The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (58 page)

Luciano’s testimony was widely reported in the Italian press. It combined with the publicity about his romance with Igea Lissoni and the rumors of his many beneficences to the poor of postwar Italy to far outweigh, with the Italian public at least, the unceasing pressures, hostility and publicity about his criminal activities that poured from Siragusa and Florita.

By then, Luciano had abandoned almost all hope of a return to the United States and had begun to accept as reality that Italy would remain his home for the rest of his life. His return to
America, he had always felt (despite his offer to Anslinger), hinged on election of Thomas Dewey as President. That was no longer even a faint possibility. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower had won a landslide victory; his reelection in 1956 appeared inevitable, and by the time his term was up, a new generation of American political leaders would certainly have emerged. Tom Dewey would then be little more than an elder statesman, without a political future and with neither national office nor much national influence.

So Luciano bowed to Igea’s long-held wish for a permanent home. They rented an apartment on the Via Tasso, halfway up the hillside overlooking the Bay of Naples. Igea’s furnishings were brought from storage in Rome, and Father Scarpato, in his spare time, installed bookshelves and wood paneling. A middle-aged Sardinian housekeeper named Lydia was hired and Luciano bought two miniature Manchester terriers who soon were accompanying him everywhere.

He even found a new legitimate business, one he was sure would be a success and one that would do little harm to the image he was trying to develop as a man of good works. He opened a store in the Hotel Royal, specializing in X-ray machines, fluoroscopes, electrocardiograph machines and other medical equipment. Through that store, too, could be channeled the equipment Father Scarpato would need once his clinic was finished.

Still, he remained under twenty-four-hour surveillance and was restricted by the dusk-to-dawn curfew, and his telephone was tapped. On occasions, though, he managed to slip away, usually for meetings in secret with couriers and other important visitors from the United States. In 1958, most of these meetings began to take place in Taormina; his friend and confidant Rosario “Chinky” Vitaliti was then spending much of his time away from his home in the United States at a villa he bought in that Sicilian resort, and that house was put at Luciano’s disposal.

There was, however, one important arrival from America whom Luciano studiously avoided. Joe Adonis had finally abandoned his fights with the police and courts in New York and New Jersey, with federal tax men and with immigration authorities. Rather than go to prison and then face deportation, he voluntarily agreed
to leave the United States forever. After a riotous round of farewell parties, Adonis boarded the Italian luxury liner
Conte Biancamano
on January 3, 1956, and set sail in a style befitting a millionaire; he had the most expensive suite on the ship, a sitting room, bedroom and bath, costing $740.

It was Adonis’s announced intention to settle in Milan. But his ship’s first Italian port was Naples. He was due January 17. Would he meet Luciano, his old friend, when the ship docked? “I’m not going to look him up,” Adonis told reporters, “and I hope he doesn’t look me up.”

In Naples, reporters who descended upon Luciano in his medical supply store got the same answer. “No, I’m not gonna meet no boat. I got nothin’ in common with types like him. If he wants to look me up, that’s his business. But I got no reason to go to him.” Then Luciano began to lecture the press about Father Scarpato’s clinic and his work with the priest.

“For one of the few times in my life, I really zippered my mouth. I knew Joe was comin’ in on the
Conte Biancamano
and that he was travelin’ in the bridal suite, all by himself. Every day that boat was sailin’ nearer to Italy it made me think of my trips across on the
Laura Keene
and that rat-infested Turkish freighter, the
Bakir
, that smelled of nothin’ but sweat and piss and vomit. And here was this son of a bitch comin’ over to smell the beautiful perfume of his three million bucks in Zurich. And me, I’m not even allowed to go out at night to a restaurant for dinner. It got so bad for me durin’ that week that if I hadn’t had Igea with me, I think I’d’ve done somethin’ real drastic.”

The ship docked. Luciano stayed far away. Adonis debarked and that afternoon boarded a train for Milan.

