Charles "Lucky" Luciano (born November 24, 1897 in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, Italy - died January 26, 1962 in Naples) was an Italian-American mobster, born under the name of Salvatore Lucania. He was certainly the criminal whose historical influence was the greatest. Times magazine named him one of the greatest empire builders of the 20th century:an empire of crime. Second "Capo di tutti capi" (leader of all leaders) after the assassination of Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano was the real creator of international heroin trafficking.
Young years
Luciano was born in Lercara Friddi in Sicily on November 24, 1897. His parents, Antonio and Rosalia Lucania, had four other children:Bartolomeo (born in 1890), Giuseppe (1898), Filippia (1901) and Concetta (1903). His father, like most of the men in the village, works in the sulfur mines.
In 1906, Luciano emigrated to the United States with his parents, in search of the American dream, who settled in a small apartment in the Jewish neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York. Preferring the street to school, he is left to his own devices in this disreputable neighborhood where violence reigns, which is how he joins a gang of thugs. He was first arrested at age 11 for shoplifting. At 14, the Brooklyn Truant School offered him a second chance, to no avail. He finds a small job delivering hats but is again arrested for racketeering younger Jewish and Italian boys in exchange for his protection, notably a certain Meyer Lansky, for whom he will retain an unfailing friendship:indeed, then that he was threatening him, he did not allow himself to be intimidated and refused his protection. It was also during his youth that he met the man who would later be the leader of the Chicago mafia:Al Capone. He forms a band that engages in racketeering, gambling, prostitution. At 18, Luciano was arrested (along with 15-year-old Armand Taheri) while he was delivering heroin and spent six months in prison. His notoriety grew within the Five Points Gang, whose members were also known as the "Five Pointers". In 1920, he was an important smuggler, and associated with Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, and incidentally Joe Adonis and Vito Genovese in the racketeering of merchants and in the smuggling of alcohol in these times of Prohibition. During the same period, Costello introduced him to Dutch Schultz and Arnold Rothstein5.
Several different versions explain his nickname "Lucky":the most likely links him to a settling of scores, in 1926, by the henchmen of one of the two main New York godfathers, Joe Masseria or Salvatore Maranzano . Left for dead after his beating, he miraculously survived, leaving only several facial scars, including a damaged eyelid, still half closed. Another version indicates that he often bet on the right horse when he played the races, yet another evoked his ability to avoid prison, unless it was a mispronunciation of his name, "Lucania". P>
Prior to 1925, Luciano grossed over $300,000 a year. However, he pockets a lot less each year due to the increasing corruption costs of politicians and police. Luciano and his associates then ran the largest alcohol traffic in New York, extending to Philadelphia. He imports Scotch directly from Scotland, rum from the Caribbean and whiskey from Canada. He also gets involved in the game.
The Castellammarese War
Lucky Luciano then joins the family of one of New York's most powerful godfathers, Joe Masseria. Luciano is enraged to see many business opportunities taken away due to Mafia anti-Semitism, and Masseria is suspicious of his ambition.
Although he created the National Crime Syndicate in 1929, the Masseria family and that of his rival Salvatore Maranzano clashed during the Castellammarese War of 1930 to 1931, resulting in several dozen assassinations. To put an end to this hecatomb (and preparing with Meyer Lansky a plan to take power), Luciano wishes to become the leader of New York. He then betrays Masseria and has him assassinated in his favorite restaurant, while he himself is in the toilet. Luciano then turns against Salvatore Maranzano, his new boss, who has made him head of the Masseria family. Luciano kills Maranzano and takes over New York all by himself.
Luciano's vision, his will to shake up the old traditions of the Mafia, his connections (in particular Meyer Lansky) and his keen sense of strategy, as well as an undeniable charisma, bring Lucky Luciano, now godfather of one of the five families of New York's Cosa Nostra, to become a prominent member of the Crime Syndicate.
Rise and fall
At 34, Luciano reigns over the middle. He convenes a crime conference in Chicago, which Al Capone will host, and another in New York at a hotel on Park Avenue to announce the outline of his crime syndicate project. Taking up the ideas gleaned from Arnold Rothstein, he wants illegal activities to adopt the same structures as large American industrial companies. It generalizes the system of “families” at the national level. Each clan must exercise absolute authority over its territory or city. A Syndicate Council will be in charge of litigation and assassinations, for which it creates a common strike force:Murder Incorporated, a public limited company for murders. No personal initiatives or gratuitous crimes. Another rule:we only kill each other between mafiosos. The others, policemen, magistrates or politicians, they are corrupted, because Luciano thinks that any man is buyable, you just have to pay the price.
