The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (34 page)

Dewey moved quickly to repair the damage. He called Mildred Balitzer, wife of Peter Balitzer, partner of her husband in his string of whorehouses. She was another admitted narcotics addict, or, rather, a former one; she, too, had overcome the habit thanks to Dewey.

Did she know Luciano? She did indeed, she testified. When Betillo moved in on her and her husband, he had told them he was working for Charlie Lucky. And later, in Betillo’s company, she had met Luciano in a restaurant and been introduced to him
with the words, “I want you to meet the boss.” She had turned to Betillo and asked, “Is Lucky really behind this?” Betillo had assured her he was.

All during her involvement with the syndicate, she said, there had been trouble with Betillo and other defendants; they were constantly shaking the Balitzers down so that they were on the verge of financial disaster even though the business was booming. She decided to go to the top for help, and at a racetrack in Miami she had approached Luciano and told him that Betillo was bleeding her husband and forcing him out of business. She testified that Luciano told her, “I can’t do anything for him. You know how the racket is.”

“Yeah, I remembered that. I was only tellin’ her I couldn’t do nothin’ for them because I didn’t have no part of it. How the hell was I supposed to know what Betillo had been tellin’ ’em? And then she got up there on the stand and made it sound like I was runnin’ the whole damn thing. All Dewey did was take the truth and just twist it around to make it come out like he wanted it to, not like it really was.”

On May 29, 1936, at 6:40 in the evening, after three weeks of testimony and about sixty witnesses, Thomas E. Dewey rested the state’s case against Luciano and his codefendants.

Outside the courtroom, Luciano was all smiles. He told reporters, “I certainly expect to be acquitted. I don’t know any of the people who took the stand and said they knew me or talked to me or overheard me in conversations. I never met any of them. I never was engaged in this racket at all. I never in my life met any of the codefendants, except Betillo, before this trial.”

The outward calm was sham. Inwardly, Luciano was very worried indeed, because his lawyers were worried. “Polakoff was tellin’ me that we hadda start thinkin’ about an appeal, and that it was gonna cost a fortune and would take a lot of time. I told him if we couldn’t lick the case right there in court, I didn’t give a damn how much it cost, he should do whatever was necessary to beat it.”

Luciano’s defense was simple. His witnesses were professional gamblers and bookmakers who testified that, as far as they knew, his sole business was professional gambling, that he bet hundreds
of dollars a day with them on the races. All said that they had often been to his apartment at the Towers and had never seen any of his codefendants.

Would Luciano himself take the stand? On the evening of June 2, with all the other witnesses gone, that was the major unanswered question in the courtroom. “We had a meet that night and both Polakoff and Levy started warnin’ me not to go on the stand. I didn’t have to do it, they said, and it probably wouldn’t help because by that time the case was stacked against me. But I told both of them that I was goin’ up there. I said it was crazy; them broads was lyin’ in their teeth and the only way to show it was for me to go up there and tell the truth. Levy and Polakoff, and especially Adams, warned me about Dewey. I told ’em I could handle that little prick. They told me I hadn’t seen him really operate, that he was only waitin’ for a crack at me. I said I was sure I could handle myself. What a mistake that was.”

Luciano was the final witness for the defense, taking the stand on the morning of June 3. Under the gentle questioning of George Levy, his testimony did not take long. He denied knowing any of his codefendants, except Betillo, before the trial opened; he denied knowing any of the prosecution’s witnesses; and he categorically denied all the charges against him.

Briefly, guided by Levy, he went through his life. With almost his first statement, he lied, claiming that he had been born on East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. (“I was a wise guy, and Levy and Polakoff wasn’t fast enough to stop it.”) He quickly brushed over his arrest for narcotics at eighteen, said that within a few years of his release, he had gone to work for the operator of a dice game, had soon graduated to running his own game, and then branched out to become a leading racetrack handicapper. He talked about his arrest in Hot Springs, declaring the only reason he had fought extradition was because he had heard that Dewey intended to put him on trial within forty-eight hours after his return to New York and he wanted to give his lawyers enough time to prepare an adequate defense.

