The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (56 page)

Still the attempts to embroil Luciano continued. Late in 1953, Mayor Lorenzo Rago of the town of Battipaglia, on the coast near Naples, disappeared, and Siragusa and Florita were off and running once more. In addition to his official duties, which paid little, Rago’s ostensible business was manufacturing tomato sauce. But it was discovered that Rago had an annual income in excess of twenty million lire — fifty thousand dollars — which is a lot of money from a small spaghetti-sauce company. It seemed that the
money was coming from the black market; Rago was running contraband between Italy and Tangier. And then the rumors began to spread that he was doing more than just trading in nylons and cigarettes; he was, it was whispered, in the narcotics business.

The search for Rago intensified, and then a decomposed body was discovered in a rowboat, trussed up like a turkey. The police were convinced this was the body of the missing mayor. Police Chief Florita promptly arrived at Luciano’s door and had him hauled away in handcuffs. Siragusa arrived at the police barracks, was installed in a nearby office, and there helped guide the interrogation. Luciano was informed that he was under suspicion of having murdered Mayor Rago. The motive: he and Rago had been partners in narcotics smuggling, Rago had obviously doublecrossed him and just as obviously Luciano had meted out retribution. Luciano was held without bail, to await the results of a pathological examination of the corpse. When the results arrived, the case collapsed. The body was not that of Mayor Rago — it was, in fact, never identified.

That did not stop the investigation or the suspicion of Luciano. Then there was a new turn, with the appearance of Francesco Scibilia, a seedy, out-of-work occasional hoodlum who scrounged the Naples waterfront. As it happened, Scibilia was an American deportee; he had been arrested in Florida for trafficking in narcotics and for forgery, had served fifteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary, and then was shipped abroad. On his arrival in Naples, he had offered his services to Siragusa, and had been hired to infiltrate the Luciano organization. “For chrissake, we spotted the guy five minutes after he showed up. I threw him out on his ass and told him to go back to Siragusa and ask for a better job.”

Scibilia told a different story. He said that Luciano had given him fifty million lire (two hundred forty thousand dollars) to pass on to Mayor Rago. It was to be used to finance Rago’s narcotics operation. As proof, Scibilia displayed a business card with the name Antonio Rago on it, his signature and handwritten notation: “48,000 lire.” This Rago, said Scibilia, was a relative of Mayor Rago; he ran a small boat that carried wine legally out of the coast town of Trapani. But, Scibilia claimed, that boat was used as well for the narcotics operation of Luciano and the missing mayor, and
one dark night the mayor’s body had been dumped from it into the sea for permanent burial.

Once more, the police descended upon Luciano. Now, they declared, they had the evidence they needed. Once more, the case collapsed. Antonio Rago, an investigation soon revealed, indeed had a boat, but that boat was too small ever to have made trips into open water and it never left the waters around Trapani and the nearby islands. Further, Antonio Rago was no relation of the missing mayor and had, in fact, never even met him. As for the business card Scibilia had flourished, Antonio Rago had, indeed, given it to him and made the notations. But that had happened during a chance meeting on a train when Rago had sold Scibilia a watch for forty-eight thousand lire (eighty dollars) and had given him the business card as a receipt.

So Luciano was free again (the body of Mayor Rago never did turn up). As for Scibilia, he was brought before the court, fined, and given a three-year prison sentence for having slandered a citizen of Naples, one Salvatore Lucanía.

This failure no more deterred Siragusa and Florita than had any of the others, and when the biggest narcotics scandal of postwar Italy erupted, they were after him once more. The scandal involved three major chemical and medical laboratories that produced legal heroin for medical uses under license from the government — the Schiaparelli Laboratories, SAIPOM Corporation and a company called SACI. During a three-year period, the laboratories had diverted more than nine hundred pounds of heroin into the illicit market — heroin worth $30 million wholesale in the United States, and on the streets at retail, more than $200 million. A number of executives and scientists of the three companies were incriminated. Behind the whole conspiracy, declared Charles Siragusa, was Charlie Luciano. As proof, there was his relationship with Egidio Calascibetta, the head of SACI, and with his old friend, Joe Biondo.

