The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (46 page)

“I could really hear them words inside of me and all of a sudden I just couldn’t wait to get there. I told the driver to step on it. I didn’t care if the whole goddamn place had a total population of eighteen or nobody never heard of me. I just wanted to get home.”

As the police car made an abrupt turn into the main piazza of Lercara Friddi, Luciano was stunned. Several hundred people were massed and the square was festooned with banners, flags and streamers. On one side was a small decorated platform, and on it were four serious, mustachioed musicians who immediately and enthusiastically broke into a discordant version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” When the car stopped, the people, dressed in their best clothes, began waving miniature American flags and shouting cheers of welcome.

Giovanni Tinorello, now perhaps the town’s oldest citizen, remembers clearly the day in 1946 when the man he still calls “Meester Sharlie” came home. It was, he said, perhaps the most important day in the town’s history. “We were told in advance
when to expect the arrival of this most famous son of Lercara Friddi, this Looky Luciano. It was like a holiday. All of the stores and the school and everything closed up so that we could gather in the piazza to give him a proper reception. Of course, we knew that he was a man who had done maybe some bad things, but for us he was not a gangster, like the men from that place they call Chicago where people kill on the streets. No, when Signor Looky left here, he had nothing; but he came back as a rich and famous personage —
Il Milionario
.

“I remember it like it was yesterday. When the Fiat of the
questura
turned into the piazza, the band began to play the wonderful American music. Then our mayor came to the car and opened the door and he shook hands with Meester Sharlie. Our mayor — he was Aurelio D’Accurso, a farmer of wheat — we used to call him
Il Stupido
, that fool was wearing a red sash across his chest. Now, I ask you, does one wear a red sash to welcome a famous
milionario
from America? Everyone knows the red sash is reserved for occasions of state. This was a time for prosperity to begin, for was not a
milionario
from America to become once more a part of Lercara Friddi?”

The old man may have been incensed at the red sash, but Luciano was moved by it, by the honor done to him. Then he noticed a long table in front of the fountain where he had played as a child. Mayor D’Accurso ceremoniously led him to it, to an open book that rested on it, and asked him to sign his name in the Official Register, signifying that he was once more a legal resident of Lercara Friddi. From his pocket the mayor drew a treasured American fountain pen and handed it to Luciano. The crowd surged forward to watch the signing. The name Luciano inscribed was the one he had been given at birth — Salvatore Lucanía. The cheers were even louder than at first. The famous American was home at last.

Then Luciano was shown where he would live — the town hotel, on one side of the square. “I can’t understand to this day why a little village like Lercara Friddi ever needed a hotel. I don’t remember as a kid that we had one, or that anybody came through who stayed long enough to use one. This two-story, broken-down, weatherbeaten joint was gonna be my Sicilian version of the Waldorf
Towers. While I was lookin’ at it, a guy steps outa the crowd and comes over to shake hands with me. He introduces himself as my cousin, Paolo Rotolo. He was the son of the uncle on my mother’s side who helped my father with the money when we went to America. His father had died and left him the properties, which included a half interest in that fleabag. He was such a nice guy that we became friends right away. He seemed to understand that I was a little disappointed in where I was gonna live, but I told him not to apologize for it, that in many respects I was goddamn glad to be there.

“So he took me inside, and they had fixed up half of the second floor as an apartment for me. It would’ve fit into a corner of my place at the Waldorf Towers. But I tried not to show how I felt, and I smiled and thanked him. And then he brought in a few other relatives who was still livin’ in Lercara Friddi, on my father’s side, all Lucanías. One of ’em was a cousin who was younger than me, Calcedonia Lucanía, and as soon as he met me he called me Uncle, as a mark of respect, because I was older. We became very close almost from the beginnin’.

“They finally left me alone to take a little rest. I unpacked my suitcases and put some things away. Then I noticed somethin’ really cute: the bathroom had an old-fashioned iron tub, and there was a note on the wall in Italian which said ‘American Shower’ — there was a rubber tube with a flower sprinkler as a head, and it was hangin’ on the wall above the faucets. Well, how can you feel blue when you see a thing like that? You realize how hard these people are tryin’ to make you feel like an American who didn’t come to a country of barbarians.

