The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (59 page)

By then, Luciano had become the most famous tourist attraction of Naples. Visiting Americans and sailors from the naval base invariably made the California a place to stop in order to see him. “Them kids would come up and ask for my autograph, and we’d talk about the States, what was happenin’ back there. I found out if I give ’em an autographed picture made out to, let’s say, their captain or some officer on the ship, it was good for a three-day pass.”

With the curfew no longer hampering his movements, Luciano and Igea often went to the Agnano racetrack in Naples in the evening. “I even bought a horse. Back in the States I never could’ve done that; everybody would’ve figured that I’d fixed the race he was in. But in Italy, nobody give it a thought. And, you know, that horse of mine never finished in the money, not once. I sometimes thought I could walk faster than that fuckin’ nag could run.”

With Igea he dined out often at favorite Naples restaurants such as the Transatlantico, the Giacomino and the Zi Teresa, and they spent frequent weekends on Capri, renting again the small house they had occupied two years before.

None of his problems then seemed insurmountable. Though Father Scarpato’s plans for his clinic were being obstructed by the Communist leader Ivan Montoni, the support and financial backing Luciano was giving openly to the priest seemed to help win the allegiance of the townspeople. The furniture business, at the end of 1956, seemed to be prospering, too, with the only apparent problems those of obtaining the necessary supplies and personnel.

“I was only sorry that this wasn’t all takin’ place in New York, where I could come home every night on the subway with the
World-Telegram
and have Igea meet me at the door, kiss me like
a regular wife and the first thing I’d ask her would be, ‘What’re you makin’ for dinner?’ ”

But any dreams Luciano had for a life as a suburban husband with a good legitimate business were not to last long. During the Christmas holiday, he and Igea received special permission to drive to Milan to visit her family. There Luciano met with Joe Adonis, their second meeting since Adonis’s arrival in Italy earlier in the year. The first had been brief and in secret in Milan, in June. This time, there were urgent matters to discuss. Both Luciano and Adonis had received news from New York that a major struggle was about to erupt, with Vito Genovese the focal point.

Under the guidance of Igea Lissoni, Luciano had spent many of his evenings when under curfew reading the books that he had ignored all his life. In his apartment on the Parco Comola one day in 1961, he motioned to the bookshelves and asked, “You know anythin’ about Shakespeare? When I went to grammar school, they didn’t teach Shakespeare. But I’ve been readin’ him for the last few years.” He reached into a bookcase and pulled out a worn copy of the collected plays and opened it.

“Well, in
Julius Caesar
, you remember a guy by the name of Cassius? He was a pain in the ass. It seems like everybody’s got a Cassius in his life. And I got one, too — only his name is Vito Genovese.” He paused for a moment. “Come to think of it, I even had two Cassiuses in my life, the other one bein’ a guy by the name of Meyer Lansky. But I didn’t get on to him for a long time.”

By Christmas of 1956, when Luciano met with Adonis in Milan, the ambition of Vito Genovese had reached the stage where it had become an urgent matter. Any checks on Genovese seemed to have vanished with the decision by Adonis to abandon his fight to
remain in the United States and instead to return to Italy, and with Frank Costello’s multiplying problems — with the Bureau of Internal Revenue over charges of tax evasion, with his appeals from jail sentences for contempt of the Kefauver committee.

“I figured that at least my good friend Meyer Lansky was still around and that he would be lookin’ after things for me and keepin’ a leash on that greedy pig. I knew Vito was burnin’ with ambition to be the Boss of Bosses and someday he was gonna make a try for it. From what Joe A. told me, I could see that Vito’d already been at work. He’d replaced some guys who’d been loyal to me and moved up other guys like Tommy Eboli who was willin’ to give him loyalty over anybody. Then Joe told me that Eboli had moved up Tony Bender as his first lieutenant, and that could mean only one thing: Vito was gonna make his try now.

“But outside of Joe tellin’ me that trouble was brewin’, all I got from him at that meet was doubletalk without no details. He knew how I felt about him ever since that time at the Zurich airport and I knew he didn’t have no more love for me. But I thought when it came to stuff in the States, we was still partners. But he just wouldn’t mention Vito’s name and I even had the impression he was sidin’ with Vito. If that was so, it hadda be against me. So I decided to wait until I got word from New York direct about what was goin’ on.”