“Sure, I knew this guy Calascibetta. He was a
commendatore
, a big shot up in Milan with medals and all kinds of honors for helpin’ his country. I met him once in Capri; he was there with his family and Igea liked ’em. We rented a little summer place in Capri and one time Calascibetta was a guest in our house. Does
that mean we was in business together? Hell, I knew Hutton real good in New York, but was I in the brokerage business with him?

“And of course I knew Joe Biondo; we was good friends from the old days. He was with me that time when we all got picked up in Cleveland when I went to see Moe Dalitz about the Masseria-Maranzano problem, and he used to come up to see me at Dannemora and bring things to me, little things that counted. So Joe come over from New York and he dropped in to see me in Naples. He had some dough, he carried a lotta dough for me from the States. But this particular time he says he has a deal in New York to buy some chemicals and he asks me to introduce him to somebody in Italy who has a plant. Am I supposed to say to him, after all these years, ‘I’m sorry, Joe, I can’t do nothin’ for you’? We was goin’ to Milan anyway, because Igea’s sister Daria was sick, so I took Joe along to introduce him to this guy I met in Capri, Calascibetta.”

That introduction was made, but no sooner did Luciano and Biondo leave the plant than they were picked up by the police, taken to the barracks, and questioned about the reason for being at SACI. Luciano’s explanation was simple: He was simply bringing two people he knew together so that, perhaps, they might come to terms on a business deal. The authorities seemed satisfied.

Then the scandal broke and that meeting took on a new significance. “Siragusa got on a soap box and he started screamin’ that Lucky Luciano was a friend of them big-shot junk dealers, and that Joe Biondo was the go-between on account of he was connected with me in the States. As far as I’m concerned, Siragusa knew less arithmetic than I ever learned in grammar school. He could add two and two and wind up with nine and then Asslinger would pat him on the back for bein’ such a smart boy and doin’ his homework so good on Lucky Luciano.”

Siragusa’s charges were unavailing. In the wake of the revelations, several companies, including SACI, were closed down and some of the individuals involved were jailed and fined. But not Calascibetta; he was merely denounced publicly. And not Luciano; an intensive investigation by the Guardia di Finanza and other Italian authorities failed to turn up any evidence against him, and so he was absolved.

With the authorities constantly after him, fear was never far from Luciano that one day all his freedom would be lost. Igea urged him repeatedly to turn away from his past, to make a sharp break with the world of illegal business. He took some steps to comply at least partially. At her suggestion, he purchased some land in the small town of Santa Marinella, and it was turned into a productive farm under the guidance of a younger cousin and namesake, Salvatore Lucanía. He looked, as well, for new opportunities in legitimate enterprises.

The candy business, by then, was almost at an end. Though Calcedonia Lucanía had run it at a steadily increasing profit, the rumors spread by authorities that it was merely a front to ship narcotics across the Atlantic proved disastrous. “That’s when I really got to hate Charlie Siragusa. He was so crazy blind that he lost every sense of decency. He was a U.S. law enforcement officer and he had no orders to be a monster. But all he wanted to do was stick it into me, right or wrong, as long as he knew I would hurt. Nobody never found nothin’ in none of them boxes but candy, but that didn’t stop him or them other guys. We had gotten a contract to export our candy to the States, to a lotta stores in the Little Italys in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, all the big cities. Because of Siragusa’s muscle, they started investigatin’. They practically ruined our shipments by breakin’ open and testin’ half the boxes. The candy had to go through a laboratory for examination and the rest of the shipment sat out there on the dock. By the time the lab report came back, it would all be ruined. So finally we hadda sell, and I dropped forty grand. Because them guys made up their minds that I shouldn’t be allowed to do nothin’ legit.”

