The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (26 page)

“This blueblood was no dope. He makes a remark like, ‘We’re sounding out some of the big contributors to see if they would be willing to make donations to support the Governor’s campaign.’ Frank says, ‘We ain’t never held back from our friends yet. If
Franklin Roosevelt gets the nomination, you come and see us. The door is always open.’

“All that beatin’ around the bush was makin’ me sick, so I put it right on the line. I said, ‘Let’s get somethin’ straight. Roosevelt has a guy by the name of Seabury who’s makin’ things tough for some people around the city. So let’s stop kiddin’ around. If we deliver — and you know what I mean — then you gotta deliver, and you know what that means. But I wanna see some sign of it right away.’

“That done it. We all shook hands, smiled, slapped each other on the back and the guy leaves. I turned to Frank, and before I could say anythin’ he starts to laugh. He says, ‘Charlie, you’re a good politician. It’s too bad you went to jail or I could make you governor. I think your timin’ was perfect, and we’re gonna get some results from this. But no matter how you look at it, we’re backin’ both horses in a two-horse race. How can we lose?’ ”

Then Tammany Hall split. Jimmy Hines threw his support to Roosevelt and announced that he would lead a Tammany delegation to Chicago committed to that candidacy. His rival Tammany leader, Albert C. Marinelli, announced for Al Smith and claimed that the majority of the city’s delegates were still solidly behind the former governor.

From Albany, Governor Roosevelt made a statement that was considerably more significant to Luciano and Costello than to the general public. In ringing, eloquent terms, he denounced civic crime, corruption and graft. Then, in carefully phrased terms, he said that while he applauded the efforts of Seabury and his investigation, he had reached the conclusion that the panel had not made a strong enough case against Mayor Walker, Tammany or its leaders like Hines to warrant any action.

“When that came out in the papers, Costello comes rushin’ to my apartment all excited. He says to me, ‘What did I tell you! Just like I said, Charlie, he’s so anxious to be President he can taste it. I told you he’ll sell anythin’, buy anythin’, and make any kind of deal if it’ll make him President.’ Costello was a lot more enthusiastic than me. ‘It sounds good,’ I said.”

Costello was amazed at Luciano’s lack of enthusiasm. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Now we’re sure we can’t lose this
race. No matter who wins, we come out ahead. With Seabury outa the way, everythin’ goes back to normal for us. What’s wrong with you, Charlie?”

“I don’t know, Frank. I just got a feelin’, and I don’t know how to explain it. Y’see, a guy like Al Smith, he’s a ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’ kind of guy — like the guys we grew up with. When you shake hands with him, you know you don’t need a lawyer. But Roosevelt — lemme put it this way. All them society guys we play golf with up in Connecticut and around Westchester, whadda ya feel when you’re around them, Frank? I mean, don’t you always feel that behind your back they think you’re no better’n shit? Tell me the truth.”

Costello paused, walked about the apartment before answering. When he did, he spoke slowly. “The answer is, no, I don’t feel comfortable. The answer is, yes, I hate their fuckin’ guts because they were born into somethin’ they didn’t make themselves. It was handed to ’em. So I agree with you. But lemme tell you somethin’, Charlie. The way we feel personally don’t mean a fuckin’ thing. So I go with Hines and you take Marinelli and we come out on top. That’s what counts.”

But Meyer Lansky, when Costello and Luciano discussed the decision with him, had another thought. “What happens if those two guys cancel each other out and a guy comes from nowhere and grabs the nomination as a compromise? What do we do to take care of that and see that it doesn’t happen?” Lansky did not wait for his stunned associates to answer. “It’s a matter of timing and strategy. We don’t support anybody until the very last minute when maybe our votes’ll tip the scale for the two-thirds. If we handle it that way, then we really own the odds.”

Then it was on to Chicago and the convention. Luciano, Costello and Lansky traveled with the New York City delegation and kept the leaders under constant watch and control. At the Drake Hotel, Luciano took a luxurious six-room suite for himself and his old friend, Tammany leader and Smith backer Al Marinelli; they were constant companions. In the opposite wing of the hotel, Costello took an equally luxurious suite for himself and his old friend, Tammany leader and Roosevelt supporter Jimmy Hines; they were constant companions. In between, Lansky took a suite
for himself, prepared to mediate and to entertain all the powers in the party, with an eye to the untapped hinterlands. And an old friend, Longie Zwillman, was splitting his time between floors and hotels, shepherding delegates under his control from New York’s Nassau County and from New Jersey’s northern tier.

