The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (61 page)

“This one night, it was at the end of June, Igea wasn’t feelin’ too well and I went out to dinner at the Zi Teresa with John Raimundo. I left my car in the garage and John picked me up in a taxi; it was a big treat for Cockeye when I took him to dinner in a swell place and I enjoyed watchin’ him eat, though I wasn’t too hungry in them days, what with tryin’ to second-guess Vito. After dinner, Fernando and Salemi came by the restaurant in Salemi’s car. We dropped John off at the Torino Hotel where he lived and they drove me home. The mechanic was waitin’ for us there. I opened up my garage, which was a private stall with its own door and lock, and the three of us start to check over the car, when suddenly I hear a noise behind me, and I could feel somethin’ comin’ at me. It was kinda instinctive, and it went through my mind in a half a second that I was gonna get it then and there and I could already feel the slug goin’ between my shoulder blades. I must’ve ducked and that’s what saved me. Just as I looked around, there was two guys, I never seen ’em before, and they was comin’ at us with lead pipes. The first guy takes a swipe at my head, but he missed me and hit the car — the son of a bitch put a terrible dent in the fender. The other guy went for Salemi and caught him across the shoulders, but didn’t knock him out.

“We didn’t give ’em a second chance. The mechanic was a skinny little runt who weighed about seven pounds soakin’ wet, so he was no good to us. But Fernando tackled them two guys like a pro football player and knocked ’em both right on their ass. And then we went to work on ’em. They both had guns, but I guess they didn’t drill me because they knew the police was keepin’ watch on me and a lotta noise was the last thing they wanted. What I never knew was where the hell them cops was, anyway; they always followed me like shadows and this one night when I could’ve used ’em, they wasn’t even around.

“Anyway, we beat them two guys into a bloody pulp. I tried to get ’em to tell me who they was or what town in the States they came from, whether they was independent or in somebody’s outfit, and especially if Vito sent ’em. They wouldn’t open their mouths except to say, ‘Don’t kill us. We’re Italians.’ We found phony passports on ’em — they must’ve had real ones stashed away someplace — so that didn’t help none. The way I felt then, I was ready
to kill ’em without blinkin’ an eye; I was ready to knock somebody off for the first time with my own hands. But then I began to cool off and think a little bit. Finally, I decided to keep ’em alive and send ’em back to Vito with a message. We threw some water on ’em, got ’em up on their feet, and I told ’em to go back to New York and tell Vito that if he wanted to start a war with me, he would get to know what it feels like to have somebody drop an atom bomb on him. I said to tell the little bastard he would never be the boss as long as I was alive and that I intended to live for a long time. Then we tied ’em up and locked ’em in the garage overnight.”

The next morning, the two would-be assassins were driven from Naples directly to Rome Airport, put in first-class seats aboard a TWA Constellation, and sent back to the United States. What happened to them when they arrived, Luciano never learned.

For a moment, Luciano considered dealing directly and finally with Genovese, then rejected that idea. “I set up the outfit and I made the rules, so I couldn’t be the one to break ’em. If Vito was gonna go, like I told Albert after the hit on Frank, it’d have to be by order of the council, all legal, accordin’ to our rules.”

Igea was never told of the attempt on Luciano, for he was determined to protect her from that side of his life. Further, he had begun to notice a growing listlessness and increasing pallor about her, which he attributed not to illness but to concern for him during a time when much of his attention had been directed elsewhere. When Pat Eboli arrived in Naples with money from New York a few weeks later, Luciano decided to take him and Igea for a short holiday to Taormina. Chinky Vitaliti, now back in the United States, had extended the use of the house he had bought there to Luciano.

“We had a little boat down there and Pat and I took it out a little ways and anchored it. At first he was kinda hedgy, sorta beatin’ around the bush about the trouble back in the States. He was in a helluva spot because everything that was goin’ on right at that time with Vito involved his brother Tommy right up to the eyebrows, and I didn’t want to bring no pressure on Pat to be a stool pigeon about his own brother. But Pat told me the situation between Vito and Albert was gettin’ worse every day, especially since Cheech [Frank Scalise] got knocked off. After a day or so, I sent Patsy back to New York, without no messages. The kid was already in a fight with Tommy over loyalty to me and I didn’t have the heart to get him involved no further.

