The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (5 page)

Goodman, in fact, was persistent in his efforts to win Charlie Lucania back to honest labor. He sought him out and sought out his family. Early in 1917, it seemed that the campaign had succeeded. Goodman came to the Lucania home and told Antonio and Rosalie that Charlie had finally promised to return to work the next week. But Antonio Lucania was convinced that if Charlie had indeed made such a promise to Goodman, he had no intention
of living up to it. That evening, Charlie appeared at the flat for the first time in several weeks, and he entered wearing a new suit, new shoes, a stylish hat and even a silk shirt. As the family gathered around the dinner table to eat Charlie’s favorite dish, lasagna filled with meat, Antonio began to cross-examine his son about his new clothes. Charlie said that he had bought them out of his pay, that he was again working for Goodman, had been doing so for some weeks.

The lie, coming so soon after Goodman’s visit, was final confirmation to Antonio that he had been right in throwing his son out of the house. He called Charlie a liar, almost triumphantly told of Goodman’s visit. Rosalie started to sob. Charlie turned on her and said, “Oh, Ma, for chrissake, shut up.”

“In my house, I had committed a mortal sin; I used Christ’s name like a swear-word. But it was an even worse sin to tell your mother to shut up. My father got up very slow, with his eyes half-closed, then he leaned over the table and slapped me square across the face. Then, like in one movement, he picked up his whole plate of lasagna and threw it at me. This was a brand-new suit I had on, and the meat and the sauce and the cheese, the whole works, practically covered me from head to foot. Nobody said nothin’. My father just stood there and stared down at me, my mother was bawling, and my sisters and brothers was lookin’ somewhere else. So, I got up and walked right out of the house. I didn’t go back home for a long time, not for a lotta months, and then only during the daytime when my father was workin’. And the olive-oil stains never come outa that suit.”

By late in 1917, living by himself in his cold-water room, Charlie Lucania’s goals seemed as elusive through crime as they would
have been through honest work for Goodman. It was not easy to be a successful thief. Often the jobs he and his gang tried to pull, a robbery or a heist, yielded only a couple of dollars. The real profits went to the fence. And his face was becoming known, in his old neighborhood and his new one, and when he appeared almost anywhere, he was carefully watched.

But he kept telling himself that he had “plans,” that he would make it, that it was only a matter of time. And indeed, the lines toward the future he believed was his were being set. His friend Frank Castiglia was out of jail, and they renewed their contact, became a close team. And soon they were joined by two younger tough kids from Lucania’s old Lower East Side neighborhood, two Jewish kids with matching ambitions. Maier Suchowljansky had been born in 1902 in Grodno, Russia (then in the Polish Pale of Settlement), and had arrived in New York’s ghetto in 1911, when he was nine, with his parents, a sister and a younger brother, Jake. In school, with the Americanized name of Meyer Lansky, he gulped knowledge insatiably and proved something of a prodigy in mathematics. Out in the streets, he just as insatiably drank in the knowledge available there, and though small for his age (even as a grown man, he was only a few inches over five feet), he was belligerent enough and good enough with his fists, with rocks, with any weapon to earn a reputation and to be avidly sought as an ally in any fight. With money needed at home, Lansky quit school after the eighth grade and went to work as an apprentice tool-and-die maker; he proved just as adept with his hands as with his mind; later, his friends would consider him a genius with a car, equaled only by his friend Charlie Lucania. Like Lucania, his aim was higher than skilled labor and he had few scruples to deter him.

Everywhere Lansky went, he was followed by a shadow, a boy four years his junior. Benjamin Siegel was a native American, his family having arrived on the Lower East Side from Kiev a few years before his birth. Even as a boy, he was tall and handsome, moving with a fluid grace and displaying an openness that beguiled victims and friends. “Everybody,” Lucania would say, “loved Benny.” And despite his youth, he won their grudging respect. Though Benny Siegel was not as smart as Lansky, he was even more fearless, willing to do anything, to take any chance to
prove that he had more guts than anybody else. He was the first to throw a punch in a fight, the first into a store or loft in a robbery. While some of the others were still a little leery about carrying a gun, Benny Siegel was rarely without one. He was, his friends would say, nuts, and so they called him “Bugsy” (though in later years, as he acquired a civilized veneer, no one called him that to his face, except for friends from the old days like Lansky and Lucania; he was Ben or Benny to everyone else).

