Boardwalk Gangster (26 page)
Read Boardwalk Gangster Online
Authors: Tim Newark
Luciano’s letter thanked Henry Rubino for sending him letters and photographs and for “what you did at the cemetery.” The police suspected this was code for some criminal service. Luciano then asked Rubino to give his best regards to Tony B., Pat R., and Tommy. These were Tony Bender, Pat and Tommy Eboli—who also used the name Ryan—and all lieutenants for Vito Genovese, but in the case of Bender, he had changed sides to help Luciano, Lansky, Costello, and Gambino nail his boss. Rubino later claimed that the service he did for Luciano was to lay a wreath on his mother’s grave—a highly plausible explanation—but the FBN weren’t satisfied with that.
The FBN linked the Rubinos to three narcotics-smuggling fugitives called Vincent Mauro, Frank Caruso, and Salvatore
Maneri. They had jumped bail in New York to spend their money in various Caribbean islands, before finally ending up in Barcelona, Spain. In the meantime, the Rubinos had returned to Naples in November 1961. After spending a week with Luciano, the Miami couple received a phone call from Spain and hurried to Barcelona, where they supposedly met the three narcotics smugglers. After a few days in Spain, the Rubinos flew back to Naples and carried on their socializing with Luciano and Rizzo.
Maneri. They had jumped bail in New York to spend their money in various Caribbean islands, before finally ending up in Barcelona, Spain. In the meantime, the Rubinos had returned to Naples in November 1961. After spending a week with Luciano, the Miami couple received a phone call from Spain and hurried to Barcelona, where they supposedly met the three narcotics smugglers. After a few days in Spain, the Rubinos flew back to Naples and carried on their socializing with Luciano and Rizzo.
At Christmas, the two couples went to Taormina, the resort on the east coast of Sicily near Mount Etna. Photographs show Luciano posing on the beach in shorts with both women in twopiece swimwear. After their holiday, Luciano returned to Naples and the Rubinos went back to Spain. They were accompanied by a Sicilian called Francesco Scimone and met the three drug-smuggling fugitives at the Palace Hotel in Madrid. Trailing the Rubinos back and forth across the Mediterranean, the FBN and their Italian police associates were convinced this indicated that some smuggling ring was being formed with Luciano at the center of it. Caruso and Mauro were arrested in Barcelona and Maneri in Majorca.
On the morning of January 26, the Italian police picked up Luciano and questioned him about this sequence of events. Luciano shrugged and smiled wearily, saying there was no conspiracy behind it. It was all merely social, purely coincidence, and his biggest concern was his meeting with Martin Gosch later that day about his movie script. Yes, Gosch was flying in from Spain, but that’s where he lived. To prove his innocence, he invited an Italian officer, Cesare Resta, to accompany him to the airport.
On the afternoon of January 26, 1962, Luciano drove his Alfa Romeo car to Capodichino Airport, four miles northeast from the center of Naples. It would be the last meeting he would ever make.
DEATH IN NAPLES
T
he aircraft landed at Capodichino Airport in Naples about 4:00 P.M. on January 26, 1962. Luciano was waiting in the terminal for the connecting flight from Rome. He’d had an irritating morning answering pointless questions from the Italian police and had one of them next to him when Martin Gosch stepped off the aircraft and made his way toward the pair. Once Luciano got the script off Gosch, he could finish with the whole damned mess of the movie. He was wearing smartly pressed gray flannel slacks with a navy blue blazer. He introduced Gosch to the police officer and they both walked off toward his car. A few steps outside the terminal, Luciano stumbled, putting an arm around Gosch.
he aircraft landed at Capodichino Airport in Naples about 4:00 P.M. on January 26, 1962. Luciano was waiting in the terminal for the connecting flight from Rome. He’d had an irritating morning answering pointless questions from the Italian police and had one of them next to him when Martin Gosch stepped off the aircraft and made his way toward the pair. Once Luciano got the script off Gosch, he could finish with the whole damned mess of the movie. He was wearing smartly pressed gray flannel slacks with a navy blue blazer. He introduced Gosch to the police officer and they both walked off toward his car. A few steps outside the terminal, Luciano stumbled, putting an arm around Gosch.
“Charlie, what’s wrong with you?” said the producer.
Luciano said nothing and slumped to the floor.
An airport doctor was called and felt his pulse. He shook his head.
