The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (52 page)

“A couple days later, the priest comes to me again. His parish had just received a whole bunch of clothes for kids and older people, diapers for babies, Christ knows what. He thanks me all over the place and says to me that people should know what I done, to understand I’m not the big American monster Washington wanted everybody in Italy to believe. Not more’n two days later, some newspaper guys was told about it by the Father and they started to write stories that I was the one behind the used rags racket and was makin’ a fuckin’ killin’ on it. That’s the way it always was for me.

“Then, as I started to think about it, I realized that the Father was right when he come to me with the idea of fightin’ fire with fire, on account of I was an expert. Nobody never thought to use me like that before, and I told the priest about it. I’ll never forget what he done. He reached out and put his arms around me and said, ‘There’s fire in all of us, my son. Now you are beginning to learn for the first time how to control it. I give you a blessing for what you have done.’

“The next night I got the first results of that blessin’. I met Igea.”

“I first set eyes on Igea Lissoni before the Christmas holidays in 1947. There was a lotta days in my whole lifetime that was especially important and they stayed with me clear as crystal. But that was the most important one.”

Igea Lissoni was then twenty-six; Luciano was fifty. One of several children of a bourgeois family from Milan, where culture and the arts are a way of life, she early revealed a talent for dancing and was encouraged by her family, who enrolled her in the ballet school of La Scala Opera Company. Though she later danced in the company’s corps de ballet, it soon became apparent to her that
she did not have the talent to become a prima ballerina and so the slender, blonde Igea turned from ballet to nightclubs, becoming a featured performer in some of the better clubs in Italy immediately after the war.

“She was dancin’ in a club in Rome. It was like some instant thing happened. I was acquainted with the guy that ran the club and I told him I wanted to meet the dame that was dancin’. After the show, he brought her over to my table. He called me Signor Lucanía, but she must’ve recognized me from my pictures in the papers and she froze up. Without sayin’ a word, she got up and walked away. Now, I never had no trouble meetin’ broads before that; in fact, it seemed like they all wanted to meet me, so I didn’t have no idea I was gonna have any trouble with her.”

Luciano returned to the club again and again, but with no success. “It happens that I knew a girl by the name of Loretta Masiero who was a big singin’ star in those days and she was married to a guy named Johnny Dorelli, who was like the Bing Crosby of Italy. Loretta knew Igea real well, so I tried to have her fix things up for me. A couple of nights later, she brought Igea over to the table where we all was and even though she talked a little bit, she was still givin’ me the cold shoulder. Igea was a girl from a good family and the idea of bein’ seen with a gangster like me just went against everythin’ she was ever taught. And I guess more important, she was from Milan and I was a Sicilian. As far as Italians was concerned, that meant like she was on top of the skyscraper and I was in the cellar.”

But Luciano persisted. He began to court Igea in an old-fashioned, gallant way, sending her flowers and presents, waited for her every night at the café, calling on every lesson in charm and polish he had learned. “All my life until then, I never needed nobody. It was always easy come, easy go, and there was always another broad another night. After a few weeks of Igea playin’ hard to get, which is somethin’ that never happened to me before, I found I was thinkin’ about her all the time. None of the other broads meant nothin’ to me. In the beginnin’, I thought she was just playin’ a cute game, but when it went on I realized she wasn’t foolin’. Now, I don’t claim to know what love is. But when I began thinkin’ about her all day long, about bein’ with her and doin’
little things with her, one thing I became sure of — Igea Lissoni was no one-night stand.”

Luciano’s persistence finally succeeded. In the spring of 1948, a few months after they had met, Igea Lissoni went to live with him as his mistress. “I wanted to marry her. She was the only girl I ever loved in my whole life; in fact, she was my whole life, and she was the only girl I ever wanted to marry. But as it worked out, we couldn’t get married. She was willin’ to live with me, just like we was man and wife. She even wore a gold weddin’ band. When she first took up with me, I used to wonder what made a nice girl like her hook up with a hoodlum like me. It was months before I had guts enough to ask her. It was so simple when she explained it to me I should’ve realized it. She said, ‘That you were an American gangster or perhaps that you were in trouble with the police had nothing to do with it. It is merely that I discovered what every woman must have — you love me and you need me.’

