The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (4 page)

Scanlon did his business in drugs right out in the open, unafraid of the police, since he was paying them for protection. Lucania “started to wonder how I could get to him to maybe take me on, so I could make a hunk of real money.” The opportunity came one evening when Lucania was eighteen. Coming home from work at Goodman’s, tired and dirty, he saw Scanlon’s car parked in front of his house. He ran up the four flights to the flat, grabbed a dishrag from the kitchen, raced back down and started briskly polishing the pusher’s car. In a few minutes, Scanlon appeared, watched until the job was done, and then tossed Salvatore Lucania a quarter.

Lucania handed the quarter back. “Here, you keep it. I just wanna talk to you for a minute.” He told Scanlon he wanted to work for him. Scanlon asked what kind of a job he had; Lucania told him he was a delivery boy for a hat factory, that he carried packages all over town. “If I can deliver hats, then I can deliver other things,” he said. Scanlon said maybe he’d give him a tryout the following week.

For the next months, Lucania combined his work for Goodman with his work for Scanlon, secreting Scanlon’s narcotics in the hatbands of the ladies’ bonnets he was delivering. Each morning he would set out carrying a dozen or so hatboxes to Goodman’s customers, stopping off here and there to make a delivery to one of Scanlon’s customers. There were no set wages for the work, just a handful of bills, a ten or a twenty, adding up in some weeks to as much as a hundred dollars; it would have taken him more than four months to earn that much from Goodman.

It looked like easy work for easy money. But it didn’t last. Afterwards, he was convinced that one of his friends, jealous of his new affluence, had tipped off the cops. He was spotted on a number of occasions going in and out of a poolroom on East Fourteenth
Street, a hangout for addicts and pushers, and police kept close watch on him. Early in June of 1916, he was arrested outside that poolroom; in a hatband in one of Goodman’s boxes was found a phial containing a half-dram of heroin.

On June 26, 1916, Salvatore Lucania pleaded guilty in New York Court of Special Sessions to unlawful possession of narcotics. In view of his previous committal to truant school, and despite a plea on his behalf by Max Goodman and a near-hysterical outburst by Rosalie Lucania, he was sentenced to one year at Hampton Farms Penitentiary. His father did not come to court.

After six months he was paroled, and he would not be convicted of another crime for twenty years, and during those years he would become the most notorious and powerful leader of organized crime in the United States.

It was Christmas when the gates of Hampton Farms opened for him. The Salvatore was gone as his first name; from then on, he would be Charles, or Charlie, Lucania.

This time, he had been sent away for something he had done, and this time there was a cache of funds, however small, waiting for him. “But it wasn’t worth it.” Not that he was going to follow the advice of Goodman or the orders of his father to get a job and become an honest, hardworking citizen. It was just that “I made up my mind I was never gonna get caught again. I’d kill myself before they’d ever put me away again.”

For his family, his arrest and conviction had been almost more than could be borne, a shame that saddened and bowed them. His father, who saw all his suspicions of the boy confirmed, felt that his son’s hopes for the future were smashed. His mother, who like so many mothers saw the prodigal as her favorite, mourned and
forgave. But while he was in prison, they had treated him as if he were dead; they did not come to visit despite his frequent written pleas.

It was Max Goodman who appeared at the prison to see the young convict, not once but several times. Goodman himself had come under suspicion as a result of Lucania’s arrest with narcotics in the hatbands. Though he had cleared himself, it had been a terrifying experience for a man who was no longer young and resilient. “Why?” Goodman asked during a visit. “Why did you do this to me? Is this the thanks I get for being nice to you, for treating you like a son?”

Luciano remembered later that he started to cry as Goodman talked to him and that rarely in his life would he ever cry again. He had a deep affection for the man who had helped him, had revealed to him a world he had not before known even existed, who visited him in prison while his own family abandoned him, had been almost a surrogate father to him. At last, he said, “I wanted to make money.”

“Money isn’t the whole world,” Goodman said.

“If you don’t have it, it is.”

“If you needed money, you should have come to me.”