“This man is dead.”
A green canvas sheet was placed over the body. It was 5:25 P.M. One of the most famous gangsters in the world had suddenly passed away. He was sixty-four years old.
The news flashed around the world. The next day, the London
Times
said “Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the immigrant boy who became undisputed boss of a multi-million dollar New York vice racket, collapsed and died.” The article said Luciano “owned a fashionable apartment in Naples and sold electrical medical appliances” but that Senator Kefauver claimed that he “still directed the American underworld by remote control from Italy.”
Times
said “Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the immigrant boy who became undisputed boss of a multi-million dollar New York vice racket, collapsed and died.” The article said Luciano “owned a fashionable apartment in Naples and sold electrical medical appliances” but that Senator Kefauver claimed that he “still directed the American underworld by remote control from Italy.”
Lucky’s death made the front page of the
New York Times
. He was still big news in his home city. They led on the story that Luciano was about to be arrested for his part in an international narcotics ring. “We were ready to move against him with the Italian authorities,” said Henry Giordano, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau in Washington. The ring was alleged to have smuggled heroin worth up to $150,000,000 into the country over the previous ten years. Three smugglers had already been taken down in Spain, and Luciano was to be next—the legend lived on.
New York Times
. He was still big news in his home city. They led on the story that Luciano was about to be arrested for his part in an international narcotics ring. “We were ready to move against him with the Italian authorities,” said Henry Giordano, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau in Washington. The ring was alleged to have smuggled heroin worth up to $150,000,000 into the country over the previous ten years. Three smugglers had already been taken down in Spain, and Luciano was to be next—the legend lived on.
An FBI memorandum sent to J. Edgar Hoover on March 21, 1962, revealed the truth of the matter. It said that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was “still following leads in an attempt to prove Luciano’s involvement in international narcotics but all indications are that the case will be closed with no startling developments.”
As soon as they heard of Luciano’s death, his younger brother, Bartolo Lucania, and two nephews, Salvatore and Gino, children of his sister, flew to Naples to arrange the funeral. On January 29, violent scuffles marred the funeral service as crowds of reporters tried to take pictures of the mourners. It started during the requiem mass held at the Holy Trinity Church, where photographers clambered over a statue above the altar to take shots of the service from behind the crucifix.
Some three hundred people were present, including Bart
Lucania, Luciano’s girlfriend, Adriana Rizzo, and some minor Mob associates, including the Fischetti brothers, Joe “Cock-Eyed John” Raimondo, Nick di Marzo, and Joe di Giorgio. Joe Adonis was the most senior mobster to attend the funeral, although he turned up late just before the service ended. He had ordered a large floral tribute in the style of the old mobster funerals, inscribed with the farewell “So long, Pal.” Lansky also, reputedly, sent flowers, though he had nothing to say in public about the death of his good friend; neither did Costello.
Lucania, Luciano’s girlfriend, Adriana Rizzo, and some minor Mob associates, including the Fischetti brothers, Joe “Cock-Eyed John” Raimondo, Nick di Marzo, and Joe di Giorgio. Joe Adonis was the most senior mobster to attend the funeral, although he turned up late just before the service ended. He had ordered a large floral tribute in the style of the old mobster funerals, inscribed with the farewell “So long, Pal.” Lansky also, reputedly, sent flowers, though he had nothing to say in public about the death of his good friend; neither did Costello.
The fact that the majority of the crowd was Italian police, government agents, and journalists underlined the extent to which Luciano had become a creature of law enforcement agencies rather than being a genuine criminal mastermind at the heart of the Cosa Nostra. Among the U.S. agents present were two officers of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, three agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence from the U.S. Navy headquarters in Naples—Luciano’s old wartime allies—and officers from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, but no one, apparently, from the FBI. Adriana wore a long black veil and sobbed dramatically throughout the service into a white silk handkerchief. As the photographers surged toward the mourners after the church service, some of the mobsters grew angry and swiped at them. “Somebody is going to get hurt,” growled one of them.
“A lensman was punched, knocked down and kicked outside the church,” said a reporter for the New York
Daily News,
“and his camera was smashed by Luciano henchmen.” He had been trying to take a photograph of Adriana. “Two of Adriana’s girl friends kicked and slapped the photographer as he lay on the ground.”