“Before we started to live together in my apartment at the Excelsior Hotel, it seemed like all we did was talk. Sometimes I felt like this was my first girl and I never knew nobody before her. But I leveled with Igea like with nobody else in my life; I told her everythin’ she wanted to know and a lot of things she didn’t. One night, we was havin’ dinner alone in a little garden restaurant outside Rome. I was tellin’ her about the way things was in America, all about New York, and then I started to tell her about my trial. She stopped me all of a sudden and she said, ‘Sharlie, no more. No more, now or ever. I know only one thing; you love me.’ That night she come back to my place at the Excelsior and it was the first time we ever made love. No girl I ever knew could compare with Igea. That night was the last time we talked about marriage. She asked me if I wanted children and I told her I’d like to have ten but we couldn’t even afford to have none. What kind of a life could it be for a kid of Lucky Luciano? That’d be sentencin’ the kid to a life of misery before he was born, and I couldn’t do that. I thought that might bust us up, but Igea understood what I was gettin’ at, without a million words of explanation. And there was another thing. I told her with my kind of life, maybe she could be a widow any minute, because somebody would put a slug in me. So, if she married me, she could have all my dough, everythin’.
But she didn’t want that. All she said was, ‘Sharlie, I don’t want your money, any of it. I want you.’ What the hell could you say to that?”

Igea made only a single demand when she moved in with Luciano: that they leave the Excelsior, where he was too accessible to the constant parade of “business” offers that could put him in danger with the Italian police and with Anslinger. They moved to the more residential Hotel di Savoia, but even there those with propositions for Luciano to enter the narcotics traffic managed to evade the hotel security and camp outside his third-floor suite. Finally, Igea proposed that they abandon the nomadic life of hotel dwellers and find a permanent home.

“If that was what she wanted, I figured what the hell, why not. We started to look for an apartment and about a week later we found one in the Parioli.” In that exclusive, parklike residential section of Rome, they took over the lease of an American Army officer who was returning home after a tour in Italy. “It was a big break for us,” Luciano said. “It was almost like bein’ back in the States. That apartment had beautiful American furniture, a new Westinghouse refrigerator with a freezer, an electric stove with an oven, and we even got one of them little infrared broilers that was just comin’ out at the PX. With my connections, we had no trouble gettin’ stuff at the PX and the American commissary had plenty of good food, just about anythin’ we wanted. Outside, Rome was a mess, where people had nothin’. Inside that apartment, for me it was the happiest time of my life.”

He was happy, too, because he was meeting people from a world outside the rackets, people who seemed to like him and want to help and asked for nothing in return. “There was this guy in 1947 who had just finished a tour in the Army in Italy where he’d been in charge of public relations for General J. C. Lee, who was the United States commander in the Mediterranean. I met this fella in the Excelsior restaurant when he come over to my table and introduced himself. He told me his background and said that he knew all the Italian newspaper guys and he suggested that maybe he could help me get a better break from them and change my image in public. I told him that was a good idea and I’d put him on the payroll and try him out. He started to laugh and told me
he didn’t want no dough; he said he figured I’d served my time and I oughta have some peace and he’d like to help me, for free. He knew I was in the black market and we used to joke about that. He’d say to me, ‘Charlie, you’ve got a lot of good company in the black market — the whole U.S. Army in Italy.’ After about two years he went back to the States and I sure was sorry to see him go.”

Those who saw Luciano in these days remember him as being more relaxed, more outgoing than ever in his life. He appeared to have few concerns, and the money was pouring in torrents to him, from the black market and from his interests across the Atlantic. With Igea, he toured Italy, taking her to all his favorite places — the Quisiana Hotel on Capri, the Sicilian resort of Taormina, the Villa Igea in Palermo, a modern hotel designed to look like an ancient castle; the name alone intrigued Igea and when she saw it she was captivated, wanting to return often.