“Then I got a hunch that maybe Albert never got my message, which could mean only one thing; the Gambinos was on Vito’s side and didn’t pass on the instructions. Then it all began to make sense, because after all, I done the same kind of thing myself years before. Carlo was willin’ to wait on the sidelines in the fight between Anastasia and Genovese, just figurin’ the odds that Albert was so crazy in the head Vito would take him sooner or later. When that happened, Mister Carlo Gambino winds up head of the Anastasia family. After Albert knocked off Phil and Vince Mangano in the early part of ’51 and took over that outfit, he made it a hundred times bigger. So, if my hunch was right, the minute Gambino gets control, he or Paul will be comin’ over to Naples again to make peace with me.”

Luciano, though, was not willing to abandon his old friend Albert Anastasia. Through his APO contact, he sent a direct message to Anastasia at a secret post office box in Fort Lee, New Jersey, alerting Anastasia to what Luciano considered very real and imminent danger. No acknowledgment was ever received. All Luciano could do was wait.

On October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia was driven by his chauffeur-bodyguard out of the electrified gates of his estate in Fort Lee into Manhattan, arriving at ten-fifteen in the morning at the barbershop in the Park Sheraton Hotel on West Fifty-fifth Street. Anastasia entered, hung up his jacket, and sat down in his customary chair number four. Hardly glancing at barber Joseph Bocchino, he said, “Haircut,” and then settled back. Indeed, he
needed a haircut, for his black hair was shaggy and uneven. Bocchino draped a towel and cloth around Anastasia’s chin and went to work with scissors and clippers. Suddenly, the front door opened and two men, with scarves masking their faces and pistols in their hands, walked in. “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off,” one of them said to Arthur Grasso, the shop’s owner. Then they quickly stepped up behind Anastasia’s chair and opened fire. Anastasia leaped forward out of the chair at the first shot, landing on his feet, weaving. Apparently disoriented, he lunged toward the reflection of the gunmen in the mirror. Another volley of shots smashed into and around him, sending him reeling into the mirror and the shelf under it. As he fell, bottles of hair tonic crashed to the floor with him. Then two more shots were fired, one smashing into the back of his skull. Ten bullets were fired at Anastasia; five hit him — one in the left hand, one in the left wrist, one in the right hip, one in the back and the final one in the head that killed him.

It was over in less than a minute, and the two gunmen were out of the shop and around the corner into the Fifty-fifth Street entrance to the BMT subway, dropping their guns as they raced away — one was found in the corridor leading from the shop to the hotel lobby, the second two blocks away at the end of the Fifty-seventh Street BMT platform. Just who the killers were has been the subject of rumors and speculation for years. According to Luciano, however, he was told they were “Crazy Joe” Gallo, a young Brooklyn hoodlum who owed his allegiance then to Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, and Joe Biondo, once part of the Luciano family and now devoted to Genovese. (Fifteen years later, Joe Gallo met the same sudden fate in a restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy.)

“I was sittin’ at home when I got a phone call from the Caserna Zanzur, which was across the street from where I used to live at the Hotel Turistico. The man callin’ said his name was Andrea Speziale and he’s an important inspector with the Guardia di Finanza. He says they want to see me down at the Caserna right away. It was late in the afternoon and I just figured it was another one of them things, another roust about nothin’ in particular. Fernando drove me down here and I go into Speziale’s office and
he tells me to sit down. He’s very polite and quiet-spoken, nothin’ like that prick Florita. He looks at me for a minute, then he says that over in the United States a gangster just got killed and what do I know about it? I kinda shrugged, but inside I was thinkin’ that Albert finally done what he was supposed to do. So I said, ‘I don’t know nothin’ about no American gangster gettin’ killed today. How the hell could I? I’m sittin’ here in Naples about five thousand miles away. I don’t even know who you’re talkin’ about.’

“I’m expectin’ Speziale to tell me that the guy he’s talkin’ about is Vito Genovese. He gives me another one of them looks, with a kind of smile, and he says, ‘The gangster I have in mind was a friend of yours — named Albert Anastasia.’ Then he gives me all the details. I almost fell over. I couldn’t figure out how it could’ve happened. I had warned Albert weeks and weeks before. How could he have been so stupid to get caught alone in a closed-in place like a barbershop? I was sure in that second Vito was behind it, and he must’ve been responsible for knockin’ off Frank Scalise, too. I think Speziale must’ve seen I was tellin’ the truth because I was so staggered, so he didn’t press me. He got up and put his hand on my shoulder and walked me to the door.