“I first saw Lansky and Siegel long before I left home, when I used to grab pennies from the little Jewish kids for protection. I remember when I made Lansky the usual proposition. I was about a head taller than this midget, but he looked up at me without blinkin’ an eye, with nothin’ but guts showin’ in his face, and he said, ‘Fuck you.’ Well, I started to laugh. I patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Okay, you got protection for free.’ He just pulled away and yelled, ‘Shove your protection up your ass, I don’t need it!’ Believe me, I found out he didn’t need it. Next to Benny Siegel, Meyer Lansky was the toughest guy, pound for pound, I ever knew in my whole life, and that takes in Albert Anastasia or any of them Brooklyn hoodlums or anybody anyone can think of.”

One of the things, besides ambition and guts, that drew Lucania and Lansky together, as it drew them to Costello, was an ability to keep their emotions in check. “We was like analyzers; we didn’t hustle ourselves into a decision before we had a chance to think it out. Siegel was just the opposite, and I guess that’s what made him good for us, because he would make his move on sheer guts and impulse.”

That Lansky and Siegel were Jewish bothered Lucania hardly at all — though it bothered some of his Italian and Sicilian friends a great deal. There was more about the two to attract him than to repel him; the same ambitions, desires and intensity transcended religious differences.

It was a coming together that would dominate the face of organized crime, would change it radically from the sporadic, hap-hazard thing it was into a new and all-pervasive menace that would influence the social life of the United States far into the future. There was Charlie Lucania (a decade later, he would rename himself Charlie Luciano), tough, shrewd, a natural leader and organizer,
calm, with animal cunning and intelligence. There was Francesco Castiglia (soon to be called Frank Costello), suave, tough, intelligent, always figuring the angles. There was Meyer Lansky, tough, shrewd, circumspect, preferring the background where he could influence and manipulate others without their knowing it, considered by his friends a genius. And there was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, tall, handsome, suave, tough, merciless, daring, a killer. All four were men with plans and a dream for the future. “We was,” Luciano said, “the best team that ever got put together. We knew our jobs better than any other guys on the street. We was like the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame — except what would two Jewish guys be doin’ at Notre Dame?”

It was during one of their first jobs together that Castiglia came upon his new name. “We was gonna break into a riverfront warehouse. Benny was gonna lead the way and take out the night watchman. When we was plannin’ our move, Meyer sort of objected. The way he put it was, ‘Why should the Jews, Bugsy and me, always go first and take all the chances, then everything gets split down the middle? After all, we’ve got two Italians, so why don’t you guys take the same chances?’

“ ‘Whadda you mean, two Italians?’ I said to him. ‘We’re one wop, one mick and two Jews, just like in the neighborhood.’

“Lansky stared at me like I was nuts. ‘What’re you talkin’ about,’ he said, ‘one wop and one mick? Where’s the mick?’

“I started to laugh and I pointed to Frank. I said, ‘Him. He’s Irish. Y’know, Frank Costello.’ That’s how Costello got his name. I remember we told this story so many times later on that lots of guys would sometimes call Costello, ‘Hey, Irish.’ And, of course, when we got up to our ears in New York politics, it didn’t hurt at all that we had an Italian guy with us with an Irish name like Costello.”

The coalition prospered. They had learned from failures to plan carefully and so their thefts, robberies, stickups grew bigger, the profits began to mount and their gangs expanded. “We had so much dough comin’ in that it was hard to keep track of it. Even a good counter like Lansky got a little confused once in a while. We figured maybe it would be a good idea if we opened a bank account. There was a bank down on the Lower East Side, I think it
was called the United States Bank, and Lansky’s uncle knew one of the big shots. Frank went over to take a look at it, to see if that’s where we should put our dough. While he was lookin’ it over, he couldn’t help but kinda case the joint a little bit, and he sees they only got one guard, an old guy who must’ve been about a hundred and four. So a couple of weeks later, instead of puttin’ our money in the place, we take out over eight thousand bucks and got away clean. Meyer said, ‘If that’s the way they’re gonna protect our dough, the hell with ’em.’ ”

Only one thing seemed now to stand in the way of their forward march. Not the police, for they were confident they would not be caught. In the spring of 1917, the United States went to war with the Central Powers. Siegel and Lansky were both too young for military service and Costello’s throat trouble made him unfit. But Charlie Lucania was twenty, tough and trim — the ideal American fighting man.