“If I came to you, you wouldn’t’ve given it to me. I needed a new suit.”

“I wear a new suit,” Goodman said. “Why shouldn’t you wear a new suit? The only thing is, people have to work for new suits.” Then Goodman said, “Sal . . .”

“Don’t call me Sal. From now on, my name’s Charlie.” In his mind, Sal was an effeminate name. During his first days at Hampton Farms, he had been called Sallie; it was, he was sure, a girl’s name and it had led other convicts to attempt to assault him homosexually, attacks he had resisted violently. Charlie was more masculine and, henceforth, it would be his name.

“All right,” Goodman said, “now we’ll call you Charlie. I’m going to try to get you out of here. Only you must make me a promise that you will do everything they tell you to do here, and do it the best you can.”

Then Goodman began a campaign, by letter and personal visits, to persuade parole authorities to release Charlie Lucania, promising
to hire him back at his old job. It took six months for the campaign to succeed.

During those six months, Lucania lived by his word to Goodman and was a model prisoner. (Through the years, it would be one of his boasts that he had never broken his word to anyone, that his word was as good as a written contract, even better, since nothing involving him could ever be put down on paper.) “I scrubbed floors, I scrubbed walls, I cleaned out latrines, I scoured pots and pans. They had guards watchin’ all of us young guys and we got the worst kind of work. They stood over us with rubber hoses and there was hardly a day when I didn’t get a few solid whacks across the back. I had a bucket, some rags and a heavy brush and some kind of cleanin’ liquid with lye in it. I hadda get down on my hands and knees and scrub the floors. When I’d get up at the end of the day, my knees’d be raw and bleedin’ and they never got a chance to heal. Sometimes I’d make knee-pads out of a few rags, but when the guards seen what I was doin’, they’d beat the shit outa me. Every single night I was too tired to eat, and even when I was starved, the food was so terrible that it was almost impossible to swallow.

“The worst part of them six months for me was that I didn’t have no privacy, that I could never be alone. I hated the idea that there was no place where you could take a crap without fifty million guys watchin’ you. How can a human bein’ wipe his ass with all them guys watchin’?”

What came to Luciano’s mind as he talked about the past was a movie. An inveterate moviegoer all his life, he constantly saw himself in films, drew allusions to his own life from them. “I seen a movie called
Oliver Twist
. It was written by some English guy by the name of Charles Dickens, and the young kid in that picture reminded me of myself, because they used to knock this little bastard around in the picture the way they did to me at Hampton Farms.”

Then, into the snow, the slush, the mud of Christmas, 1916, Charlie Lucania walked out a conditionally free man. With nowhere else to go, with parole to restrict his movements, he returned to his family’s home, to what at best was a tenuous situation.

He had been thin and wiry when he entered prison; he was
emaciated when he left, and his mother cried over him, fed him enormous portions of pasta. “It seemed like everybody in my family, even my brothers and sisters, come charging at me to ‘reform,’ to go back to work for Goodman. I knew they was ashamed of me in front of all their Sicilian friends, that everybody called me ‘the bad one.’ And you might think I committed murder because I changed my name to Charlie. My mother started to tell me about everybody in my family with the name Salvatore and what a great name this was and how I had no right to make it sound like somethin’ dirty. In fact, she never gave up calling me Sal, and my father, when I told him, he just spit on the floor and walked out.”

He was nineteen then, no longer a child but a man, and he had established his direction. “I began to realize that what I’d promised Goodman would make me nothin’ but a crumb, workin’ and slavin’ for a few bucks, like all the other crumbs. I made up my mind that if I hadda wind up a crumb, I’d rather be dead.”

But there was no need to be what he saw as a crumb. He was in demand, a more prestigious leader of a street gang with a term in prison behind him. He had gone to school there, learning the technique of bigger and more successful jobs, had begun to practice them and so was attracting the attention of the older gangsters in Little Italy, who began to approach him with offers to join their gangs. Occasionally he went with them on jobs, but the relationship was never close and he never considered himself a member of another group. He saw himself as a leader, not a follower taking orders from someone else.