But both men fully intended to meet, and a week later, Luciano and Igea drove secretly to Milan. While she visited her family, Luciano and Adonis met at a small, out-of-the-way hotel that rarely saw a tourist. There was little warmth between them. The meeting was strictly business and brief. Adonis had some messages for Luciano and some reports on the state of the underworld in the United States. Then they parted. They would not meet again until Christmas.

Just before that next meeting with Adonis, Luciano finally received some good news. In November, some of the restrictions on him were lifted by the Naples police; the two-year sentence had run out. Almost the first move he made, in concert with other deportees, was to send a formal appeal to President Eisenhower requesting readmission to the United States. It was denied. He was not surprised. “I never expected it. So somethin’ you don’t expect, when it don’t happen, it also don’t disappoint you. Of course, I know that Asslinger give Eisenhower’s staff a whole file of lies about me that Siragusa had been sendin’ to Washington. He was dreamin’ up them charges in his head, what they call a ‘paper case’ because it’s strictly crap that got put on paper when one of the agents wrote it into the files. The funny thing, though, was that when I got turned down, Igea was very happy. She never looked forward to goin’ to the States with me. She just felt that I would get back into the rackets and big trouble would really start up all over again.”

Hopeful that Luciano could now settle into a normal and peaceful existence, Igea talked often with him about buying a home — a villa somewhere or an apartment, something they could own. Luciano agreed. As they began their search, a friend named Gino Cuoma came to their assistance. He had been born in Italy, had emigrated to the United States where he had made a small stake in the restaurant business and then, in late middle age, had returned to Naples, hoping to open a restaurant. But he lacked sufficient capital. When Luciano met him and heard his story, he advanced the necessary funds (and was later repaid when the restaurant began earning a profit). Cuoma opened his restaurant in 1957 on the Partenope, the roadway paralleling the Bay of Naples and a short walk from the Excelsior and other hotels that catered to American tourists and naval personnel. He called it the California, and with Luciano as a frequent patron, it became an immediate attraction for Americans anxious to catch a glimpse of the notorious gangster. So proud of his friendship with Luciano was Cuoma that he decorated the walls of the restaurant with pictures of Luciano and visiting celebrities. Even today, they remain, though one, showing Luciano in conversation with Frank Sinatra, was removed a few years ago: Cuoma was visited one day
by “some men I did not know” and requested to remove that photograph. He complied.

The California was still in the construction stage at the end of 1956 when Cuoma learned that his friends were looking for a place to buy. He volunteered his services and discovered a cooperative penthouse atop a five-story building on the exclusive Parco Comola, just off the Via Tasso where Luciano and Igea were living. It was spacious and surrounded by a huge red terrazzo veranda. Luciano quickly bought it for twenty-five thousand dollars with the deed made out in the name of his brother Bartolo in order not to complicate or delay the legal transfer. (Six years later, Bartolo would sell it, and all its furnishings, for thirty-two thousand dollars, less than half its value then, according to Naples real estate dealers.) The penthouse, with its view over the bay to Vesuvius, was everything Igea wanted, and she spent her days cajoling gardeners to fill the terrace with flowers, bartering with furniture dealers and cabinetmakers, employing the sisters at a nearby convent to embroider the linens with the initial “L” — and then teasing Luciano that if they ever separated, he must promise to let her take the linens with her since they both had that same initial.

“It was just about the time we bought the apartment that I started to change businesses. I found the medical supply setup was goin’ to hell because I spent more time with Don Cheech up on Mount Vesuvius than in the store. I had a very nice secretary by the name of Dora De Negris, but she couldn’t run the business all alone, even though she sure tried. That’s when Father Scarpato came up with the plan to start a small factory to make furniture for Catholic schools. The idea was that a little plant could turn out plenty of desks and things like that and we could also use it to make furniture for the clinic. He was no dope, Don Cheech; he knew the only way I was gonna help him every day was for him to be my partner. So I got into the furniture business and we started to sell everything we could turn out. There wasn’t a church that didn’t have a school and there wasn’t one of them schools that didn’t need new desks and chairs and that type of stuff. I thought to myself that I’d finally hit on an honest business that was gonna pay off. Was I wrong! But I didn’t find it out for a few
years. We sold everything we made, but that didn’t mean we collected our money. It seems there’s some kinda law that makes it almost impossible to sue a church in Italy. So my furniture business wound up with a million accounts receivable and I was back where I was before I brought Momo Salemi over from Palermo to try to locate the deadbeats that never paid me for the appliances. Sometimes I would go home at night and want to hit my head against the wall, because every time I turned my hand to somethin’ in Italy, either it got chopped off or I lost a bundle of dough.

