The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (45 page)

“She must’ve seen that I had a funny look on my face, so now she smiles and says, ‘If you’re gonna be with a Jewish girl, Charlie, then learn how to eat a real Jewish breakfast.’ Then she says, ‘My name really isn’t Billie — it’s Rebekah; so from here to Genoa, forget the Billie and call me Becky. I only let my friends call me
that.’ I didn’t leave her cabin until three o’clock the next mornin’. I wasn’t green no more — just tired.

“I don’t wanna sound like I was some kind of a lover, a Rudolph Valentino. But a funny thing happened — after a few days, them three girls started to fight over me. Now, it don’t make no difference whether I spent nine and a half years in jail or not; at that point I was pushin’ fifty and I was no rabbit. I hadda use Murray to keep ’em off me once in a while so I could get a rest. But the first time I heard them three girls screechin’ at each other in their cabin about who was gonna get the next shot, that’s when I knew I was free, free, free.”

Luciano had other reasons to feel a sense of security in his rediscovered freedom. Once out to sea, he opened the bon voyage envelopes left for him by his business associates, and counted up more than $165,000 in cash. The amount itself made little impression on him, just that a quick calculation showed it would be enough for his purpose when he arrived in Italy, especially since he had been assured of a continuing flow through Costello, Lansky and Adonis from the interests he had left in their care back in the United States.

The two weeks at sea provided Luciano, for the first time in a decade, with plenty of time to relax and contemplate the future without restrictions or constant pressures. He paid little mind to the other deportees sailing with him. “They was under guard on the deck below mine. A couple of ’em was from my outfit and one time I seen ’em. The first thing they said was that they expected me to take ’em under my wing when we got to Italy. I let ’em know right away not to expect no favors. After all, who knew what one of them crazy guys might pull and then screw me up in Italy from one end of the country to the other. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.”

So Luciano spent his time with the three girls and with Weinstein and embarked on a rigorous program of gymnastics, weight lifting and calisthenics to take off the fifteen pounds he had gained at Great Meadow and get himself back into solid physical condition. “When I arrived in Italy, every one of my suits fit like a glove, the old ones and the new ones. I was probably the best-dressed
guy that ever come over from America; I had a different suit for every day of the month and my underwear, shirts and pajamas all had the same little initials on ’em — real class. I found out later that Gay had it done; she was nuts about initials, the same as Arnold Rothstein.”

In moments of solitude, Luciano thought much about a serious problem that had been discussed with him just before his departure — Bugsy Siegel’s new venture in Las Vegas, the Flamingo Hotel and casino. “Siegel’s original estimates on how much the joint was gonna cost was way outa line. It looked like he was gonna run over by millions just to build a plush hotel and casino in the middle of a fuckin’ desert. On top of that, Joe A. had told me Siegel was absolutely crazy about Virginia Hill and there was kind of a feelin’ among the guys that Benny might be stashin’ away some of the buildin’ money without tellin’ nobody about it. And I knew Lansky was burned to a crisp at Siegel, but it was my opinion the Flamingo didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, that it went back to the time the Bug and Meyer mob broke up and Bugsy went to California. There was bad blood between ’em that never came to the surface up to that time. So I had a lot to think about. It was a touchy situation that the Unione council couldn’t settle because of Lansky and Siegel bein’ Jews and havin’ no vote. I thought about it all the way over to Italy, but I just didn’t get no idea how to take care of it.”

Then Genoa was in sight. On the eve of the docking, Luciano threw his first party in more than ten years. At his request, before sailing, Costello and Lansky had stocked the liquor and food lockers with provisions for the event. “I told ’em that I wanted to arrive in Italy in style, like I was the captain of the boat, and that the party was on me. We was lucky to arrive in one piece, because after that party there wasn’t nobody on that whole fuckin’ boat that was sober, from the guy who was steerin’ it to the fellows workin’ down in the hold. We docked at Genoa in the mornin’ with one complete hangover from stem to stern.