At the end of direct examination, Levy asked him whether there was any truth to the charges against him. In a loud and belligerent voice, Luciano said, “I’ve never had anything to do
with prostitution, I’ve never gotten a single dollar from a prostitute or from the prostitution racket.”

“Your witness,” Levy said to Dewey and turned back to the defense table.

“Sure, I lied up there on the stand. I lied when I said I never met some of the other guys who was on trial or any of them girls who testified against me. What else could I do? I knew it was their word against mine, and if I ever admitted that I knew any of ’em, nobody would even hear nothin’ else I said. The truth of the matter is in them days, and even in all the years after, people come up to me all day long to ask for somethin’, to get a handout, things like that. Sure maybe I’d be standin’ in front of Ducore’s drugstore and a couple of them broads might come by and wave at me and say, ‘Hello, Lucky,’ or ‘Hi, Charlie,’ and I’d wave back. I wouldn’t let none of them come within ten feet of me as far as goin’ to bed was concerned. My girls come from Polly Adler or they was girls I knew from shows or from society. Period.

“After George Levy questioned me, I had the feelin’ that I done pretty well. Then I looked over and watched that little bastard Dewey get out of his chair and walk towards me. At that second I was more scared than I ever had been in my whole life. I had a hunch that he was about to skin me alive. He walked over real slow, and he had a look on his face like I was a piece of raw meat and he’d been goin’ hungry for a month. He kept comin’ at me, takin’ his time — and that’s when I began to regret not listenin’ to my lawyers about not takin’ the stand. But it was too late.”

In the stillness of the expectant courtroom, Dewey played the silence to the point of torture. Finally, he asked his first questions. They were mild and seemingly innocuous. Was Lucania the only name the defendant was known by? Wasn’t he also known as Charles Luciano, and Lucky Luciano, as Charles Ross, as Charles Lane, and other names? How many others? The defendant didn’t remember? Well, let’s go on.

The prosecutor thumbed through some papers. Had Luciano recently been convicted of carrying a gun, a concealed weapon, while in Miami, Florida, say within the last five or six years?

Sure, Luciano said, he had been picked up for that. But there wasn’t any law in Miami against carrying a gun.

Well, Dewey asked, holding out a Florida newspaper clipping, what about this article that quoted him as saying he was carrying the gun because he was going out hunting in the Everglades.

“There’s a lot of things in the newspapers that ain’t true.”

Even Dewey smiled briefly at that. But he quickly turned to the attack, thrust by thrust, destroying any semblance of respectability that Luciano had attempted to present. Year by year, Dewey went through Luciano’s life since 1920, drawing from him the not-so-startling information that he had been a bootlegger during Prohibition as well as a professional gambler. At any time during those sixteen or seventeen years, Dewey asked, did Luciano have any legitimate occupation? Luciano said no, not that he could remember. Then, some minutes later, as Dewey was taking another line, Luciano interrupted. He had just remembered that around 1929 he had owned “a piece of a restaurant” at Broadway and Fifty-second Street.

Dewey stared at him for a moment and then shot out sarcastically, “Oh, the only legitimate business you’ve had in eighteen years you forgot?” Luciano shrugged.

“Well, let’s go on,” Dewey said. Had Luciano ever been married? No, Luciano said. Had Luciano ever been arrested? Yes, he admitted reluctantly. Had Luciano ever told an arresting officer that he was married? “I might’ve said so. I don’t remember.”

On the stand that day, Luciano had declared he was born in New York. Did he ever tell arresting officers that he had been born in Italy? “I might’ve said so. I don’t remember.”

Had Luciano ever told officers arresting him that he was employed as a chauffeur? As a salesman? As a fruit dealer? “I might’ve said so. I don’t remember.”

Had he ever lied to the police then, Dewey demanded. Luciano tried to hedge. Dewey pounced, forcing him to stumble, then to admit that he had, indeed, lied, and lied frequently to arresting officers. But, he insisted, those lies were unimportant.

