ in my bed like a queen while I’m layin’ on the couch because I can’t get it up. I looked at Judge McCook when she was tellin’ that bullshit and that little prick was starin’ at this broad like she’s the Queen of England and I’m worse than dirt. It was bad enough for that louse Dewey to try to become a big shot on my back, railroadin’ me in the worst way; but then right in the middle of it, to throw a zinger that Charlie Lucky Luciano can’t get a hard-on! I started to get up from the defense table. All I knew was that I hadda hit somebody and at that minute I didn’t give a shit who it was or what it cost me. Moe Polakoff saw me start to move, so he grabbed me by the arm and ground his foot right on top of mine. My right foot was so sore I couldn’t’ve moved if I wanted to, and I let out a yell because he hurt me so bad. The whole courtroom turned around and looked at me and it took a couple minutes before it was quiet again. I noticed that George Levy was makin’ notes like mad; I was seated between him and Moe, and he whispered to me, ‘Take it easy, Charlie. This girl’s helpin’ us.’ I made a silent prayer that he knew what he was talkin’ about.”

But Nancy Presser had more to say than just a description of Luciano’s lack of sexual prowess. She said she had listened on the telephone and through partially open doors as he discussed the
prostitution ring with Betillo and others, had once heard him assert, “The take ain’t so good. Looks like we’ll have to raise the two-dollar houses to three and boost the five- and ten-buck joints too.”

When Levy began his cross-examination, however, it was apparent that Nancy Presser had not done her homework as well as she could have, or should have. Her description of Luciano’s apartment proved faulty; she was not sure about the couches or chairs or colors. (“She’s not an interior decorator,” Dewey later explained.)

Had she been shown pictures of the suite? Levy asked.

No — well, perhaps. She couldn’t remember.

Then Levy attacked her on her description of the Waldorf Towers itself. She said that she had come and gone late at night, undisturbed and unstopped. Weren’t there any regulations in the place about visitors?

Not that she knew of, she said, and nobody ever interfered with her. After all, she had usually come at night when nobody was around (J. David Hardy, the Towers’s assistant manager, would testify for the defense that the Towers had strict security regulations and that late at night, no visitors could enter without being checked and announced to the host.)

When Levy asked her to describe the hotel itself, she was unable to do so, unable to say where the entrances were, unable to describe the location of the elevators or what they were like and, it turned out, she wasn’t even sure where the Waldorf Towers was, other than somewhere on the East Side around Park Avenue.

If Dewey was at all concerned about this witness’s memory, he did not show it and he quickly began to recoup. In open court, he announced that the lives of many of his witnesses, especially those of prostitutes and madams, had been threatened. With great indignation, Judge McCook at once issued bench warrants for the arrests of several minor hoodlums who until that moment had not figured in the case and were never really linked to it, and he sternly warned that he would hold the defendants responsible for any harm to the witnesses or any repetition of the threats. The
effect of this revelation on the jury, and the judge’s response, was apparent.

Step by step, Dewey continued to build his case. He summoned personnel from the Waldorf Towers and the Barbizon to show that Luciano had been meeting with the other defendants for years, and thus the prostitution ring was of long standing. But Frank Brown, the Barbizon Plaza’s assistant manager, shocked the prosecutor. It had been anticipated that he would testify to having seen Betillo, Pennochio, Liguori and the other members of the syndicate at the hotel, visiting Luciano, often. Instead, Brown said that of course he knew Luciano; after all the man had lived at the Barbizon for years; but he had never seen the others and didn’t know who they were.

Dewey was stunned and enraged. He demanded that the court declare Brown a hostile witness so that he could cross-examine him. Brown would not be shaken. Dewey’s staff, he said, had shown him photographs of the other defendants and told him, “You must have seen that one and that one.” When Brown said he had not, one of the Dewey staffers “persisted in telling me so. He warned me about jail if I didn’t tell the truth. There were three or four in the room. They were very insistent about my identifying the pictures. When I said I couldn’t do it honestly, they threatened me. They hinted that Mr. Dewey was very powerful and could do as he liked.”

Brown’s testimony, with its various implications, set Dewey back for only a moment; and the judge and jury appeared to discount it almost entirely. From their attitudes, it seemed that they were now prepared to believe almost entirely anyone who supported Dewey’s case, and disbelieve anyone who countered it.