It was like New Year’s Eve, or the eve of Prohibition, that last week in June in Chicago. There was no pretense of adhering to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Democrats were ready to start celebrating victory even before they had a candidate. Liquor was for sale openly to any delegates at stands run by the heirs of Al Capone (six weeks earlier, he had begun serving a prison term for income tax evasion). In the hospitality suites run by the outfit, liquor was free to all comers, and it was poured steadily and unstintingly all hours of the day and night. The bar was never closed and the buffet tables were constantly replenished. “We had the best whiskey in the world, any kind that any guy wanted, and we poured it like it was comin’ out of the sink in the kitchen. It didn’t cost us nothin’. Capone’s outfit — with Al away, the guys who was runnin’ it were Jake Guzik and Tony Accardo and Charlie Fischetti, Al’s real cousin — they supplied all the booze we needed free.”

Much of the booze at Lansky’s bar, and at Costello’s, gurgled down the throat of a Louisiana politician, Huey “The Kingfish” Long. But he was there not just for the hospitality. Between drinks he was sober enough to explore means of bringing new enterprises to his state, and to draw cash to his own pockets. When Long had been sufficiently primed, he was brought to a meeting in Luciano’s suite with Charlie Lucky, Costello, Lansky and Moe Dalitz from Cleveland. There the outlines of a deal were laid whereby Louisiana, and particularly the parishes around New Orleans, would be thrown open to the organization, to bring in gambling casinos for the high rollers and slot machines and other nickel-and-dime games for the average man and the poor. To run things for the outfit, Luciano selected Dandy Phil Kastel, a former partner of Arnold Rothstein and more recently a partner of Costello in the New York slots. “Phil was no youngster, but he had a lotta what you might call polish. After Rothstein was bumped off in 1928, he sorta went back and forth between me and Costello and Lansky
and Adonis. After all, we didn’t know too much about Huey Long except that he was a loudmouth who liked to drink and he seemed to control his state with an iron fist. That was good enough for me. Unless somethin’ went bad with him, we figured the city of New Orleans alone could be worth millions to us. And that’s the way it worked out after we made the deal in Chicago. Long opened up the state and we moved into every parish, with Phil Kastel runnin’ things from the Roosevelt Hotel where we put in a gamblin’ club under one of Meyer’s best guys, Seymour Weiss. By the time Long got knocked off a couple of years later, his piece of the action put about three million bucks cash in his pockets. We was practically buyin’ the guy solid gold underwear. But, like I told Lansky at the convention, for us it was pure platinum.”

The deal with Long was one of the peripheral benefits of that convention week in Chicago. The main attention was directed at the gathering of delegates at the hall in the Stockyards. “We waited until the very last second, and we had Roosevelt and Smith guys comin’ out our ears. They all knew we controlled most of the city’s delegates. Without ’em, Smith didn’t have a chance. Maybe Roosevelt would’ve won anyway, but we knew that a lot of them big boys from the important states was holdin’ back their delegates, figurin’ that if Roosevelt couldn’t even carry his own state, maybe they oughta dump him entirely and find somebody else.

“But you could smell that the convention was leanin’ toward Roosevelt and all it was gonna take was a big switch, maybe of somebody like Garner, to put him over. I’d already talked to Al Marinelli and got him to agree to go in with me whichever way was best for all of us, even if it meant switchin’ the majority of the hall over to Roosevelt. With all that was goin’ on, we knew we hadda make our move, either to go with Roosevelt or with some guy we never heard of. Frank, Meyer and I had a private meet, what they call a caucus in politics, with all the guys on our side of the line, like Curley in Boston, Pendergast from Kansas City, Huey Long and a few others like them. When Frank got the word that Roosevelt would live up to his promise to kill the Seabury investigation — I mean, like tapering off so he could save face — it was in the bag for him.”