That word was brought in the first week of February 1957, by Genovese’s newly appointed chief aide, Tommy Eboli. A sometime prizefight manager under his own name and the alias Tommy Ryan, Eboli was a man with a quick and volatile temper (he was later barred from handling fighters after leaping into the ring to dispute a decision and assaulting the referee). He had served as a courier to Luciano once or twice before, but the exiled gang leader did not know him well and what he knew he did not particularly like.

“I guess he’d been told by Vito to watch his mouth with me, because when he come over he showed me a lotta respect. Eboli said there’d been a meet of the council to discuss Frank Costello, because Frank told Vito and the rest of the guys a few months before that he wanted to get out. He was in so much hot water that he didn’t hardly have no time left over for the Unione’s
business or nothin’ else. He just wanted to retire with honor. Of course, there ain’t no such thing as retirin’ from the outfit; once you’re in, you’re in, and the only way out is in a box. But, hell, Frank had been part of it since the beginnin’; he helped me set the fuckin’ thing up and he’d been with me all the way. So I didn’t see no reason why an exception couldn’t be made in his case.

“Eboli told me that the council had already met and voted and he’d come to Italy to get my vote. I asked him how the council voted and he said it was unanimous — everybody agreed that Frank oughta be allowed to step down. All they needed was my vote to make it official. Naturally, that means that Anastasia, Tommy Lucchese, Joe Bananas and all the other guys, includin’ Joe Adonis, okayed it. So I began to think to myself, why the hell did Adonis doubletalk me on the details? I asked Tommy whether Adonis had voted before me, and he said, ‘Yeah, he went along with everybody.’ I began to wonder why Adonis didn’t send word to me when he was asked for his vote before Eboli showed up in Naples. I can’t come up with no answer except my nose tells me somethin’ stinks.”

Though disturbed by his growing suspicions, Luciano nevertheless sent Eboli back to New York with the word that he had no objections to Costello retiring to the home he had bought at Sands Point on Long Island, or anyplace else he wanted. But that night, Luciano sent a short note to Costello through the APO address to which he had access. “I couldn’t trust nobody to carry that note personally, but I knew that Uncle Sam would get it to Frank without no questions. All I wanted to know was would Frank send me word by messenger what was up and gimme the whole story.”

About a month later, a new courier arrived with Costello’s reply. He was Pasquale “Pat” Eboli, sometimes known as Pat Ryan, the younger brother of Tommy Eboli; in recent years, he, too, had served as a courier from the States, carrying money and messages. But unlike his older brother, he and Luciano had instantly become close friends, a friendship that created a schism between the two Ebolis.

Costello had called Pat Eboli to a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria and given him the reply to take to Luciano. “First, Frank
said Joe A. was right, that trouble was really gettin’ ready to blow up. Joe Bananas come to Frank a couple weeks before this and told him that Vito had been goin’ around on the sly, talkin’ to the heads of the different families. Vito didn’t say nothin’ direct; he was tryin’ to find out in them little private meets who would be loyal to who if the goin’ got tough and a showdown come. He didn’t say who the showdown was gonna be with, Joe told Frank; he just let that hang. Knowin’ Vito, he probably figured that since Bananas was very big in junk and was buyin’ from him, Vito had nothin’ to worry about Joe backin’ him all the way. The only thing was, Vito was so stuck on himself he thought he could muscle everybody to his way of thinkin’. He always made that kinda mistake. He could never read guys right. That’s why Joe Bananas went to Costello; he was smart; he knew that if Vito tried to shut me out, he’d have to climb over a lotta guys, especially Anastasia and Tommy Lucchese.

“So, readin’ between the lines of what Pat Eboli told me, I realized that Costello was also on the spot because he wanted to retire. I asked Pat whether Frank had made any comment about his retirement and Pat told me that Frank wanted him to use the exact words to me: ‘Tell Charlie I’m gonna retire even if it kills me.’ Well, that gimme the whole answer to everythin’. All the rest was just words and Costello knew that I’d understand it. He was simply tellin’ me that Vito didn’t really give a shit about no decision by the council or nobody else. He was gonna make his move and get where he’s been wantin’ to reach all along, no matter who got killed.”