What, Dewey snapped, would he call his response to an arrest for traffic violations in July 1928? He had told the police when they found two pistols, shotguns and forty-five rounds of ammunition
in his car that he had been up in the country shooting pheasants. Dewey was incredulous: “Shooting pheasants in July?”

That was exactly what he had been doing, Luciano maintained, and the answer was the truth. (Even twenty-five years later, Luciano insisted that answer, at least, had been no lie. “Some guys and I had been invited up to Connecticut to what they called a ‘shoot’ and that’s what the shotguns was for. They wasn’t sawed off; they was regular ones for huntin’ and they cost over three hundred bucks apiece. The funny part of it was, when it come to shootin’ them birds, I missed by a mile. What made the whole thing look so bad when it come out in court was that the cops found two revolvers in the car. That was standard equipment in them days. I never went nowhere without some hardware. Things was very dangerous in 1928.”)

Suddenly, Dewey switched his line. “How many times in your life have you been taken for a ride?”

Spectators leaned forward in anticipation. Luciano appeared to be unmoved. (“I knew he’d get to that, so it didn’t surprise me.”) “Just once,” Luciano replied, then added he couldn’t remember exactly when, but he thought it was six or seven years before.

“Do you remember,” Dewey asked, “that you were found on Staten Island by a police officer, that you had been badly beaten and cut up, and had tape over your eyes and mouth, and that you told him you wouldn’t give him any information, that you would take care of this in your own way?”

“I gave him all the information I could.”

Did he, Dewey pressed further, tell the grand jury, as he had told this court in direct examination, that he had been taken for a ride by men who had demanded ten thousand dollars ransom and who had released him when he promised to pay it, though he had never paid it?

No, Luciano said, he had not told that story to the grand jury.

“So you lied about that, too.”

“Yes.”

Dewey paused, letting that answer hang in the silent courtroom, then turned to another area. Had Luciano ever been arrested for selling narcotics? Yes, when he was eighteen. Had he been picked up again, in 1923? Had he given federal agents at
that time information that led to the seizure of a trunkful of narcotics? Yes. “Didn’t this make you a stool pigeon?” Dewey asked.

“No. I was picked up myself, so I told them what I knew.”

Then Dewey read off a list of names: “Do you know personally Louis Buchalter, who is known as Lepke?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Jacob Shapiro, who is known as Jake ‘Gurrah’ Shapiro?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know personally Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know Joe Masseria, who was known as ‘Joe the Boss,’ before he was killed in Coney Island?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Owney Madden?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Al Capone?”

“No.” Dewey let that pass for the moment.

“Do you know Ciro Terranova?”

“No.”

Dewey turned back to the prosecution table and picked up some papers, returned to Luciano and read them to him. They were Luciano’s telephone records from the Waldorf Towers and the Barbizon Plaza, showing repeated calls to the unlisted number of Terranova in Pelham, New York, and to Capone in Chicago.

And then, in moments that caused the sweat to flow from Luciano, that made him wriggle uncomfortably on the witness stand, Luciano began to hear Dewey read off the record of repeated calls at all hours of the day and night from his apartment to Celano’s Restaurant on the Lower East Side, the headquarters, Dewey charged, of the vice ring’s sub-leaders. How did Luciano explain them, Dewey demanded.

The spaghetti was good, Luciano said, and he went there a couple of times a month to eat, often calling ahead. Friends hung out there, and he used to call them for a talk. But he had not made all the calls Dewey was reciting; he couldn’t possibly have
done so, for during much of the time he was out on his usual rounds of the city. Somebody else must have gotten in and used his phone. Dewey and the court stared at him with disbelief.

For four hours Dewey hammered away. By that evening, when Luciano finally stepped down, “I felt like I’d been through a washing machine, and I really looked like it. I went to the washroom, and my shirt was all wrinkled and I seemed to be perspirin’ from head to foot. That night, when I read the
News
and
Mirror
, they said it was a bad day for Charlie Lucky. Them writers didn’t have no idea how bad it really was. I never felt so tired, like I could sleep for a week. I couldn’t wait to get outa the courthouse. I practically ran.