The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (64 page)

Participating in this notice:

The Manna uncles and aunts, the Carrera family.

The official ban on northern travel by Luciano was lifted so that he might attend the funeral. He walked directly behind the hearse drawn by eight plumed horses, on a dreary, rainy day. Igea’s body, with a gold wedding band on her finger, rested in its coffin on a huge bed of roses, her favorite flower. Across her chest was a silk sash embroidered with the name “Charlie.”

Long after everyone else had left the cemetery, Luciano stood at the graveside, his glasses misted by rain, his face pale and strained as the gravediggers covered the coffin.

Then he returned to Naples. Igea was gone and in the penthouse there were only the housekeeper, Lydia, and the two small dogs, who darted here and there searching for their mistress. Igea’s clothing and personal possessions were given to her sister,
with Luciano retaining only a mountain of photographs and memories.

“Everybody I knew come around to try to get me outa the house. Chinky Vitaliti was back in Taormina by then and he wanted to come and stay with me for a while, and all the guys tried to make me understand that life was for the livin’, as they put it. I was so damn lonely that nothin’ seemed to matter, and even my friends, really good friends, couldn’t help me. It was my insides that was empty.”

For weeks, Luciano mourned, wearing the traditional black tie and black ribbon in his lapel. He was morose, uncommunicative. Eleven weeks after Igea’s death, on December 13, he was suddenly forced back into the world.

The Italian Court of Appeals was ready to hand down a decision based on the investigations of Prosecutor Franciscis. With Giovanni Passeggio at his side, Luciano arrived at the court promptly at two in the afternoon, dressed in a gray suit, overcoat and felt hat. The proceedings lasted less than an hour, and when they were over, Luciano was a free man. The decision, read by Judge Zanotti, restored to him all the privileges that had been taken away four years before; he had his driver’s license again and his identification papers, even a passport. Luciano, the court declared, “has nothing to do with murder, narcotics or illegal rackets.” It was a complete victory and a complete vindication. And, perhaps, it revealed how little the court really knew, how little the investigation had really uncovered.

By the turn of the year, into 1959, Luciano’s season of outward mourning was at an end. Events in the world outside continually intruded and he could no longer ignore them.

The plot against Vito Genovese was reaching its climax in the United States — that would come in the spring, with the trial, conviction and sentence of the mob leader. But as long as Genovese was free, and, indeed, even after the prison gates closed behind him, his ambitions remained unchecked. His forces were encroaching ever more openly into the Brooklyn domain of Joe Bonanno and bloody warfare appeared inevitable. Other members of the council appealed to Luciano to intervene and help restore peace.

There was trouble in Cuba. Fidel Castro and his revolution had swept out of the Sierra Maestra mountain stronghold, routed the government forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista, and seized control of the country. Batista had been forced to scurry for his life, fleeing to sanctuary in Florida, and the resident American gamblers had hurried after him. Lansky’s casino empire in Havana collapsed as Castro’s puritanical regime shuttered the city and the country.

As the disaster approached, Lansky had begun a search for alternatives and replacements. He found them. In the Bahamas, gambling was legal and officials could be corrupted to provide easy entrée for the underworld. And in Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel’s dream of a new Eldorado was coming true. Americans, infected by gambling fever, were pouring into the city in ever-increasing numbers to try their luck at the tables. Everywhere new hotel-casinos were springing up. No matter the names on the real estate deeds and state licenses, the vast majority were controlled by the Mob, often in partnership with legitimate interests. For even
honest businessmen in Nevada seemed to feel that only the underworld could operate a casino at a profit — a profit that was enormous even after the racketeers had skimmed twenty per cent or more off the top of the casino’s income for their own private, nontaxable use. Under Lansky’s supervision, and with the approval from Italy of Luciano, the underworld poured millions into Las Vegas and took out even more.

But even as Cuba and his gambling empire there were falling, Lansky did not abandon his old friend Batista. He helped the Cuban dictator, he told Luciano, transfer more than three hundred million dollars into Swiss numbered accounts, in the names of Batista and his family, particularly his two sons. Under Lansky’s guidance, some of Batista’s fortune would wind up as investments in gambling enterprises in Nassau, Beirut, London and later even in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where Tito seemed to find no objection to wooing currency with American casino-operating expertise.

All these matters required Luciano’s personal attention and so he was forced to emerge from his shell. His personal life began to take on a familiar pattern. He was dining again at the California, the Zi Teresa and other old favorites, was spending time with his friends, and was beginning to seek out girls. His only personal problem seemed to be a sacroiliac condition which had started some years before, and now appeared to be worse.

One unusually warm day in January 1959, Luciano was having an open-air lunch on the patio of the Santa Lucia Restaurant in Naples with some friends when a young, plump Neapolitan shop-girl named Adriana Rizzo strolled by. “I knew Adriana for a couple years. She worked in a store where they sold trusses and medical belts and them things; when I first had trouble with my back, the doc sent me to this store around the corner from the Santa Lucia Hotel, and that’s where I met her. This particular day, my back was botherin’ me again. Adriana waltzed through with her bouncy little walk and as she passed my table, she said hello to me. I reached out and kind of gave her a little pinch on the fanny. I didn’t mean nothin’ nasty by it; with Italian girls, it’s kind of a compliment. Adriana stopped and she said she’d heard about Igea and how sorry she was, and one thing led to
another. I went back to the shop with her to get a new belt support for my back, and that’s the way it started.