“The next thing I knew, the deck was swarmin’ with Italian policemen and all kinds of officials. You could hardly tell anybody without a scorecard; there was the
carabinieri
guys with their fancy uniforms and them shiny patent leather hats, lookin’ like a
bunch of Napoleons, and there was the plainclothes detectives and customs officials in uniforms. Then I spotted a half a dozen guys from what they call the Mobile Squadrone and other guys from the Guardia di Finanza [the Italian military treasury department] — and to me that meant narcotics. So the nice trip was over and I could smell in a minute that my troubles was all startin’ up again.”

In early 1946, scarcely eight months after the cease-fire in Europe, the huge harbor of Genoa, Italy, teemed with boats of every description, from Allied warships to tiny fishing craft. The arrival of the S.S.
Laura Keene
would normally have gone unnoticed; but not when it carried Charles Lucky Luciano, even though he appeared on the passenger list by the name he would officially carry henceforth — Salvatore Lucanía. The officials who swarmed over the ship at first studiously ignored him as they processed the other passengers — the fifteen Italian-American deportees, the three American girls.

Then it was Luciano’s turn. “The whole goddamn rigamarole took over two hours before they got to me. I’m standin’ there on the deck watchin’ them Italians yellin’ at everybody, spittin’ on the deck, and fightin’ over nothin’. There must’ve been twenty-five guys in and out of uniform, each one tryin’ to prove he had more authority than the other one.

“Murray Weinstein come over and took me aside. He said, ‘I hate to tell you this, Charlie, but I think we’ve got trouble.’ I noticed he said ‘we’ and I really appreciated that. He told me, ‘It seems that the Italians have orders from the Ministry of the Interior in Rome to ship you back to your hometown in Sicily.’

“I couldn’t believe it. I started to yell, ‘Do you mean to say I gotta live in Lercara Friddi for the rest of my life? What the hell’s
goin’ on here? I served my time; I’m supposed to be free. Who the hell is doin’ this to me?’ Murray just shook his head and I realized I was puttin’ him on a spot. He didn’t owe me nothin’, but to prove what a nice guy he was, he opened up with me. He told me that orders had come from the head of the Narcotics Bureau of the U.S. Treasury in Washington, from that dirty son of a bitch Asslinger [Luciano’s constant corruption of the name of Harry Anslinger] to keep me under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance.

“Then Weinstein told me, ‘Charlie, this is out of my hands. I’m only a New York cop. All these people are getting their orders from America and they say Washington has the crazy idea that you had yourself paroled to Italy so you could supervise the drug traffic from this side of the Atlantic.’ I was ready to explode, but Murray stopped me. He said, ‘Hold your water, Charlie. You have some friends here. But you have to realize that all the Italian officials are under the thumb of the American Army in Italy. They lost the war, and so what America wants, America gets. You have to face it and wait it out. They’re going to go through a lot of red tape with you; the best thing you can do is just be patient and don’t blow your top.’

“There wasn’t nothin’ I could do except to follow what he told me, practically to the letter. I was really sorry I’d hadda shake hands with Murray and say goodbye the night before because I knew we couldn’t do it in front of people. I wanted to give him five grand for doin’ nothin’, just for bein’ a nice guy. But he wouldn’t take a quarter — the same as the three girls; they wouldn’t take a penny and they couldn’t thank me enough for a wonderful trip.

“The next thing I know, they take me down to the big main cabin of the
Laura Keene
, where we had our party and which still looked like a hurricane hit it. Some guy with a whole bunch of ribbons tells me that he’s sorry about what he’s gotta do. As far as this guy was concerned — and he said he was speakin’ for everybody — he would just as soon let me go anyplace in Italy I wanted to. He tried to make me understand that it was the
Americani
who asked ’em to send me back to Lercara Friddi and it was gonna take some time to work out all the details. Then he gives it to me; if I wouldn’t mind, they’d like to take me to the pokey until everythin’
is worked out, but I shouldn’t think of it as bein’ in jail; I should think of it more as a hotel, only he was sorry I would have bars on my windows.”

If Luciano was given the impression his stay in a Genoese jail would be a matter of hours, that was soon corrected. After a day, as his patience and his temper wore to breaking, a guard told him casually that he could not expect to be released for at least five or six weeks. “It was like an absolute stranger walked into my cell and hit me over the head with a baseball bat. All some guy hadda do was sign one simple paper to transfer me over to the police in Palermo. That’s all that hadda be done. So I said to this monkey, ‘What the hell are you talkin’ about, five or six weeks? I can walk halfway around the world in that time and all we gotta do is go down to Palermo.’

