The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (37 page)

As the appeals process began, Luciano had given Polakoff and Wolf an open checkbook to develop the evidence that would overturn his conviction. The initial appeals, based on several obvious errors of the prosecution and the court during the original trial, were rejected peremptorily by higher courts (this was a day when the rights and protections of defendants, particularly notorious gangsters, were of less than overwhelming concern to appeals justices).

Once this avenue had been closed, the defense took another
direction, and, of necessity, was forced to move slowly and with extraordinary circumspection. Because of Judge McCook’s warning during the sentencing, holding Luciano and the other defendants hostages for the safety of the prosecution witnesses, only the most subtle and oblique approaches could be used to persuade those witnesses to recant their testimony; if a single witness was intimidated or threatened, Wolf and Polakoff warned Luciano, then any appeal would surely fail even if every other witness admitted perjury.

“I’d been yellin’ at Polakoff that he and Georgie hadda find a way to get them lyin’ broads to tell the truth, that they was the key to any chance we had. Then one day Polakoff comes up and tells me that they can’t find them girls, that they seemed to have disappeared into thin air. I said to him, ‘What the hell am I payin’ you guys for? Use whatever dough you need; get detectives, a hundred detectives — I don’t give a shit. But find them broads.’ ”

At Dannemora that afternoon, Luciano directed Lansky to join Polakoff and Wolf in the hunt for Cokey Flo Brown and Nancy Presser. “For chrissake, Meyer, we got enough guys around on the street to be able to locate anybody. I want you to drop everythin’ you’re doin’, don’t bother about nothin’ else, but find them broads.”

But every trail was cold, every lead a dead one. Then, late in 1938, the first break came. A photostatic copy of a letter addressed to Sol Gelb, of Dewey’s office, found its way into the hands of Wolf and Polakoff. Written by Cokey Flo Brown and postmarked from Paris, France, it was bitter and complaining. It seemed that Cokey Flo, Nancy Presser, Mildred Balitzer and several others had been secretly given all-expenses-paid vacations in Europe, with the stay hopefully to be, it appeared, permanent. But Cokey Flo’s letter revealed an increasing unhappiness over the constant surveillance under which they were kept, which hampered their movements and their enjoyment of the gay life, and over a diminishing flow of expense money. The letter ended with a threat: If more money and more freedom were not forthcoming, the girls would consider doing something Dewey “wouldn’t like.”

The discovery of the whereabouts of these witnesses sent defense investigators and lawyers hurrying to Paris. Cables back to Polakoff
revealed that no pressure, only a sympathetic ear, would be necessary to win from the girls what was desired. Cokey Flo, Nancy Presser and the others signed affidavits recanting their testimony at the Luciano trial and asserting that not only had that testimony been fabricated but that it had been fabricated by Dewey’s office and fed to the girls. They had agreed to lie, they said, because they felt they had no choice; they had been threatened with strenuous prosecution and long prison sentences as prostitutes, madams, drug addicts, unless they testified. But if they talked, they had been promised protection, immunity and a long vacation in Europe.

Almost simultaneously, a letter arrived at Polakoff’s office from Sing Sing, from the equally unhappy Joe Bendix. His promised deal for reduction of sentence, parole and freedom had been forgotten by the prosecutor. Convinced he had been double-crossed, Bendix decided to turn on his ungrateful benefactors. He wrote that he, too, had lied at the Luciano trial, that he had been sought out by Dewey’s aides, who had concocted the story he told, briefed him, and fed him the lines he had recited on the witness stand.

When Luciano heard the details from Polakoff he was elated, convinced the gates of Dannemora were about to open wide for him. “Moe came up and told me about the affidavits and said he was gonna reorganize our appeal. I felt I could start packin’ my stuff and be back home in New York in no time.”

Against the sworn statements of Flo Brown, Nancy Presser, Mildred Balitzer, Joe Bendix and others that they had perjured themselves, and that the perjury had been suborned by Dewey and his staff, Dewey used ridicule, scorn and righteous indignation. The reputation of Luciano, he said, was a prime concern for the court of appeals, and Luciano’s background alone was enough to show that this recanting of testimony must have been gained, despite Judge McCook’s warning, by threats, intimidation, bribery and every other weapon at a hoodlum’s command. A reading of the documents, the prosecutor asserted, demonstrated that they were “reeking with perjury” and were “a fraud upon the court.”

