Boardwalk Gangster (2 page)
Read Boardwalk Gangster Online
Authors: Tim Newark
Did Luciano use drugs himself? In later life, he admitted that as a teenager he smoked opium. “I used to hit the pipe joints in Chinatown when I was a kid, we all did,” he recalled. An unlicensed dentist gave him his first smoke. “I liked it, the stuff did funny things to my head. But I’d never let it suck me under.” He saw it more as a business opportunity.
In 1923, European government medical experts met in Paris to discuss the abuse of heroin. For them, it seemed to be largely an American problem. “If heroin is abused in America,” said a British Ministry of Health report, “let Americans who like prohibition forbid it, but why should countries where heroin is not abused be put to all the trouble for the benefit of the United States.” This narrow-minded view would be blown apart a few years later.
By the time Diamond and Luciano took their voyage to Germany, smuggling heroin and other narcotics had expanded
into an international business with enormous profits to be made. On March 17, 1930, one hundred U.S. customs agents boarded an ocean liner that had arrived from France. They had been tipped off that two thousand pounds of narcotics manufactured in Germany were on board. Shortly beforehand, a trunk-load of narcotics valued at $200,000 was seized on a New York pier after the arrival of the White Star liner
Majestic.
Later, before a grand jury, an English passenger explained that he had not recognized one of his heavy leather trunks deposited on the pier, despite it bearing his name. He left the trunk behind and customs agents became suspicious when another man claimed it.
into an international business with enormous profits to be made. On March 17, 1930, one hundred U.S. customs agents boarded an ocean liner that had arrived from France. They had been tipped off that two thousand pounds of narcotics manufactured in Germany were on board. Shortly beforehand, a trunk-load of narcotics valued at $200,000 was seized on a New York pier after the arrival of the White Star liner
Majestic.
Later, before a grand jury, an English passenger explained that he had not recognized one of his heavy leather trunks deposited on the pier, despite it bearing his name. He left the trunk behind and customs agents became suspicious when another man claimed it.
The international network stretched from America to Germany to Turkey. Major-General T. W. Russell Pasha was commandant of the Cairo police and he was very well placed to observe the flow of the narcotics market. He reported back his findings to a League of Nations committee set up to investigate the global trade. Although countries suffering from the traffic tended to “think in grammes and kilogrammes” he explained, “the unit of calculation in the central European manufacturing countries when talking of narcotics is the metric ton.”
Russell Pasha identified one illegal factory in Alsace in 1928 that had produced 4,349 kilograms of heroin—more than two and half times the legitimate requirement of the world population—and that was just one factory. Recently, his Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau had broken up a gang of Polish smugglers operating out of Vienna who sourced narcotics from Austria, Switzerland, and France. These were then passed on through ports in Italy, Greece, and Turkey to end up in the drug dens of Alexandria, Egypt, servicing the needs of an estimated five hundred thousand addicts. One of the arrested dealers was an outwardly respectable doctor who claimed he was simply “engaged in making and selling something for which there was a world-wide demand. No visions of demented, tortured victims of his poison came ever to disturb him.” The raw materials for this trade—opium—came mostly from Turkey, although factories
in Istanbul were also responsible for shipping thousands of kilograms of heroin and morphine.
in Istanbul were also responsible for shipping thousands of kilograms of heroin and morphine.
The United States established its own Federal Narcotics Control Board and Narcotics Division as a result of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914. In June 1930, these were combined to form the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), part of the U.S. treasury department. It was this agency that pointed the finger at Luciano and Diamond setting up a drug-smuggling network in Germany. They passed their information on to the FBI, who made the connection between Italian gangsters in New York and the drug business. Early on, they claimed that narcotics were arriving hidden in barrels of olive oil. Much of this came to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—the heart of the Italian immigrant community. This was the place where Charles Luciano began his criminal career as a teenage peddler of heroin.
