The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (6 page)

And so any worries about the war were behind him. If he were to be shot now, it would be on the streets of New York. Lucania and his friends rapidly expanded their activities during the war years; there was plenty of money around and they were determined to have their share. By the time the Armistice was signed in November 1918, they had organized a gang of more than twenty members, were ranging over the downtown area of Manhattan where Lucania, Lansky and Siegel had grown up and still lived, over the East Harlem terrain of Frank Costello, and into the wealth of midtown in between. They hit small banks, warehouses, stores, anyplace where there was loose money or loose goods that could be fenced. Siegel was always out in front, the man to take the risks. A favorite ploy was to send him into a jewelry store on pretense of looking for a gift for his mother, which gave him an opportunity to examine the merchandise, see where it was kept and how tight the security was. When the store was robbed, it was easy pickings.

In the ghettos, the pawnbrokers and moneylenders were natural targets, and if some of them got badly beaten, “it was their fault for keepin’ so much money around,” or for objecting to its loss. And then there were the bearded insurance men who toured the Jewish ghettos selling small policies and collecting dime and quarter premiums each week. “If all the nickels and dimes we took from them had been put into premiums, I’d own more than a million dollars’ worth of life insurance today,” Luciano said later.

As the profits piled up beyond their immediate needs, they sought ways to put that money to work. They knew that off-track betting was a protected business and they began to buy into established “books,” even taking shares in several small ones in midtown.
It was the beginning of what would become a gambling empire blanketing the nation. It was also a school in which they learned some important lessons: that there were some illegal activities the public not only did not frown upon, but actually encouraged; that with certain illegal activities, protection could be purchased from the police and other public officials, to insure continued operations and profits; that the opportunities in professional gambling were limitless and that, paradoxically, the operators could gain a certain status and power in society. They had only to look at Arnold Rothstein, the millionaire gambler and political fixer, to see how true that was.

“Ever since we was kids, we always knew that people could be bought. It was only a question of who did the buyin’ and for how much. After all, we saw it everywhere around us — from the cop on the beat to the captain of the police precinct, from the ward heeler to some top politicians. We knew that most of them guys had their hands out. It was Frank Costello, a little bit later, who really opened the door to the whole business of buyin’ influence and protection. He had the style and the class of a guy twice his age, and with that Irish-Italian name we hung on him, he was able to move into all circles. That’s when we set up a private bank. Not a real bank. We called it our ‘Buy-Money Bank.’ It started with five grand and the pot was turned over to Costello to use any way he saw fit.” Within a decade, the amount in the Buy-Money Bank — to corrupt those on the public payroll — had grown into millions of dollars. Costello started small and cautiously with this limited initial bankroll, putting cash into the hands of police and politicians in the districts where the group was buying into bookmaking operations, greasing the ward heelers who could use it to insure election victories by buying turkeys, cigars, medical treatment and more in exchange for votes.

Early in 1919, a new world suddenly opened. The keys to riches and a kind of shadowy respectability were handed to Charlie Lucania and his friends, and the door slid open easily, greased by the funds Costello had spread from the Buy-Money Bank. On January 16, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, to become the law of the land a year later. It banned the general manufacture, sale and transportation
of intoxicating liquors and beers. Ten months later, on October 27, over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the Volstead Act, amplifying and strengthening the language of the Prohibition amendment and setting up the federal machinery for its enforcement. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had scored its long-sought victory; there would be no more public drinking in the United States.

But millions of Americans were not about to stop drinking. They would just have to look somewhere else than the old neighborhood saloon or package store for their booze. The Roaring Twenties were about to begin and the stars of the new era were about to take center stage.

They were all Italians and Sicilians, most of them young, and they gathered in a favorite restaurant on Mulberry Street in Little Italy late in 1920 to toast a local boy who was making it big in Chicago. After an absence of more than a year, Alphonse Capone had come back to New York for a visit, to confirm the rumors of his success and to tell his friends that they, too, could share the wealth. When he had left the city, Capone had been only another small-time strong-arm man, with a violent temper backed by fists, a club and a gun he seemed always anxious to use, with two murders to his credit already and a third man he had brutally beaten in a Brooklyn barroom about to die in a hospital.