“I took a nap for about an hour, and then a lotta noise from outside woke me up. I went over to the window. It was about eight o’clock, dark, and they was shootin’ firecrackers down below in the piazza. They had the whole place lit up with coal-oil lamps, and them tables that was empty when I arrived was now loaded with food and bottles of wine. The whole town was there, and it seemed like everybody was lookin’ up at my window like they was waitin’ for me. As soon as they saw me, they started to yell, ‘Sharlie! Sharlie!’ and they was all motionin’ for me to hurry down.”

For days, the women of the town had been hoarding their
meager rations and cooking sauces, grinding grain and making pastas of all shapes and sizes. Tables and chairs were set up all around the square and the people of Lercara Friddi sat down to eat, drink homemade red wine, and honor their distinguished native son. Giovanni Tinorello remembered, “I had the best dinner of my life that night. Not all the women in Lercara Friddi were such good cooks, but I had an opportunity to go from one table to another to taste the best things from each. I remember that Meester Sharlie had mostly spaghetti with the sauce marinara that was made by la Signora Rotola; she made the finest pasta anywhere on the island of Sicily.”

In the days that followed, Luciano became the town’s bountiful patron. He distributed money and sent off to Palermo for clothing, food and other supplies to meet the needs of the people. When his wardrobe trunks finally arrived, he gave his relatives a dozen suits, whether the men were his size or not, for their wives assured him it would be no trouble for them to do any necessary alterations.

Luciano’s cousin, Paolo Rotolo, lived around the corner from the hotel in a three-story building. He and his wife lived on the top floor, another family leased the second, and the ground floor was empty. Luciano discovered that he and Rotolo shared the same passion for movies, with Rotolo invariably throwing thousands of questions about Hollywood at him, assuming that since he came from America, he must know every star. It was then that Luciano made a gesture that insured him a permanent place in his cousin’s — and the town’s — heart.

“I got an idea I knew the whole fuckin’ town would love. I give ’em a movie theater. It cost me a fishcake, because everybody in the town pitched in to make over the bottom floor of Paolo’s house into one big room that would seat a couple hundred people. Calcedonia and Paolo got a truck and went into Palermo with the money I give ’em and bought a whole bunch of secondhand chairs. Then I made a connection with a guy up there to buy a thirty-five millimeter projection machine from one of the movie theaters that had been hit during the war. And in about three weeks, the town of Lercara Friddi seen its first movies in about ten years.
These was pictures we found in a fireproof warehouse where they used to keep films in the old days and all these cans was saved from the bombings.

“The funniest thing, most of the pictures was them gangster movies that Warner Brothers made, with Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney. As a matter of fact, the first picture we showed,
Little Caesar
, made me such a big man like you’d never believe. The people was comin’ up to me and practically kissin’ my hand — not only because I brought them the pictures but because they wanted to show me that I was a bigger shot than Little Caesar. They made me feel like Salvatore Maranzano.”

But Lercara Friddi was not where Luciano intended to spend his life. It was out of the current of his world, and besides, he was continually embarrassed by the constant adulation heaped upon him. He persuaded the chief of the local
questura
to drive him to Palermo for a talk with the captain in charge there. The captain was sympathetic and agreeable to a proposed change of residence. “It is ridiculous to assume that you can be watched any more closely in Lercara Friddi than in Palermo,” he told Luciano. “I, for one, will place no surveillance on you, but I would suggest that from time to time we might take coffee together and you can report to me informally the nature of your daily activities.”

So Luciano moved to Palermo, into the Grande Albergo Sole, one of the best hotels. Though not New York, Palermo was still the capital city of Sicily, where contacts could be made and plans for the future expedited. But Palermo, too, was a city decimated by war. Survival was the only law, and any means to achieve it seemed permissible, if not with the overt assistance of authorities, at least with their knowledge.