“When I left the Caserna, I started to think. I realized I hadda get in touch with my friends in New York, the guys I could still depend on.” During the next days, messages flew back and forth across the Atlantic between Luciano and his allies in the Unione. He learned almost immediately that Genovese was about to make his final push for the top. He had sent out a call to his peers throughout the underworld for a general conference of all leaders of the Unione Siciliano in mid-November, only three weeks after the Anastasia murder. To that summons he had added the statement, “Charlie Lucky wants the meeting held to set things straight.”

“It was like the shit hit the fan all over the country. A lotta guys really didn’t know how bad things was between Vito and me at that time, but I think a lot of ’em must’ve smelled a rat. After all, the word was around that Vito and I wasn’t on the best of terms, so why would I send a notice for a national council meet through Vito? When they began to ask me, I answered ’em all, by letters, couriers and cablegrams under other names, that I didn’t know a fuckin’ thing about no council meet. Besides, I would never’ve
been such an idiot to call a wholesale conference of all the leaders at one time. Maybe if I’d been in the States, I’d’ve gotten a few guys together in small groups in an open public place where we could still have some privacy, like we used to do on the beach at Atlantic City. But that wasn’t Vito. He just hadda have a big meet, with everybody sittin’ around and bowin’ to him, like he was Maranzano’s Messiah. He even had the fuckin’ guts to tell all the council members to bring envelopes. I think he had it in mind to have himself named king, because I don’t think he would’ve settled for the title
capo tutti capi
; that wouldn’t’ve been big enough for that little round, fat bastard.”

In the weeks before Genovese’s scheduled meeting, personal agents from many of the American leaders arrived in Naples to seek Luciano’s advice. Among the arrivals was Carlo Gambino himself, who had assumed control of the Anastasia operations. With that goal reached, he now pledged his loyalty to Luciano again.

“I told Carlo to go to the meet, but not to bring no envelope. He took my advice, because as it turned out, he only had some travelin’ money with him and, he told me later, that if things had come to a showdown, he was gonna stand up and tell Vito to go to hell, that he didn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell that the council would name him top
capo
.

“A few other guys was smart enough to pass up the meet. Frank Costello got out of it by coppin’ a plea that he had so much heat on him and maybe he was bein’ tailed everywhere, so that if he went it might cause a lot of trouble. Little Meyer had a different excuse. He said he had a sore throat and laryngitis and leavin’ Florida in November would be too risky for his health.”

On November 24, 1957, about a hundred top- and middle-level underworld leaders from all over the United States — most of them Italians — gathered at the estate of an outwardly respectable Buffalo businessman named Joseph Barbara in the rural Sullivan County community of Apalachin. The parade of so many big black limousines containing so many obviously unrural gentlemen, however, aroused the suspicions of New York State Police Sergeant Edgar Cresswell. With the three state troopers he had under him, he set up roadblocks immediately around the Barbara
estate. The roadblocks were spotted as the meeting was just getting under way, and the alarm was raised.

Then, in one of the most ludicrous scenes in the history of organized crime in the United States, the leaders of the American underworld, dressed in their hand-tailored silk or imported woolen suits, went scurrying out windows and doors, crashing through the woods and underbrush in a frantic effort to escape. Many did. But Cresswell and his troopers, aided by reinforcements, rounded up sixty. It was a haul that bewildered law enforcement officials for the moment, for into their net was swept a galaxy — Genovese; Barbara; Joe Bonanno; Joe Profaci; John Scalise, the Cleveland leader; Louis Trafficante, Jr., from Florida; Joe Zerilli from Detroit; Frankie Zito from downstate Illinois (other Midwestern leaders, including Chicago’s Sam Giancana, managed to escape); Joe Ida of Philadelphia; Colorado’s James Coletti; Dallas boss James Civello, and many more. For some, the raid was an almost fatal blow, for it destroyed the cover of respectability they had labored for years to erect. One of these was John C. Montana, a Buffalo taxi operator who only the year before had been named Man of the Year in Buffalo by the Erie Club, the police department’s official social organization.