It was a very disturbed Luciano who came away from the meeting with Eboli. For the next several days, he spent much of his time away from Igea and his apartment, telling her nothing of what had happened so as not to worry her. And during the next weeks, he began to learn more and more about events in the United States.

At the time of Costello’s decision to retire, his major interests — aside from attempting to stay out of jail — were in gambling and real estate. He owned points in the Beverly Club, the Beverly Hills Club and three Las Vegas hotels, interests that were administered for him by Meyer and Jake Lansky and Phil Kastel. He
personally supervised his real estate portfolio — owned in his own and cover names — consisting of parcels in Wall Street and along Park Avenue. He had proposed to his associates on the council that if he were permitted to retire, he would surrender all his decision-making powers and even withdraw from active participation in gambling. He wanted only to continue receiving the income from gambling and real estate.

To most members of the council, Costello’s proposal seemed reasonable. But not to Genovese. Despite his earlier agreement to Costello’s retirement, he began to oppose it. “When I heard about that, I was sure that Vito had started to make his move by beginnin’ a real squeeze on Frank. He got up at the last meet I was told about and said there was only one way a guy could get out. Frank couldn’t quit and live. Then I heard that Lansky got up and said, ‘Frank should have the right to live in peace after all he’s done for everybody.’

“That give Vito the openin’ he was lookin’ for. He said that if Frank got out and retired, he would have to throw everything he had into the pot for the city, for all the families in the city, and then the New York bosses would decide what kind of a pension he should have. Of course, that was a lotta shit. Vito couldn’t have cared less about Frank’s interests goin’ into a pot. I realized there hadda be somethin’ else — that little son of a bitch was out to get Costello because he never forgot that time when Costello insulted him back in the Claridge Hotel when he objected to me bringin’ Dutch Schultz into our outfit. I just knew that was in the back of Vito’s mind like a fire all them years and he’d been tryin’ to figure a way to pay off Frank for talkin’ to him like a piece of shit. Now, he got a chance to do it, and with the council’s okay, because they didn’t know what was really behind it.

“Then my brother Bart come over to Naples with some money and with a message from Albert. There had been another meet just two days before Bart left New York. Albert said that things was comin’ down to a choice between Vito and Costello. Vito finally opened up and said he was gonna be the boss. Albert told him that he was boss of nothin’. He said that I set up everything back in 1931 so that no one guy could run nobody else’s outfit. If Vito thought he was gonna change that way of operatin’ and try
to become another Maranzano, Albert would personally make sure that Vito would be very, very sorry.

“Then, Albert said, Lansky tried to calm everybody down by sayin’ that Costello might end up in stir for a long stretch and that could solve a lotta problems. He asked Vito, ‘After all, how much of a danger could Frank be if he’s in jail?’ When Vito seen that Lansky’s question was havin’ an effect on everybody else, he said, ‘Okay, maybe you’re right. Maybe what we oughta do is just let him take the rap, just let him fight his own fight and not help him out at all.’ What Genovese was doin’ was tryin’ to go against everythin’ we always did when a guy got into trouble; everybody helped him out, and if he went away for good, we would help out his family. It was like a law with us. Now, that dirty prick was tellin’ the council we oughta forget the rules anytime they got in his way to the top.

“I didn’t wanna involve my brother. Things was gettin’ too complicated in New York in the early part of 1957 and the less he knew about it the better. Besides, I had a feelin’ in my guts that Albert’s little speech to Vito was gonna bounce back and hit him bad. I didn’t want Bart connected with that, neither. I sent him back to New York and told him to stick to his garment business and not talk to nobody at all. I was about to send word to Chinky Vitaliti to see Albert in Brooklyn when I got word that the council had gone against Vito. They ruled exactly the way I suggested, that Frank should be allowed to quit with honor, that he could keep all his interests and just give up his vote on the council.”