“All day long, I was approached by dozens of guys with deals phonier than Vito Genovese’s money machine. Them guys in Palermo was workin’ petty larceny worse than anything we ever done in New York in the twenties. And here I am, twenty-five years later, and these Italian bastards’re tryin’ to do it to me — tryin’ to con me out of a hundred here, two hundred there. And lemme tell you, in 1946 a single American dollar in Italy was unbelievable what it could buy.”

Luciano sought from his friend, the captain of the Mobile,
relief from the unceasing horde of con men and petitioners who seemed to line up waiting for him at his hotel. “I asked the captain what to do to get rid of all them jokers. We was sittin’ in the bar of the Sole, facin’ the street, and the captain starts to laugh. He says, ‘The first thing a man like you has to do is move out of this hotel.’ Then he points across the street — there’s this very elegant municipal building with a lotta wide steps leadin’ up to it, and behind an iron railin’ there was a plaza in front of the building filled with statues. The captain asks me if I notice anything unusual about the statues. I looked and looked and finally I said, ‘Yeah, them statues are naked.’ He smiled and told me that was the whole point. It seemed that for years they called the place the ‘Plaza of Shame’ because of them naked statues. A lotta religious women in Palermo thought there was somethin’ wrong about that kind of art and they wouldn’t even let their daughters walk noplace near it. So the plaza turned into a hangout for pickpockets, bandits, whores and pimps. By livin’ in a hotel overlookin’ that place, I was just drawin’ all the people that’d been badgerin’ me.

“That’s when I decided I had enough of Palermo, and I put the wheels in motion to get to Rome. I knew I couldn’t do nothin’ too soon about the move to Havana; I hadda stick it out in Italy for a while to make things look good. Rome was where the action was, where the big politicians hung out and where I hadda get my contacts established. But I decided, while I was waitin’, not to waste the time and maybe do a little business.

“The first thing I done was get in touch with a cousin of mine, a guy they called
Il Barone
. His real name was Riccardo Barone, and he was related to me somewhere on my mother’s side. He was a real hotshot in the black market and I had word that he was reliable. He went to work for me right away, settin’ things up, carryin’ dough and all that stuff. Also, he was in the Mafia.

“There wasn’t nothin’ strange about that, and it wasn’t nothin’ like what J. Edgar Hoover and all them guys was always screamin’ about in the States. Half the people I met in Sicily was in the Mafia, and by half the people, I mean half the cops, too. Because in Sicily, it goes like this: the Mafia is first, then your own family, then your business, and then the Mafia again. In a way, you might
say it’s like a private club that a lotta people belong to, all over Sicily. So Riccardo was very helpful to me and I didn’t have to made no open moves that would get me in trouble with the police. Besides, before I left America I was supplied with a lotta the right names, not only in Sicily but in Naples and Rome. Riccardo started to make my contacts for me.”

The opportunities were nearly limitless in postwar Italy, a nation beleaguered by shortages of almost everything. “That’s when I remembered Lansky’s Law — the law of supply and demand. It was kinda like the good old days when bootleggin’ was the name of the game, when we could supply somethin’ that everybody was demandin’. In 1946, Italy was the same thing all over again, except now it was whiskey, medicine, cigarettes — you name it, and that’s what was goin’ on in the black market all over the country. Everybody was in it, the legit guys, the ex-Fascists, the Communists, every fuckin’ son of a bitch was tryin’ to make some money and he didn’t give a goddamn how he got it. It was just a question of survival. And that goes for the priests in the churches, too. There was plenty of them padres who learned to look the other way in order to keep the people in their parishes alive.

“From the time I got to Italy I went heavy into the black market. That means I had just gotten out of the can and I was mixed up in crime again. But that was entirely different. A big part of the black market involved gettin’ the real necessities of life for the people in Italy outa the American PX’s and commissaries. Then, pretty soon, I had a fleet of old fishin’ boats comin’ and goin’ from Tangier, which was a free port. A dozen nylons could buy a half-interest in a bank in them days, and the same thing went for a carton of American cigarettes. When I finally got to Rome, I found out that for a carton a girl would live with you for a week, do your laundry, sleep with you, and then go out and sell that carton — one cigarette at a time — and come up with a bundle that would keep her alive for a couple weeks more.