HOW TO BECOME A GANGSTER
S
alvatore Lucania sat at the back of a classroom in Roman Catholic Public School 19. He was nine years old with thick black hair and a sunburned complexion. He couldn’t understand a word the teacher was saying. The other kids in the class were much younger than he, but they all spoke English. He knew nothing but his native Sicilian. He was embarrassed and stubbornly refused to enter into the lesson. He stared out the window at the decrepit tenement blocks of the Lower East Side. Outside on the streets of New York, he vowed to make himself understood and respected—and feared. By the time he reached his goal, he would have a brand-new name to go with his brand-new American character—Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
alvatore Lucania sat at the back of a classroom in Roman Catholic Public School 19. He was nine years old with thick black hair and a sunburned complexion. He couldn’t understand a word the teacher was saying. The other kids in the class were much younger than he, but they all spoke English. He knew nothing but his native Sicilian. He was embarrassed and stubbornly refused to enter into the lesson. He stared out the window at the decrepit tenement blocks of the Lower East Side. Outside on the streets of New York, he vowed to make himself understood and respected—and feared. By the time he reached his goal, he would have a brand-new name to go with his brand-new American character—Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
Salvatore was born in Sicily on November 11, 1897. In the spring of 1907, he left the Mediterranean island with his family to emigrate to America. Their point of entry was the Lower East Side in New York City. In just one day in May 1907, twenty thousand immigrants arrived there, breaking all previous records by
five thousand. It was a human flood of economic refugees that included Italians, Irish, Portuguese, and Jews. Salvatore Lucania and his family arrived by transatlantic steamship from Palermo on the northern coast of Sicily. In the previous year, a total of 273,000 Italian immigrants had come to America. They were just one more family added to an army of poor people looking to earn a better living.
five thousand. It was a human flood of economic refugees that included Italians, Irish, Portuguese, and Jews. Salvatore Lucania and his family arrived by transatlantic steamship from Palermo on the northern coast of Sicily. In the previous year, a total of 273,000 Italian immigrants had come to America. They were just one more family added to an army of poor people looking to earn a better living.
Salvatore’s family numbered his mother, Rosalie, and father, Antonio, older brother, Giuseppe, and his older sister, Francesca. A younger brother, Bartolo, was born later in the United States When the family finally stepped ashore and wandered through the teeming streets of southern Manhattan, jostled by thousands of other immigrants, they took a deep intake of breath. The smell of poverty was different in America. Back home in Lercara Friddi, a little village in the dusty heart of sun-blasted Sicily, it had been the reek of sulfur dug out from the mine where Antonio labored. Here it was a pungent multitude of odors: rotting fish, decaying garbage, stale alcohol—the smell of the big city. It would only get worse.
The Lower East Side was paralyzed by a series of strikes in the summer of 1907. One of these was led by Italian street cleaners. Garbage piled up on the streets outside tenement blocks. In the heat, clouds of flies buzzed around and the city’s health commissioner feared an outbreak of disease. His men poured chloride of lime and bromide solution over the rotting piles, but his biggest concern was for immigrant children. “They play freely all over them,” he said, “and rummage among them to find playthings. They smear themselves with the refuse and then eat with unwashed hands. Therein lies the real risk; the smell is only unpleasant.”
The Italian street sweepers wanted to raise their $720 a year income to $800, the same as the drivers of garbage carts, and were violently supported by their wives and friends, who threw bricks and fireworks at the police escorting strikebreakers. Later, in the summer, Teamster union members who packed meat for
big wholesalers went on strike. Jewish kosher butchers had to pick up the meat themselves, but when the prices went up, they refused to buy. No meat was bought for the Jewish Sabbath and all the Lower East Side went without, Italian butchers included. Mounted police had to guard wagons of meat driven by strikebreakers from the city abattoirs. Conflict was in the air as poor immigrants fought to get their fair share of American riches. Sometimes they turned to gangsters to help them out.
big wholesalers went on strike. Jewish kosher butchers had to pick up the meat themselves, but when the prices went up, they refused to buy. No meat was bought for the Jewish Sabbath and all the Lower East Side went without, Italian butchers included. Mounted police had to guard wagons of meat driven by strikebreakers from the city abattoirs. Conflict was in the air as poor immigrants fought to get their fair share of American riches. Sometimes they turned to gangsters to help them out.
Dopey Benny was a renowned thug hired by Italian union officials to attack strikebreakers. “I got my men together,” he later admitted to a district attorney, “divided them up into squads and saw that they were armed with pieces of gas pipe and with clubs, but this time not with pistols, and when the workmen came up from work the men I had got set on them and beat them up.” It was one of the earliest lessons Lucania learned about the way things worked in New York City.
Among the main immigrant communities of the Lower East Side, the Irish were the oldest and most senior, with many of their members in the police force. The Italians included Sicilians, Neapolitans, and Calabrians, while the Jews came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Sharing the Catholic faith, the Irish and Italians tolerated each other and looked down on the more alien-looking Jews, but each community hung tightly together and viewed other nationalities with suspicion. The Lucania family first lived in a tenement block on First Avenue, between East Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets. This was on the northern boundary of the Lower East Side in an area now called the East Village. To the south were Little Italy and Chinatown.