And the suspicions of his father that Charlie Lucania had picked up the old threads grew, and the old man looked for evidence. It did not take him long to find it. Early in 1917, behind some socks in Charlie’s drawer, he discovered an expensive gold belt buckle. Antonio Lucania said nothing to his son, merely went around the neighborhood the next morning and, about four blocks away, found a jewelry store that had been robbed; among the missing items, the gold belt buckle.

That night, the old man flung the buckle in Charlie’s face and demanded, “Why did you have to steal a gold belt buckle? Is this the most important thing in your life?”

“I wanted it, so I took it,” Charlie answered.

His father removed a heavy metal belt from his trousers and hit Charlie across the face with it, cutting his cheek, from which the blood dripped down his face. “I felt like hittin’ him back then, but I didn’t. It don’t matter what happens, a Sicilian son never hits his old man.” Charlie tried to stem the flow of blood with a kitchen towel as his father stood over him and roared, “You are not my son! You are only a thief and you cannot live in my house any more! Get out!”

Just at that moment, Rosalie Lucania came into the room. Charlie looked at her and said, “So long, Mom, I’m leavin’.”

Instantly, she understood and started to pummel Antonio with her fists, screaming, “No, no, you cannot do this. I will not let you throw my Sallie out into the street.” But the old man was adamant.

That night, Charlie Lucania was on his own. He moved into a cold-water flat in the West Twenties with a young friend from his gang, Frankie Coppola. They paid three dollars a week for a room with a sink, a one-burner gas plate, a brass double bed, a small round table, and for their clothes, some nails driven into one wall and six shelves bracketed into another. “In the beginning, it was like a palace to us, because it was our joint, the first time we lived away from home. The biggest thing for us was that now we had a place to bring broads and we didn’t have to do those quickies in the whorehouses. Frankie and I would toss a coin to see who could use the place for the night while the other guy went for a walk; sometimes we didn’t stay out late enough and we’d walk in on each other.”

That sense of freedom lasted only a few weeks. The girls Lucania brought to the room began to talk about marriage and “I wasn’t the kind of a guy who was lookin’ for romance. There were too many things I wanted to do. The thing that made me realize that I still was goin’ nowhere happened one night when our gang done a job down at the Battery. One of the guys, Willie Cioppi, had cased a warehouse near the fish market where a whole shipload of canned anchovies had just come in. Italians love anchovies and these was the best quality. We set the whole thing up; we had a wholesaler who was willin’ to fence the stuff at half price, which would have meant over two grand for us. The only thing, Willie
didn’t case the job too good; he didn’t know they had two night watchmen on weekends instead of one. Frankie Coppola got caught. The rest of us got away. It was Frankie’s first offense, so he got off with probation on condition that he live with his folks and go back to school. That’s what he did; he learned how to be a cabinetmaker and he stayed straight.”

Now Lucania was completely on his own, and it was not easy. “Things was lousy; I had a good gang of guys but the jobs was scarce and a lotta times we had no money.” He had, however, a place to turn for some help. His ties with his family had not been totally broken. He returned home at regular intervals for visits and free meals, though when his father was around, the atmosphere was always charged. And his mother would visit him in his room about once a week, bringing with her a jar of spaghetti sauce. She told him, “You don’t know how to eat anybody’s spaghetti sauce but mine.” It, along with a big pot to cook spaghetti in, was a gift most appreciated, but a gift that presented problems. The single-burner gas plate required the deposit of a dime in a meter before it would work, and sometimes dimes were hard to come by. And then, with only a single burner, when the sauce was hot, the spaghetti was cold, and when the spaghetti was hot, the sauce was cold. “Once in a while, the woman who had the apartment next to my room, Mrs. Petracci, she owned the building, would let me use her stove. But when she was out or I didn’t have no dimes, I went hungry.”

Along with the spaghetti sauce, his mother came loaded with lectures and advice, particularly about the necessity of returning to school for an education that would prepare him to hold a decent job. “What are they gonna teach me in high school?” was his unvarying response. Well, if he wouldn’t go back to school, then at least he ought to go back to work for Goodman.