They went, too, to Milan. Soon after they began living together, Igea decided she would rather have her family learn of her relationship with him from her than from the newspapers. So she took Luciano north and there told her outraged parents that she was abandoning her career to become the mistress, the wife in all but law and church, to Luciano. When they left after two days, it was to harsh demands from her father that she leave “this American killer.” Her parents would eventually relent, Igea told Luciano. She was right. Within a few years, the Lissonis had begun to look upon him almost as a proper son-in-law.

But there were shadows over this world, and suspicion was never far from Luciano. He was constantly under surveillance, constantly accused of involvement in the rackets, constantly harassed and brought in for questioning. He realized that he needed a front, some legitimate business that would at least partially get the police off his back. The word was spread and each afternoon scores of promoters would approach him at one of the outdoor cafés along the Via Veneto with propositions; all seemed to assume that he had an unlimited bankroll and wanted only to invest without asking questions and without playing any role in the operation. All were turned away.

“And then big shot Charlie Lucky got taken by his own
paisanos
worse than anybody ever took me in my life. I’ve been bugs about ice cream and candy since I was a kid; it was almost like a trademark. Well, these two bastards knew it and they played me like a fuckin’ fiddle. I was sittin’ outside at Donay’s on the Via Veneto with a couple of guys when who should come walkin’ by but Momo Salemi, a cousin of mine from Lercara Friddi, and a friend of his named Pasquale Enea. They looked surprised to see me and they come over to my table. I asked ’em what they was doin’ in Rome, and they tell me they’re in business together and they come up to make a deal. Then they sit down at the next table and start talkin’, and of course, I hear what they’re talkin’ about. They was plannin’ to start a candy factory in Palermo. My ears go up and I’m like a lamb waitin’ to be slaughtered. I hear Enea talkin’ about this great formula he’s got for makin’ fantastic candy and how they’ve got customers all lined up in Rome who’re gonna help ’em sell the stuff all over, especially in the States. The guy they’re supposed to see is gonna lend ’em the money to get their factory goin’.

“I was what Lansky used to call a schmuck. Here was these guys, one of ’em a cousin of mine and the other from my home town, so who would ever think they’d try to pull the old con game on me? I turned around and I told ’em I heard what they was talkin’ about. I asked ’em how much dough they need. Enea said about a million lire, which in my market would cost me only a little more than a thousand bucks. So I thought, this is just what I’ve been lookin’ for, a legit business I’m really interested in and it’ll be operated by guys I know and can trust. I took ’em up to my apartment and I hand ’em a million lire and tell ’em to get their asses back to Palermo right away and get the business started.”

The fish had swallowed the bait. It was not long before Salemi and Enea were back in Rome asking for more money; costs were rising far beyond their anticipations. Luciano gave it. Soon they were back again. “Every time they come up, they’d bring along a few boxes of candy and it was goddamn delicious, chocolates and nougats with fruit in it, the best I ever tasted. So I got hooked tighter each time, especially since Igea thought it was a good thing for me to be involved with a nice business like that and a business
where I could help with gettin’ the American distribution since I knew a lotta guys over there who could help make it a big success.

“After about a year, Igea tells me I’ve shelled out about sixty grand. All I had to show for it was a couple of boxes of candy. I’d never even asked ’em a question, I just took their word that they was pilin’ up stock and buyin’ machinery and stuff like that. So I got in touch with my cousin in Lercara Friddi, Calcedonia Lucanía, who was runnin’ a little paint store. I asked him to go up to Palermo and take a damn good look at the candy business. He was to walk in and tell Momo and Enea that I sent him to see what was goin’ on, and he was to look at everything.”

It was only a few weeks later that Calcedonia Lucanía arrived in Rome with the news that the boxes of candy he had received were about all he was going to get out of his investment. Calcedonia had carefully examined the books, had discovered that indeed the business was prospering, with production and sales moving steadily upward. But he had discovered, as well, that Luciano’s partners had been putting the profits in their own pockets.