“Capone was three or four years younger than me, a guy with plenty of muscle and guts and a way of lookin’ ahead. He’d done a couple jobs with me. When we found out through our contacts that the law was gonna throw the book at him, I sent word to him in Brooklyn and we arranged a meet in a dry-goods store on East Fourteenth Street that was owned by an aunt of Benny Siegel’s. Capone walks into the back room, throws his arms around me and
says, ‘Hey, Cousin Charlie, what’s goin’ on?’ Of course, he wasn’t my cousin, but he always called me that. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on; you gotta get the hell outa town and don’t bother to pack.’

“Al’s face fell so much his whole body sagged. It was the first and only time I ever seen him look scared. Maybe because I was the second guy in a couple of hours who’d told him the same thing, though I didn’t know it at the time. The other guy was Frankie Yale [born Francisco Uale], who was the boss of the old Unione Siciliano. Al was workin’ for him in one of his bars as a bouncer. I told Al not to worry, that I had it all arranged. I’d been in touch with Johnny Torrio out in Chicago and he was willin’ to take Al on. I handed him two grand in small bills and told him to get right up to Grand Central and buy a ticket; he could get new clothes when he got to Chicago in a couple days. Capone got so emotional he almost started cryin’; then he hugged me again and kissed me right on the lips, like a Sicilian, and he left. Jesus Christ, he was no Sicilian, he was a Neapolitan, and I didn’t like him kissin’ me that way, but what could I do? The thing I found out later was that Frankie Yale had been in touch with Torrio, too, about Al, because he knew Torrio from way back when they was workin’ together in Brooklyn before Torrio went to Chicago, and he’d done the same as me, settin’ things up for Capone. So Al had two of us sponsorin’ him when he went out there, which didn’t hurt him none.”

In Chicago, Capone became the strong and enforcing right arm of Torrio, sometimes called “Terrible John” or “The Fox,” another man with visions of the profits that could come if crime were organized, of the opportunities opened up by Prohibition. When Capone arrived, however, Torrio was blocked from turning his vision into a reality by Big Jim Colosimo, then the ruler of vice and rackets in the notorious “Levee” district of the nation’s second city. Despite the urgings of Torrio, his chief aide and his wife’s cousin, Colosimo was satisfied with things as they were, had little interest in illegal liquor, did not see its future. He reluctantly permitted Torrio to move into bootlegging, but only in a small way.

But Torrio saw what Prohibition could bring to anyone perspicacious
and daring enough. He was not to be blocked, just as he was determined not to be second man. On the surface a courtly, gentle man who always expressed an abhorrence of violence, he dealt with Colosimo’s opposition and lack of vision in a final and sudden manner. For ten thousand dollars, he brought his old comrade, Frankie Yale, to Chicago and on May 11, 1920, Yale put a bullet in Jim Colosimo’s head. The funeral was gargantuan, the model for all the Prohibition-era funerals that would follow. And when Jim Colosimo was laid to rest, Johnny Torrio was the boss, Al Capone was his aide, and the liquor and money poured in an unceasing fountain in Chicago.

Now, a year later, Capone had returned to New York for his visit, wearing a hand-tailored suit and diamond rings, a big cigar in his mouth, the veneer of power upon him. He sat at the head of the table in the Mulberry Street restaurant, drinking the best imported Italian wine, being toasted and toasting those around him. Late in the evening, the air redolent with smoke, heads heavy with drink, Capone raised his glass and pointed down the table to Charlie Lucania. “To my cousin Charlie,” he shouted, “who’s gonna be the King of Booze in New York.”

Capone went back to Chicago, to his own vision of becoming the king of booze and all the rackets there. He left behind a Charlie Lucania already planning his next moves and determined to make Capone’s prophecy come true. If he could do that, he was certain he would overshadow Capone and everyone else. For Chicago was only the second city; New York was the first, the biggest, where everything important happened. To be king in New York was to be supreme.