Once that decision had been made, Al Smith had to be told.
The question was, who would tell him? Marinelli was the logical choice, but he was reluctant to break the news to his idol. Thus, it was left to Luciano, the outward Smith backer, and the decision was to present it face-to-face. “It was like the rules in my own business. As far as I was concerned, Al Smith was a top Don and in a sense, me and Frank was about to knock him off. He was entitled to get it straight to his face.”

Late that evening, Luciano made his way surreptitiously to Smith’s suite at the Drake for a private conference. “I told him we figured — no, I said we was sure — that Roosevelt was gonna win and there was no way to stop him. That meant we had no choice but to throw in with Roosevelt. Naturally, Smith tried to get me to change my mind and keep the delegates in line behind him. I said the decision had been made and there wasn’t no way to change it.

“Of course, Smith was nobody’s fool. He asked me straight out what the deal was, and I decided to tell him. I said, ‘Al, Roosevelt’s promised he’s gonna close his eyes to Seabury and keep ’em closed. You already saw what happened last spring when he made that statement. We gotta believe him after that.’

“What happened then really got to me. This big guy, this world-famous politician, this tough guy who grew up on the same streets of New York as me, he started to bawl. I mean, he was blubberin’ all over the place. I never saw a guy cry like that. He kept walkin’ around the room, holdin’ his head in his hands and all he could say was, ‘Charlie, you fellas are crazy. I would’ve murdered Seabury for you.’ But what the hell, it was too late. He knew it and I knew it. As I started to leave, Al came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He wasn’t cryin’ no more. He got it out of his system and now he was the tough old ‘Happy Warrior’ they used to call him. Then he said somethin’ that really made my blood run cold. He looked me square in the face and shook his head real sad. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘Frank Roosevelt’ll break his word to you. This is the biggest mistake you ever made in your entire life, by trustin’ him. He’ll kill you.’

“When I walked out of Smith’s suite, my knees was shakin’. My bones told me that we’d walked into a trap — that Smith was right.”

What Smith knew — and what Luciano, Costello and their friends had not sensed — was that Franklin Roosevelt was something more than a country squire, an aristocrat whose word, implied or explicit, could be counted on. He was a politician, and a wily one, a supreme opportunist who used people and events just so long as they were of value, and who refused to be used. With the adulation of the country beginning to pour over him as the Democratic presidential candidate, Roosevelt suddenly turned Judge Seabury loose. The smiling, affable governor, soon to be President, met with reporters in Albany and issued a new public statement about corruption in New York City. Ever since his early-spring refusal to authorize action, he had been under mounting public pressure from Seabury and New York City Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia. He had kept his silence until, with the nomination his, he needed the Tammany machine no longer. Indeed, the Tiger had become so notorious that it was only a weight around his neck he was more than eager to shed.

Public office is a public trust, he said, echoing the words La Guardia had used to him earlier. It was the highest of public trusts and those holding it must be above suspicion. He was, then, giving Judge Seabury the power to subpoena and question fully any officeholders and politicians against whom suspicions had been raised. If their answers were not satisfactory, then as governor he was prepared to act to remove those officials from office.

“Naturally, Roosevelt had been a prick all along, but I gotta give him credit for one thing — he was really smooth. Of course, I was sorry I didn’t tell Meyer and Frank about my hunch in Chicago, because now everythin’ was clear. But as I look back on it, he done exactly what I would’ve done in the same position, and he was no different than me. I had Masseria and Maranzano knocked off to get to the top. What I did was illegal; I broke the law. Roosevelt had us and other guys like Hines and Walker sent to the can or squashed. What he did was legal. But the pattern of it was exactly the same; we was both shitass doublecrossers, no matter how you look at it. Now, I don’t say we elected Roosevelt, but we gave him a pretty good push. I always knew that politicians was crooked; that you could buy ’em anytime you wanted and you couldn’t trust ’em around the corner. But I didn’t think it was
the same with a guy who was gonna be President. I never knew that muscle could buy its way into the White House. I never knew that a guy who was gonna be President would stick a knife in your back when you wasn’t lookin’. I never knew his word was no better than lots of racket guys’. But I guess nobody should become President of the United States on the back of a gangster.”