Daily News,
“and his camera was smashed by Luciano henchmen.” He had been trying to take a photograph of Adriana. “Two of Adriana’s girl friends kicked and slapped the photographer as he lay on the ground.”
Eight plumed black horses pulled a silver and polished black wooden funeral carriage carrying Luciano’s coffin to a chapel at the English Cemetery in Poggio Reale on the outskirts of Naples. The U.S. consulate said it could stay there for two or three days while a decision was made on whether Luciano’s body could be
returned to the United States. Bartolo Lucania made the request, saying that his brother had wished to be buried alongside his mother and father in the family tomb he had bought in New York.
returned to the United States. Bartolo Lucania made the request, saying that his brother had wished to be buried alongside his mother and father in the family tomb he had bought in New York.
Before Bartolo left Naples, he quickly sold Luciano’s penthouse apartment for less than half its value. This meant throwing out his grieving girlfriend. Only after the intervention of Pat Eboli did Bartolo relent and give her $3,000, plus allowing her to take her clothes and personal possessions. Some land belonging to Luciano was also sold for a reduced price, while the only bank account that could be located contained the sum of $16,000. Only the Mob knew where the rest of Luciano’s money was, and they quietly absorbed that for themselves.
Two weeks after Luciano had dropped dead, his body was returned to America. On February 7, a Pan American World Airways cargo plane delivered the body to Idlewild Airport in Queens, New York, where it was met by his two brothers, Bartolo and Joseph, and a large contingent of FBN agents and city police. The large wooden crate containing the casket was placed in a hearse and driven eight miles to St. John’s Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. It was accompanied by one car containing the mourners and two dozen containing police and reporters. There was no ceremony at the cemetery as the coffin was placed in the family vault.
Luciano had bought the vault, adorned with bronze doors and Greek columns, for $25,000 in 1935—the year before he went to prison. His mother, father, an aunt, and uncle were buried there, with space for sixteen more family members. A small stained-glass window at the rear of the vault bore a representation of a bearded saint leaning on a shepherd’s staff. One of the reporters asked Bartolo who the saint was in the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not acquainted with saints.”
The family tomb of Vito Genovese stood only a hundred feet away from Luciano’s vault. Seven years later he would be placed in there.
An obituary published in the
New York Herald Tribune
quoted an interview with Luciano from a couple of years earlier. If he had his life to lead again, would he do it all the same?
New York Herald Tribune
quoted an interview with Luciano from a couple of years earlier. If he had his life to lead again, would he do it all the same?
“I would do the same things all over again,” he said, “only I’d do it legal. I learned too late that you need just as good a brain to make a crooked million as an honest million. These days you apply for a license to steal from the public.
“If I had my time again I’d make sure I got that license first.”
It did not take long before rumors of murder and conspiracy arose around Luciano’s death. One newspaper story claimed that he had been assassinated at the airport by underworld rivals who gave him potassium cyanide. This seems to have derived from witnesses seeing the dying mobster being given a tablet. An FBI report clarified what they thought happened at the airport.
“A few minutes after meeting Gosch in the Naples airport,” said the FBI, “Luciano collapsed and Gosch, who knew that Luciano suffered from a bad heart, frantically searched Luciano’s pockets for pills that he knew Luciano took. He did find the pill box, removed one of the pills and placed it in Luciano’s mouth. This activity was observed by a number of the people who had witnessed Luciano’s collapse and is believed to be the source of the story to the effect that Luciano was poisoned.”
A Madrid newspaper quoted Gosch as saying that Luciano was poisoned. “He appeared as though he were drugged,” Gosch told the Spanish reporter. Arriving in New York, Gosch then announced that elements from the underworld had asked for the film on Luciano not to be made, but that he planned to go ahead anyway. The FBI were unimpressed by Gosch’s comments, saying, “It would appear from this that Gosch might be obtaining a good deal of free publicity for his proposed film.”
A later FBI report alleged that Gosch met Pat Eboli on the day after Luciano died to talk to him about the film script. Eboli wanted to know what Luciano had said between his heart attack and his death. Gosch reassured him that he had said nothing. Eboli then asked for the script, but Gosch refused to give it to him.