Still, Luciano persisted in a search for a legitimate business that would pay off. He promised Igea that he would find one.
And he promised her that he would quit the rackets, at least those in Italy. “But I explained to her that I hadda be just as careful about gettin’ outa things as I was when I was in ’em. All them years after I become the boss, people all over the world thought of me as the head of somethin’. If it became public that I decided to be the head of nothin’, then everybody in Italy would believe that Igea talked me out of the rackets. In Italy, a thing like that can ruin a guy, because in this country a man has to be the head of the house. A guy who’s led around by the nose by any woman gets a fast reputation for bein’ a
castrato
. So Igea agreed with me that I hadda keep up the front; I hadda still be the big gangster, Charlie Lucky, whether I was or not.”

Then Luciano began his second legitimate venture. He opened an electrical appliance store in Naples. He sold both major appliances, like washers and refrigerators, and small ones that had not been seen in Italy in years, like irons, toasters and mixers. Had he desired, he could have tapped his American Army contacts for U.S.-made appliances, but that would have been to flaunt the black market openly, and he was determined to keep this business legitimate. So he specialized in Italian-made products and those from Germany and other countries on which he could get import licenses and win franchises. And he brought to the business an American selling technique — installment buying.

At first, it looked as though he had found success. But then American-made appliances began to appear on the Italian market in increasing numbers, and Luciano’s business started to suffer. It dipped into the red and within a few years, he closed the store, with a loss of fifty thousand dollars mostly in the form of unpaid installments. In the old days in the United States, no one would have welshed on debts to Lucky Luciano, and he was determined that the same thing would be true in Italy. Luciano sent for a collector. He was an old relative, Momo Salemi, who had come out of hiding in the Sicilian mountains and, through the intervention of other relatives, had managed to convince Luciano to use him again. This time, Salemi was completely loyal. He scoured the back alleys of Naples and, with a little bit of muscle, managed to collect at least part of the debts outstanding.

So, Luciano began once more to seek a business, a legitimate
one that, if not paying as well as the rackets, at least would not collapse around him. If he did not find one immediately, he at least discovered another occupation, and a worthy one, to divert him. His old friend Father Scarpato arrived one day from Mount Vesuvius and insisted that Luciano and Igea return with him to his parish at San Sebastian al Vesuvio. Midway up the lava-strewn slope, the priest stopped and pointed to a vacant lot. “Here, my friends,’ he said, “you see the Clinic of Our Lady of Lourdes.”

“Igea and I looked at each other and I could see that we was thinkin’ the same thing, that this little round butterball with the cigarette ashes all over his front had finally blown his top. But, as it turned out, he had a terrific idea. There was no hospital for miles around and if anybody in one of them villages all over Vesuvius got sick, they hadda go to Naples. Most of ’em didn’t have cars and it was a pretty long hike by donkey cart to a doctor. They could die by the time they got to Naples.

“Don Cheech said he was gonna build a hospital with more than a hundred beds, the best modern equipment and the best doctors. All he wanted to know was would I help him. Of course, I said I would, and I got involved in somethin’ that gave me more satisfaction than anythin’ I ever did.”

Father Scarpato was filled with plans and he had the technical ability to design and blueprint his dream. To Luciano fell the task of organizing the project and raising the money. It was slow and difficult and, because of its nature, one to which he would not lend the old techniques. Later, he would remember the times when he returned home after being spurned by those he had approached for money and Igea would mock him. “She’d say to me, ‘Maybe for the next three or four days I forgive your promise. Go and make protection for a few big
milionarios
. You can play the part of Robin Hood and maybe someday they will talk about how you raised the money for the clinic for the poor by giving protection to the rich.’ ”

These may have been happy days, but Luciano had a persistent and nagging concern. His finances were not in good shape. His Swiss bank account was being depleted rapidly by the losses in the candy and appliance businesses, his own continued high standard of living, and his personal charities. He was approached daily by
the poor, by out-of-luck deportees, by a horde of people with hard-luck stories, and almost always he would pass over a few bills. There were those, too, who had once been on his payroll in the black market or who were still on his payroll, and to each he paid fifty or seventy-five dollars a week. He was still getting about twenty-five thousand a month from the States, from those interests administered by Meyer Lansky, but he was spending almost all of it.