“I put Momo to work again, only this time it was tougher, to try to collect at least some of the bills from the churches. He couldn’t put the muscle on ’em, of course, like he did with a few of them appliance buyers. All he could do was go to see some priest or monsignor and ask very nice for a little dough on account. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, he got the same answer, that the church was too poor to pay. He’d come back to me and say, ‘Charlie, what am I gonna do? You want me to hit the priest or steal the collection?’ Then we’d laugh and write in another zero on the ledger.”

One day, Luciano had a surprising visitor to his new home, a United States senator. “If you want to see some real crooks, take a look at our senators and congressmen in America. They call somebody a gangster, a racket guy or a crook because he’s doin’ somethin’ against the law, when they’re the worst kind of thieves, within the law. The United States was lendin’ a lot of money to Europe, most of the time puttin’ it into partnerships with the foreign country where there was plenty of profits. The dough would sit in Europe and pile up and they called the account ‘counterpart funds.’ It came to billions of lire in Italy and it was controlled by the American Embassy. So a senator and his family and his friends and his staff would arrive in Rome on a U.S. government plane, which they got the use of free, and somebody from the embassy would meet ’em and hand ’em a big bagful of lire from that counterpart fund; it happened all over Europe the same way. And these guys from Washington would spend the dough
like it was dishwater, payin’ their expenses, buyin’ presents for the family, fur coats and jewels for their wives, you name it.

“This one senator who come to see me in Naples, he drank more booze, took out more airline stewardesses and embassy secretaries, and spent more counterpart funds than any nine congressmen put together, and to top it, he had a yen to be in the White House. He also had a yen to meet me. So we met, and I found out he would steal a red-hot stove. He talked about tryin’ to fix up a way for me to come back to the States. He said he knew my record, but he also knew that Asslinger was way off base where I was concerned; he said he’d asked the American Embassy guys, includin’ Siragusa, to show him proof that I was connected with the drug traffic in Italy, and he said they come up empty.

“Just before he left my apartment, he happened to look at this ring I wear on my pinky [a star sapphire and diamonds set in platinum] and he said to me, ‘That’s a beautiful ring. I’ve always wanted one like that.’ I could’ve thrown that hayseed right off the roof. Instead, I said, ‘Senator, you can have it and a lot more the day I set foot in New York — permanent.’ We shook hands and he left and that’s the last I ever saw of that chiselin’ son of a bitch.”

(Off to one side of the room during this conversation sat an Italian friend of Luciano’s who spoke no English. But he remembered the meeting clearly, for when it was over Luciano told him the man was an important United States senator. He was not told the visitor’s name, but recently he described him as “a tall, thin man. He wore glasses and he had a very prominent nose. What I remember best about him is his enormous capacity for drinking.”)

During these years of the middle fifties, Luciano appeared relaxed and contented much of the time. With Fernando Alotti, the chauffeur-bodyguard he hired when Naples police chief Florita lifted his driver’s license, he tinkered often with the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, a modest and relatively inexpensive sedan Alotti had persuaded him to buy in place of his customary American cars. They retooled the engine and occasionally out on the
autostrada
, where there is no speed limit, Luciano would take the wheel and push the car over 120 miles per hour. “He may have been a gangster in America,” Alotti said, “but he was one of the nicest men I
have ever known — kind, considerate and very brave. Sometime there would be people who would try to approach Mister Sharlie at the racetrack or someplace in public, to do something wrong or maybe to try to make some publicity for themselves. It was then that I could see him turn to steel. Nothing ever bothered him and he never lost his nerve. But la Signora [Igea] worried about him all the time.”