But he had no intention of going to war; it would interrupt his plans. “I wasn’t afraid that if I went to war I’d get killed or nothin’ like that. But I knew goddamn well that if I went to Europe, by the time I got home it would be the end of me when it come to my outfit. So the war in Europe come at a bad time; for the first time, things was goin’ great for me and my gang needed me a helluva lot more’n Uncle Sam. So we had a meet to figure out how to fix up my draft status.

“Bugsy Siegel started it off by saying, ‘The only way we’re gonna give up Charlie Lucania to Uncle Sam is if he’ll give us General Pershing.’ ” Everybody thought that was a great joke, but when Siegel started callin’ me ‘Black Jack Lucania’ I stopped them jokes. But it was Siegel who come up with the idea that kept me out of the army. He was just a punk kid, not even fourteen, but he knew more about broads than all of the rest of us put together. He said, ‘There’s only one thing that’s gonna keep Charlie out of the army, and that’s a good long dose of the clap.’ And all my good friends agreed.

“I looked at them like they was out of their minds and told ’em the idea was out. But Frank Costello assured me that with a friendly doctor, a case of the clap could be a breeze and that he could keep the cure goin’ until the war was over. And then
Lansky, the mathematical wizard, says, “I give five-to-two, the war won’t last more than a year.’ So I was outvoted, three to one.

“The only question was, where and how did I get the clap, because it ain’t somethin’ you buy in a store and we was all pretty much babes when it came to that kind of thing, except maybe Siegel. A couple days later, Siegel came over to my room and tells me he’s got it all fixed up. ‘A guy I know, Herbie Shapiro,’ he says, ‘just caught a dose of clap from a broad named Nora over at Jenny’s,’ which was a house at Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue.

“I told Benny, ‘Thanks very much, but I changed my mind and you three guys can go fuck yourselves.’ Just then Lansky came in and he says I’m lettin’ down the partnership. I really got sore and I told him, ‘What the hell, you’re only a little shrimp. You ain’t even got a prick half the size of Benny’s. You don’t give a shit about nooky; you’re only interested in money, and that’s why you’re so anxious to keep me out of the army.’

“But it didn’t do no good and they finally talked me into it. So that night I went over to Jenny’s and I went up to a room on the second floor with this girl, Nora, who was really stacked, with red hair, and she wasn’t a day over eighteen. All I could think of was what a terrible thing that a pretty girl like that was diseased. We get into the room and I’m too scared to move. Nora looks at me and she says, ‘Come on, let’s go. Take your clothes off. What’re you here for?’

“Like an idiot, I say to her, ‘I come here to get the clap.’ Well, she picked up a lamp and threw it at me, and she comes at me with her nails a mile long, tryin’ to cut my face to ribbons. I grabbed hold of her and tried to explain what it was all about. When I tell her that she’s got the clap, she gets scared and says she’s gotta get outa there and go see Jenny’s doctor. Then she stops and says, ‘But first I’m gonna take care of you,’ and she starts to undress me. I was so nervous that I couldn’t get it up. So she says, ‘Don’t worry, Charlie-boy,’ and she pushes me down on the bed and starts to go down on me, and I’m wonderin’ to myself if maybe I can get clap by mouth, which shows how much I knew. But when I’m good and ready and start to get off the bed, she grabs me and yells, ‘Oh, no, you don’t. You come here for it and you’re gonna get it.’ She was right. A week later I had it.

“If I’d known what it was gonna be like to get cured, I’d rather have run around the trenches in France with a bunch of krauts shootin’ at me. I had to get treatments every other day for over a year by some doctor down on Tenth Street; I paid him plenty so he wouldn’t report me to the health authorities. And what a treatment. He put a rubber tube with some kinda solution in it all the way up my pecker, and then he’d follow this with a round metal bar I think he called a ‘sound.’ He told me it’d help make the cure permanent so that my pecker would never close up again.”