“Home came equipped with a fire escape for summer sleeping,” is how one Jewish immigrant remembered the cramped living conditions. “Every floor had four railroad flats. On our floor, the one toilet in the hall served the four families—two Jewish, one Russian, and one Polish. There was a yard in the
back and a house in the rear, two stories high. Here lived the poorer of the poor—in back, unable to see what went on in the tumbling, fierce activity and continuous gabble of the streets.”
back and a house in the rear, two stories high. Here lived the poorer of the poor—in back, unable to see what went on in the tumbling, fierce activity and continuous gabble of the streets.”
A typical tenement apartment from this period had just three rooms for a family to live in. Only one outside window illuminated the interior, so a second window was built into the wall of the living room to allow light to pass through into the kitchen; the interior bedroom was in complete darkness. At different stages of the day, the front room served as work space, dining room, and a second bedroom. The majority of immigrants worked in the clothing industry. The head of the family set up his sewing machine by the outside window while the rest of his family busied themselves in the gloomy, stuffy interior, finishing off dresses and suits destined for swanky shops in uptown Manhattan. Aside from working and sleeping, most life in the tenement blocks was lived out on the streets.
Antonio Lucania had been a sulfur miner in Sicily and carried on with his law-abiding but humble existence as a laborer in New York. Whenever his son Salvatore got into trouble he would beat him, but in the overcrowded tenement blocks, it was easy for boys to get into gangs and compete with each other to establish their reputation. Salvatore Lucania was no different from any of them and gravitated to the street corner and the network of kids involved in petty crime.
“There are thousands of New York boys attending organized schools for crime,” wrote one reporter in 1908. “Their operations during the day, conducted out of school hours, also provide much more than a comfortable income for the masters of these schools for pickpockets, thieves, and gamblers. The problems that beset the Principals of the schools of the Lower East Side, with its predominating un-American population, are more perplexing and multifold than in any other metropolis in the world.”
The reporter compared the situation to Charles Dickens’s tale of
Oliver Twist
with young men—teenage “Fagins”—training
teams of kids to act as thieves for them, knowing they would not face harsh punishment if caught. In the Lower East Side, many of these boys, as young as six, were involved in illegal crap shooting games, in which they tried to hustle other kids out of their money. They were also taught how to pick pockets on the rear end of trolley cars, subway trains, or ferry terminals, wherever a crowd of well-off commuters could be found. The money was brought back to their adolescent Fagins who would first reward them with sweets but then bully them if they failed to bring in enough revenue.
Oliver Twist
with young men—teenage “Fagins”—training
teams of kids to act as thieves for them, knowing they would not face harsh punishment if caught. In the Lower East Side, many of these boys, as young as six, were involved in illegal crap shooting games, in which they tried to hustle other kids out of their money. They were also taught how to pick pockets on the rear end of trolley cars, subway trains, or ferry terminals, wherever a crowd of well-off commuters could be found. The money was brought back to their adolescent Fagins who would first reward them with sweets but then bully them if they failed to bring in enough revenue.
Salvatore Lucania absorbed early lessons in crime when he ran with these child gangs. They broke into neighboring apartments and mugged people in the streets. A tough and fearless kid, Lucania organized his own protection racket, offering to shield Jewish boys on their way home from school from being attacked by other Italians or Irish. On one occasion, he offered his services to a puny-looking schoolboy. “If you wanna keep alive, Jew boy,” he said, “you gotta pay us five cents a week protection money.” The little Jew fixed him with a stare and told him—“Go fuck yourself.” The defiant kid was Meyer Lansky, who would later become one of Lucania’s leading crime associates.
As Lucania caused mayhem on the streets of his neighborhood he also skipped more school. Finally, in 1911, he was punished for his persistent truancy by being sent to a secure school in Brooklyn. Full of similar rough-minded kids like him, all he learned was how to perfect his criminal skills. When he emerged four months later, his reputation was enhanced on the streets and he never went back to school.
He was fourteen years old and got his first job as a shipping clerk for the Goodman Hat Company on Greene Street. He was paid $5 a week and this rose to $7. He must have got on well at the hat factory because he stayed there for four years, but all the time he was watching who had the real money in his community—who wore the flash clothes and drove the smartest
cars. He was observing the world of organized crime and wanted part of it.
cars. He was observing the world of organized crime and wanted part of it.
Over the previous decade, the Lower East Side underworld had been dominated by several well-known criminal characters. There was “Humpty” Jackson, whose gang worked out of East Fourteenth Street. He got his name from his physical deformity—a hunchback—and he wore a pistol in his derby hat. Then there was “Nigger Mike” Salter, who ran a bar in Chinatown and got his name from his very dark Mediterranean coloring. His gang killed “Eat-’em-up” Jack MacManus, who had been lording it over his rivals by wearing an elegant suit and overcoat and carrying a silver-headed cane. MacManus was found dead one night in Houston Street with his head crushed in by an iron bar. He had been a lieutenant to Paul Kelly, chief of the long-established Five Points Gang, who was not in fact Irish but Italian.