The most sensational tale accused Luciano of working with federal government agencies to disrupt narcotics smuggling from the Middle East to the United States. The story was based on an interview with Bill Mancuso, a former bodyguard for Luciano, which appeared in an Italian newspaper. It claimed also that Martin Gosch was, in fact, an FBI agent pretending to be a film producer. Mancuso told the Italian journalist that Luciano had long worked for the U.S. government, citing his help to them during the Allied invasion of Sicily in World War II. These claims were undercut somewhat by the article alternating the FBI with the FBN, as though there were no difference between the two organizations. The article ended by saying that Luciano was killed by narcotics gangsters who substituted poison for his heart medicine.
The FBI was scathing in criticisms of these reports. “There is, of course, no substance whatsoever to these claims,” said a memorandum addressed to Hoover. “The Italian press will publish stories which have absolutely no basis on fact but which are drawn out by reporters in connection with sensational-type stories.”
In the years following his death, newspaper stories linked Luciano to all kinds of crimes. In 1965, the Italian minister of the interior declared war on pinball tables and slot machines. They were leading the nation’s youth astray and pushing law-abiding citizens into debt. The importation of slot machines was blamed on exiled American gangsters. A parish priest from near Naples pointed the finger at Lucky Luciano as the man responsible for the business in his city. It was certainly possible, as Frank Costello was the king of slot machines back in America and could have supplied them to Luciano.
At the beginning of the 1960s, gang warfare had piled up bodies on the streets of Palermo. One car bomb had killed seven policemen. When one of these gang leaders, Rosario Mancino, was finally put on trial in 1967, he was said to be a friend of Lucky Luciano. It was his death, it was claimed, that had been the catalyst behind this struggle for power among Sicilian mafiosi. As happened during his life, the power and influence ascribed to Luciano was way beyond his capacity as a largely semiretired American mobster in Naples.
An FBI memorandum of September 1965 put Luciano’s role in a more proper perspective. “Over the years,” it said, “there have been many allegations that Luciano continued to be the ‘Mafia boss’ of the United States, directing criminal activities from his place in exile. Information developed during the past several years indicates that these allegations generally have been overstatements.”
There was, however, “some indication that an association continued between Luciano and some of this country’s top hoodlums who, from time to time, visited Luciano in Italy.” That was about the strength of it.
Martin Gosch stayed true to the promise he made the mobster and waited exactly ten years after Luciano’s death to publish his memoirs. Gosch hired former
New York Times
writer Richard Hammer to help write the book based on his notes from conversations with Luciano. But Gosch died shortly afterward from a heart attack in 1973, closing down the last direct link between Luciano and the writing project. The resulting book,
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,
caused a tremendous publicity stir—not least because its publishers, Little, Brown & Co., falsely declared it was based on long-lost recordings of the gangster.
New York Times
writer Richard Hammer to help write the book based on his notes from conversations with Luciano. But Gosch died shortly afterward from a heart attack in 1973, closing down the last direct link between Luciano and the writing project. The resulting book,
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,
caused a tremendous publicity stir—not least because its publishers, Little, Brown & Co., falsely declared it was based on long-lost recordings of the gangster.
When the
Washington Post
carried a full-page advertisement on September 25, 1974, heralding the forthcoming publication
of
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,
the FBI were intrigued, especially as the ad showed a pyramid of politicians and government department heads all linked to Luciano at the top of the picture—and that included Hoover. As the book was being serialized in
Penthouse
magazine before publication, FBI agents got hold of two installments and subjected it to an exhaustive analysis. Their conclusion was that “the book is a complete fraud.” The editors at
Penthouse
claimed the book was based on a year of tapes made by Gosch listening to the reminiscences of Luciano.
Washington Post
carried a full-page advertisement on September 25, 1974, heralding the forthcoming publication
of
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,
the FBI were intrigued, especially as the ad showed a pyramid of politicians and government department heads all linked to Luciano at the top of the picture—and that included Hoover. As the book was being serialized in
Penthouse
magazine before publication, FBI agents got hold of two installments and subjected it to an exhaustive analysis. Their conclusion was that “the book is a complete fraud.” The editors at
Penthouse
claimed the book was based on a year of tapes made by Gosch listening to the reminiscences of Luciano.
“Obviously, if such a manuscript was valid,” said the FBI reviewer, “it would be of considerable value to law enforcement, but there are many instances of internal evidence to indicate that Gosch probably resurrected a few random quotes gathered during interviews with Luciano and then put them together with an old movie script of his and some recent research to produce a book that capitalized upon the current public interest in the subject of organized crime.”
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