“Adriana had a little trainin’ as a nurse and after a few times takin’ her out to dinner and seein’ her, I suggested that maybe she oughta move into my apartment and look after me. By then we wasn’t exactly strangers. The only problem was, she was half-engaged to some guy. I talked her outa that, and she became the new lady in my apartment. She knew how I felt about Igea, but she seemed nice and sincere and we was comfortable together, so it worked out just fine. And this time, there was no kickback from her family. Her father was a taxi driver and they was real Neapolitans; they understood there was no point in talkin’ about marriage. As long as she was happy with the situation, they didn’t interfere — and I helped ’em out once in a while. And Adriana got along with Lydia, so everythin’ settled down to peace and quiet.”

Luciano may have had peace and quiet at home, but there was little of that outside, particularly in the United States. Internecine warfare was erupting in New Jersey, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn. Lansky was shuttling back and forth around the Caribbean, supervising the growing gambling operations there, and worrying intensely about the results of the Castro takeover in Cuba. “It seemed like all over the world we was makin’ a fortune in spite of the fact that everythin’ was gettin’ fucked up.”

It was time, he thought, to take some kind of hand himself. So despite his personal animosity, he drove secretly to Milan for a meeting with Joe Adonis. “When I tried to discuss the New York situation with Adonis, it was like talkin’ to the wall. He didn’t give a shit about what was goin’ on noplace except where he was concerned in Milano. As he put it, he had his socked away and he also had a nice thing goin’ with import and export as a legitimate front for his old business of hot jewelry. He was into that again up to his neck. There must’ve been somethin’ about him from childhood; I don’t know what it was, but he liked flashy things. He always thought of himself as an elegant guy, which I guess is why he was attracted to sparklin’ jewelry. The thing that bothered me the most about my meet with him was his not askin’
me if there was anythin’ I needed or wanted — I was right, he was a no-good selfish cocksucker.”

The meeting with Adonis, then, resulted in nothing concrete. Before he could do anything more, he himself was stricken. Adriana may have been good for his back, but the sexual demands this twenty-three-year-old girl made on a sixty-two-year-old man were draining. A month after she moved into the apartment, Luciano had a heart attack. Though it was a mild one, Dr. Matteoli called in a cardiologist, Dr. Di Martine.

“Now I had two doctors hangin’ on my neck, warnin’ me to slow down, that I was pushin’ too hard. Dr. Di Martine said if I kept on goin’ like I’d been doin’, that I could have a real bad attack and maybe even drop dead. That scared the shit out of me. Adriana made me stay in bed; she wouldn’t even let me go to the bathroom. After a couple of weeks, when I was feelin’ better, I made a grab for her a couple times and she gimme such a whack over the head that it raised a lump. That’s when I knew I was lucky to have found her.”

Within a few weeks, though, Luciano was well enough to tour the restaurants and nightclubs again and to watch the trotters at Agnano racetrack — and watch the horses he bet on invariably finish out of the money, costing him two or three thousand dollars an evening. He was feeling well enough, too, to spend time at his office desk, trying to do something to rescue the rapidly collapsing furniture business. And he began to travel up to San Sebastian al Vesuvio in his spare time, to help Father Scarpato with the construction of the clinic, at times even taking with him prospective investors and suppliers to watch the building rise — the foundation had been laid by 1959 and the shell of the building had been erected.

Luciano was, in fact, acting as though nothing had happened. He even resumed his lovemaking with Adriana. It was all too much. Late in the spring, he was stricken with a massive coronary occlusion.

“When you’re laid up in a hospital for a month, you really have a chance to do a lot of thinkin’ about yourself. The first thing I realized was that Dr. Di Martine was right when he told me the little attack I had before had been a warning. I would be a goddamn
fool not to understand that the second attack, which almost killed me, was somethin’ I couldn’t fuck around with. The first couple days I was in the hospital, they didn’t have to tell me I was a case of touch-and-go. I knew it and, let me tell you, I was really scared of dyin’. I began to understand that I wasn’t no kid no more. I was sixty-two years old, and who needs all the trouble in the States that the doctor claimed was really the cause of the attack? I said to him one day in the hospital, ‘I thought you believed that what I done with Adriana was what made me keel over.’ But he explained that the pressures had been buildin’ up and takin’ such a big toll on my heart so that finally one long session in bed with Adriana was what pulled the trigger. In a nice way he was tellin’ me I could live a long time if I would retire, get rid of my problems, and spend the rest of my life just enjoyin’ the fact that I was alive.

“I thought it over for a long time and then I decided to send for Chinky Vitaliti to consult with him about my decision. Dr. Di Martine wouldn’t let me have no visitors until I told him it was a meetin’ that would relieve me of all the pressures. So he let Chinky come to see me in the hospital. I told Chinky I was gonna take myself out of the Unione and his eyes almost popped. I explained that it was really necessary if I wanted to save my life. So I asked him to get word back to New York that if Frank Costello could retire, why not Charlie Luciano?

“I told Chinky to tell ’em all I wanted was for ’em to keep on sendin’ my dough, like it was a pension, and they shouldn’t ask me for nothin’ else. I just wanted to step down from bein’ the chairman of the board, which is the way I liked to think of it, and turn it over to whoever the council would select. In my own mind, I figured it’d wind up in Carlo Gambino’s lap. One or two of the younger guys might want to fight him for it, but it was my opinion, and I told it to Chinky, that Carlo would be able to take care of himself. I said to Chinky, ‘Just tell ’em to send me my dough and leave me alone.’ I said he should make sure Lansky got the message first, because he was handlin’ the money.”

But Luciano’s associates in the United States did not believe the message, could not believe that he really meant it. “The dough kept comin’, but so did guys with questions that needed
answers, with messages and information. They just didn’t let me alone. To be honest about it, it made me feel good. After all, when a hundred guys say to you that you can’t retire, that they need you, well, what the hell, I have to admit I wasn’t strong enough to stick to my decision.