But the crown was elusive and there were other pretenders, some older and more experienced, and all equally determined. At that moment, Lucania and his partners were hardly grown men: he was only twenty-three, Lansky not yet twenty, Siegel still an adolescent; only Costello was past twenty-five. Their dreams and ambitions might be majestic, but their knowledge and experience were limited.

They were not men, though, to let opportunities pass, and soon they were joined by another, equally ambitious, young man who gave them the needed chance. His name was Giuseppe Antonio
Doto; he was born in a small town near Naples in 1902 and brought to the United States a few years later. (His father, in a moment of oversight, forgot to take out citizenship, and that would in later years return to haunt Doto.) By the time he was eighteen, he had become an adept thief and had adopted a new name, Joseph A. Adonis, which his friends later shortened to plain “Joe A.” The Adonis was a natural for him. “I always thought of Joe as a kind of younger brother,” Luciano said. “But I used to laugh at him. He was always lookin’ in the mirror and combin’ in his hair. Once I asked him, ‘Who do you think you are, Rudolph Valentino?’ He stared at me for a minute and then he said, very serious, ‘For looks, that guy’s a bum.’ ”

Adonis’s entrance into the Lucania circle came one afternoon late in 1920. He called Lucania and met him at an ice cream parlor in Little Italy — both men had a passion for ice cream they would never lose. “We sat there eatin’ big plates of spumoni and Joe said, ‘Charlie, I know we never done no business together and I never like to ask a favor. But I need ten grand to make a whiskey buy down in Philly, and I’ll cut you in for half.’ ”

The night before, Adonis had been in Philadelphia to see Frankie Genaro (later the world flyweight champion) box, and had met the promoter, Max “Boo-Boo” Hoff, who had introduced him to Irving Wexler, something of a bootleg power under the name “Waxey” Gordon. Adonis and Gordon struck up an immediate friendship, and before Adonis boarded the train back for New York, he had been offered a carload of 100-proof bottled-in-bond rye. But Adonis didn’t have enough money to complete the purchase, and so he turned to Lucania for the needed additional ten thousand dollars. “I put my arm around Adonis’s shoulder and told him to keep his money, that he’d just found himself a partner who’d put up all the dough. I called Costello, Lansky and Siegel and we got together an hour later. The four of us put up thirty-five grand in cash, and early the next morning Adonis and I headed out in my new car, a Marmon limousine.” The trip to Philadelphia was only ninety miles, but the roads were mudholes and there were detours every ten miles. Before they had gotten halfway, Lucania turned around and returned to New York. The next morning they went to Philadelphia by train.

“That was the first time I ever ate in a dinin’ car on a train. The tablecloths was so white the inside of the car looked like it was all covered with snow. It was the first time I ever ate corned beef hash for breakfast; it had a fried egg on top. Joe thought I was crazy; he had hot oatmeal, and I had two more orders of that hash. One time, I told my mother about that breakfast and she looked at me just like Joe A. did — they just didn’t understand how to eat American.”

As Adonis and Lucania ate, two men who looked like bankers sat down at the table with them in the crowded diner. Lucania could not keep his eyes off them. Even then, the veneer of money, manners and class fascinated and entranced him, made him realize his own social limitations, and made him determined to cultivate the same aura so that one day he could meet such people as equals. “They was really elegant, like old money, and I said to myself, ‘That’s for me.’ Then I remembered that Joe and I was sittin’ there carryin’ guns and I got thirty-five grand in my pocket to buy booze with down in Philly, just so guys like them could pay through the nose for it.”

The deal with Waxey Gordon, the first of many, was struck that afternoon, and Lucania and his friends were now bootleggers. In their new business, they could use all they had learned and practiced before, the strong-arm methods, the discipline of gang action, the quick strike; but this time their victim was not an individual. It was only a law, an unpopular one foisted upon the country by what Luciano always referred to as “them old flat-chested broads of the W.C.T.U., who was even uglier than the schoolteachers.” The profits were far greater than could ever have been realized by crimes against innocent persons and their property, and the penalties were far less, and the chances of ever paying those penalties almost minute.