“Well, this guy looks at me and he spreads his hands out and says, ‘Signor Lucanía, welcome to Italy.’

“I learned a big lesson from that guy. I realized I would always be a fish outa water as long as I thought of myself as an American in a foreign country. I hadda make myself understand that livin’ in Italy meant you couldn’t snap your fingers and get things done right away. Time didn’t mean a fuckin’ thing, at least not the way it does in New York.”

The following morning, however, Luciano’s problems suddenly disappeared — with no explanation to him. He was removed from his cell and, with two
carabinieri
in full regalia on either side, installed in a first-class compartment aboard one of the large, fast ferryboats to Palermo. Once in the Sicilian capital, he was turned over to the Sicilian
questura
(police headquarters), whose officials took a decidedly different view of the American demands than did those on the mainland.

“Signor Lucanía,” the
questura
captain told him, “here in Sicily we are more remote from Rome than our colleagues in Genoa. This gives us a feeling of independence from unnecessary political influence. To us, you are a man who is about to return to the place of his birth after an absence of many years. You are entitled to some peace. Perhaps, after a short time, we might also arrange some freedom of movement for you. In return, I pray you will
give us no cause for concern. May we have an agreement on that?” The captain extended his hand; Luciano shook it and nodded.

“I don’t know how to describe that particular moment except that there was one thing I recognized immediately — the captain and I was Sicilians first and that was the foundation of every thin’. There was nothin’ shady about this guy, because it turned out later he was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. But he thought all that red-tape crap that went on in Genoa was a joke.”

The next morning, accompanied by a Mobile lieutenant and a military police driver, Luciano was on his way to Lercara Friddi, eighty kilometers inland. As they drove through Palermo, a city he had seen briefly forty years before on his way to America, he had his first view of the ravages of war. Though the war had moved out of Sicily to the mainland over two years earlier, the city still appeared a mass of rubble, here and there a single wall of what had once been a large building loomed starkly in the emptiness, and over everything, like an acrid cloud, was the odor of charred wood and debris. Beggars were everywhere and when the car stopped at intersections they surrounded it. Luciano handed out coins from the window and then was horrified to see small boys and men fighting desperately for the almost worthless lire.

“It almost made me sick,” he said, and when the car finally left the city, he sat back with relief. But the war had come to the countryside, too. On the mountain slopes along which the car sped, there was no green; the trees were gone and the land was cratered by bombs and shells, unable yet to be cultivated. The lieutenant told Luciano that much of the population was homeless and hungry: there were few jobs and little money, and the country seemed constantly on the brink of chaos, the government in danger of collapse, besieged by a huge and militant Communist Party. The only prop was from the Americans, who provided not merely assistance but advice, orders and influence the Italians felt they had to heed. If the Americans departed, Italy would surely fall apart.

“If I live to be a thousand years old I’ll never forget that ride to Lercara Friddi. From the minute I woke up that mornin’, I saw nothin’ but horrible things — people starvin’, really starvin’; maybe more than a million people who didn’t know if they could
make it from one day to the next. And then, as we started to climb up through the hills along this narrow, bumpy road full of shell holes, I got so nervous we had to stop so I could get out and take a leak. I was scared. I don’t mean about goin’ from the Waldorf Towers to Lercara Friddi. I mean, I was scared shitless there wouldn’t be no Lercara Friddi there at all. Can you imagine? Twenty-four hours before, I hated the idea of bein’ sent back to Lercara Friddi. And now, I’m prayin’ that the town’ll still be there, with some people still alive in it.”

Even before the signpost told him he was about to arrive, Luciano seemed to know by instinct that around the next bend he would see Lercara Friddi. The driver came to a stop and pointed off to the left. The town was intact, with no sign of war damage, less than a half-mile away. The roofs of the small houses were still the same slate gray he remembered and the same gray haze covered the village just as it did in his memory of the day he left it. Then it had been his entire world. Now it seemed so small he could not imagine how it had managed to survive the war. As he stared out at it, he said, he began to feel a sense of pride and told himself, “That’s the town the Lucanías come from. No Nazi kraut could ever take over your hometown.”