With but a single justice dissenting (and this on grounds that the sentence had been excessive), the court of appeals rejected
Luciano’s plea. And it ended there. The United States Supreme Court refused to entertain arguments. For the moment, at least, the legal avenues had been closed and the sentence was to be served.

“Polakoff came up to Dannemora to tell me the news. We met in the visitors’ room and Moe didn’t look so good. He was kind of white and shaking. He said to me, ‘Charlie, I’ve got bad news for you.’

“I said to him, ‘What happened, Moe?’

“He said, ‘They turned down your appeal, Charlie.’

“I looked at him for a minute. I wasn’t sure right then just what he meant, so I said, ‘What does it mean, Moe?’

“He said, ‘That’s it for now, Charlie.’

“I still didn’t get just what he was talkin’ about and I asked him again what it meant. He told me that it was the end of the line, at least for a while, that the court had turned down the appeal because they just didn’t believe the affidavits. I almost screamed at him. I yelled, ‘Moe! Them broads, they signed them statements. They admitted they lied. Whadda you mean, the court don’t believe them?’

“He said, ‘I don’t know what to say, Charlie. I have to tell it to you the way it happened.’

“I was knocked over. I just wished the whole floor would open up and swallow me. I couldn’t see no hope. It was all black, like not even a tiny little light anyplace. That must be the way a guy feels if all of a sudden he goes blind. Naturally, Moe tried to make me feel better. He told me they wouldn’t stop workin’, but he warned me that it wasn’t gonna be easy, that the whole thing was never easy from the beginnin’ — just like he said up in my apartment when we had the meetin’ with all the guys. It was right then and there that I had the most respect for Polakoff. He never shitted me, he always leveled, and he’d been smarter than anybody else from the start. At least, when I saw Moe walk out, I knew that I had somebody on the outside I could trust, and if there was any possible way to manipulate some legal loophole, Moses Polakoff would find it.

“Back in my cell, I looked at the bars and I wondered if I’d ever see them from the outside instead of the inside.”

In the years before he had gone to Dannemora, Luciano had exercised a restraining influence over some of his more volatile associates. He, Costello and Lansky, particularly, had long since reached the conclusion that violence was in most cases unnecessary, was to be shunned unless unavoidable and then used most judiciously. He and his fellow leaders of the Unione Siciliano had tried to keep a tight reign on the two major proponents of indiscriminate violence, Lepke and Anastasia, with the dictum that no killing could be carried out without the unanimous consent of the council. When he was on the scene, in control, his influence had been pervasive and few ignored his orders and disobeyed his dictates.

But now he was in Dannemora, hundreds of miles from the seat of his empire, and the surrogates he had left behind were often absent from New York, as well, unable then to exert a restraining influence on Lepke and Anastasia. Costello was often in New Orleans or elsewhere, working with Dandy Phil Kastel and others on his burgeoning gambling interests; Lansky was spending more and more time in Broward County, attempting to establish a network of casinos in the Miami area, and in the Caribbean, cementing his profitable friendship and partnership with Cuba’s Batista.

“Up in Dannemora I had enough things to bother me, like my own plans for the appeals and different ideas to help me get out. Then I began to get a lot of reports about what Lep and Albert was doin’, just because Costello and Lansky wasn’t around every day to stop ’em. Then I heard that Lepke was goin’ around tellin’ some of our guys that he wasn’t gonna use his muscle for the benefit of nobody but himself. In other words, the garment district and the bakery business, for example, was gonna be his without cuttin’ nobody else in.”

By the middle of 1937, Lepke was in deep trouble. He lived lavishly and loudly, was often in the newspapers and so became an obvious target for prosecutor Dewey. “And then the shit hit the fan when word got around the narcotics guys was buildin’ a case against Lep for somethin’ that even surprised me. The stupid jerk got himself mixed up with a shipment of junk from Hong Kong to the United States that was supposed to be worth ten million bucks — I heard later it was a helluva lot less than that. It was bad enough that I always had to worry about Vito with that hard stuff — now this muscle-headed son of a bitch Lepke gets himself involved up to his belly button in somethin’ he don’t know a fuckin’ thing about.