Many of these gangs gained their prestige from their connection with corrupt Democrat politicians from Tammany Hall who paid them handsomely on election days for delivering votes for their party. When these gangs demonstrated their power openly in 1903 by taking over sections of the Lower East Side and raiding saloons, the police moved in strongly and ever after kept them in the shadows with frequent raids on their headquarters.
A more insidious criminal organization was the Black Hand. They were an early form of the Italian Mafia and were notorious for bombings and kidnappings. At first, they had preyed largely on their own countrymen, but by 1911, as their confidence in moving among the English-speaking community increased, they widened their zone of activity to include rich Jewish businessmen. Their mode of action was to send threatening letters to their wealthy victims—when they refused to pay up, mobsters would kidnap their children or blow up their properties.
In 1911, there were seventy bombings in New York City credited to the Black Hand gangsters. Sometimes the victims fought back.
In 1911, there were seventy bombings in New York City credited to the Black Hand gangsters. Sometimes the victims fought back.
On August 14, 1911, the whole Italian community of the Lower East Side was celebrating the feast day of Saint Rocco. Four Black Hand assassins threaded their way through the crowds on East Eleventh Street to enter the grocery store belonging to the Calandro brothers—they had persistently refused their letters of blackmail and were now going to pay the price. But Sylvestro and Antonio Calandro recognized the gangsters through the shopwindow and pulled out pistols as soon they entered the store. Shots rang out and the four mobsters ran out into the street, causing panic as bullets flew everywhere. One gangster fell mortally wounded just outside the grocery store. A crowd gathered around him and called for a priest, but as soon they recognized him as a Black Hander, the mood changed. “Beware of
La Mano Nera
!” one shouted, and the crowd disappeared, leaving the man to die alone on the sidewalk. The Calandros were tried and acquitted for his murder.
La Mano Nera
!” one shouted, and the crowd disappeared, leaving the man to die alone on the sidewalk. The Calandros were tried and acquitted for his murder.
Two years later, Black Hand mobsters turned to poisoning the horses needed for delivering goods. When Jewish blacksmith Louis Blumenthal still refused to pay up, gangsters drove a car that cost them $3,400—all raised from frightened local businessmen—to his street, where they shot him dead. His murder roused all the other traders to get together and work with the police to run down the murderers. They succeeded, but they faced another major problem. “The immunity of the gangster from arrest has been due to the fear of the victims to appear against him,” said Eighth District Assemblyman Solomon Sufrin. “The only way to prevent the development of gangs in future will be found in giving more attention to the growing boy in the streets.”
One of these growing boys was Salvatore Lucania, and he keenly followed the news of all the latest gang outrages. At the age of fourteen, he acquired his first gun. As he was showing it proudly to a friend, it went off and the bullet grazed his left leg.
It gave him a scar he would bear for the rest of his life—the only time he would ever be shot. When his father found the gun, Antonio pointed it at his son and said he should shoot him for bringing disgrace on their family.
It gave him a scar he would bear for the rest of his life—the only time he would ever be shot. When his father found the gun, Antonio pointed it at his son and said he should shoot him for bringing disgrace on their family.
“So I stopped coming home, when he was around,” Lucania later recalled. “I’d sleep in empty apartments in the neighborhood, or in pool halls. I’d only go home in the daytime, to get a hot meal from my mother. But I stayed away from my old man as much as I could.”
His friends out on the street were his family, and it was them—not his brothers or his parents—who would help him get on in the world. When he got some money, he shared a furnished flat on East Fourteenth Street with two other men, one of them another wannabe gangster called Joe Biondo.
Working as a delivery boy for the Jewish hatmaker Goodman helped shield Lucania’s criminal activities, but all the time he was building up his name as a gang leader with a following of violent kids who would do anything for money. Lucania and his mates would steal old-fashioned pocket watches and gold chains from wealthier Italian immigrants. He said he averaged a haul of three items a day. Early on, he was aware of the market in illicit drugs—especially heroin and cocaine—and started running errands for a local drug dealer. One day he delivered a vial of heroin to a prostitute in a bar who turned out to be a police informer, and he got caught. On June 27, 1916, at the age of eighteen, Salvatore Lucania was sentenced to eight months in prison at New Hampton Farms Reformatory.
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