“So, of course, he needs help and he sends Joe A. up to see me. My first reaction was to tell Joe to let him take the rap. For years, I’d been tryin’ to help him, and it was always like talkin’ to a stone wall. But you can’t throw a guy to the wolves, so I sent Joe back to New York with an okay for Anastasia to hide Lepke. I knew he and Lep was close and he’d give it extra special attention.”

At the end of 1937, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter disappeared, and for two years he was the subject of a nationwide manhunt. Dewey, calling him “the worst industrial racketeer in America,” offered a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for his arrest. A little later, J. Edgar Hoover, apparently alarmed that so many others — Dewey, Narcotics Bureau chief Harry Anslinger, New York Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine — were encroaching on his province as the chief nemesis and scourge of the underworld, chimed in with a statement that Lepke was “the most dangerous criminal in the United States” and so was worth five thousand dollars to the man who turned him over to the FBI. Circulars flooded the country, but did not flush Lepke. There were rumors that he was hiding out in Florida, Arkansas, California, Chicago; not in the United States at all, but in Cuba, Poland, the Far East.

“But the real laugh for me come sometime in 1939. The FBI was sendin’ guys all over the place. One guy got a free vacation down in Havana, where he went to see Lansky, and another guy went to New Orleans to talk to Costello to see if he knew where Lep was. And then it happened. Hoover sent an agent up to see me at Dannemora. He wanted me to help them find Lepke. Can
you imagine the gall of that guy Hoover? I told the agent I wanted to send a message back to J. Edgar — if he would arrange to commute my sentence, I could let him have Lepke in twenty-four hours. No commutation, no Lepke, and as far as I was concerned, Hoover could go fuck himself — and maybe that was a good idea.”

To Luciano and the others in the underworld hierarchy, Lepke’s whereabouts was no secret. He was under the rigid protection of Anastasia, much of the time at 101 Third Street in Brooklyn. But he was doing more than hiding out. He was attempting to govern his rackets as usual. He was dispatching his and Anastasia’s killers from Murder, Inc., to eliminate every potential witness against him and so force the collapse of the cases prepared by the authorities. And he was meeting often with the upper strata of the underworld and becoming more and more belligerent with his associates.

Lepke’s attitude finally sent Tommy Lucchese — accompanied as usual by Moses Polakoff — hurrying to Dannemora to see Luciano. Two nights earlier, Lucchese related, Anastasia had brought Lepke to a meeting with Lucchese, Willie Moretti, Gerardo Rullo (who, some years later, would be better known as Jerry Catena, one of the major caretakers of the Vito Genovese interests), Longie Zwillman and several others. Lucchese had called the meeting to broach to Lepke his increasing dissatisfaction with Lepke’s attempts to tighten his own personal control over the garment industry at the expense of Lucchese and his other partners. Lepke’s response was to claim that the garment district belonged to him exclusively and he would fight any incursions by others. Then Lepke stormed out of the meeting and ordered his aide, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, to drive him back to his sanctuary.

“Ever since you’ve been gone,” Lucchese told Luciano, “things ain’t the same. I’ve got the feeling that Frank Costello is doing too much on his own and that little genius, Lansky, disappears down in Havana someplace and we don’t see him but maybe once a month. Charlie, you’ve gotta do something about this Lepke thing, because Dewey and Hoover would give their left arms to grab him and until they do, they’re putting plenty of pressure on everybody. They ain’t gonna let up on none of us until they grab Lepke.”

“I felt like we was pushin’ the calendar back again to Dutch Schultz. I thought it over for a few minutes and then I finally made
the decision. We couldn’t knock off Lep the way it happened with Schultz. That would just mean more trouble. Hoover would be sore as a boil at anybody stealin’ his glory and Dewey would go through the ceilin’. We had to get Lep out of our hair once and for all, but we had to do it some way that’d still give Dewey and Hoover their piece of the cake. So I told Tommy to get hold of Meyer and Frank and Joe A. right away, and to make sure Anastasia got my message — I ordered him to stop protectin’ Lepke and I didn’t want no arguments about that.