Luciano, a brilliant and power-hungry young gangster, rises to the top. His idea of decentralizing crime with the commission at its head gave him a power that no gangster knew after him4. He becomes a celebrity and raises considerable sums for the time. He settles into luxury at the Waldorf Astoria, wears different suits every day and hangs out with the most beautiful call girls in New York. The “Innominato” (nickname of Luciano, the “unnamed”) requires his men not to reveal any names.
However, in 1936, prosecutor Thomas Dewey put together a file supposedly aimed at bringing to light a large prostitution network that Luciano was accused of organizing according to industrial optimization processes. During the trial, several prostitutes and pimps are called to testify, and Luciano receives a sentence of 30 to 50 years in prison. He is incarcerated in Sing Sing prison, where he holds the position of librarian. His lawyer manages to have him transferred to Dannemora prison where, thanks to his political acquaintances, he can benefit from preferential treatment (champagne, caviar, etc.) and regularly receive his associates, thus continuing to manage his empire. In 1942, Luciano was transferred to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a “rest home” in the New York prison system where he remained until the end of the war.
World War II
In December 1941, the US Navy's secret service (ONI) contacted Joseph Lanza, mafia "boss" of the Fulton Fish Market, to distribute union cards to American agents so that they could investigate German spies. Lanza tells them the name of Luciano, who is recruited to help with the investigation and transferred from Dannemora to Great Meadow, a more pleasant prison. The American authorities feared that the port of New York was the subject of sabotage attempts by Nazi agents (they imagined that the Nazis intervened in the sinking of the Normandie in February 1942). Until 1945, the Dockers' Union, totally controlled by the Mafia, notably through Albert Anastasia, would thus have exercised very firm control over the port facilities. According to historian John Dickie, "this is certainly what Luciano's collaboration with the federal government boils down to", "there is no evidence that he went to Sicily during the war, nor that he was freed in exchange for Mafia support for the Allied landings”.
According to other sources, however, this collaboration would have taken a new step in 1943 when the American secret services would have asked him to get in touch with the main Sicilian "families", including in particular the godfather of Palermo, Calogero Vizzini, so that 'they facilitate the Allied landing in Sicily through sabotage and intelligence missions. The mafia would thus have played a non-negligible role in the success of military operations. Lucky Luciano, however, denies this version of the facts in his testament book, only his intervention for the infiltration of men for the identification before the Landing is attested and, after the Landing, the appointment to the head of villages of the former mafia leaders persecuted by Mussolini, which corresponds to the desire of the Americans to contain communist influence on the island.
The fact remains that at the end of the war, prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who had become governor of New York State, announced on January 3, 1946 that Lucky Luciano was to be released on the condition that he immediately leave the America and spends the rest of his days in Sicily. As a result, on February 8, 1946, Lucky boarded the Laura Keene (he will therefore have remained 9 years in prison, instead of 30). Before the ship sets sail, his friends organize a gigantic party there, attended by the entire underworld and many personalities. But breaking the agreement, Luciano does not go to Sicily.
The Havana Conference
In December 1946, continuing a trip that took him to Venezuela and Mexico, Luciano went to Cuba where he organized (with Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis) the Havana conference. During this period, the American mafia completely infiltrated the Cuban government. As a precaution, Luciano buys for the sum of $150 million with the approval of Fulgencio Batista the Nacional Hotel where the meeting takes place. This meeting is an opportunity for him to reaffirm his leadership role over the crime syndicate. Albert Anastasia, Joseph Bonanno, Vito Genovese, Tommy Lucchese, Carlos Marcello, Willie Moretti, Joe Profaci, Bugsy Siegel, Santo Trafficante, Bo Weinberg (en), and Abner Zwillman are present. This meeting leads to decisions of primary importance such as the massive investment in the casinos of Havana, the assassination of Bugsy Siegel, who after his investments in Las Vegas, was unable to repay the sums lent by the Commission. In addition, he renders an arbitration in the rivalry between Albert Anastasia and Vito Genovese. The latter, ambitious and vindictive, wants the withdrawal of Luciano, the management of his family, which Genovese covets, having been entrusted to Costello and Lansky, which provokes a heated altercation.
In February 1947, the US government pressured the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista to deport Luciano to Italy, threatening to suspend shipments of pharmaceuticals.
International heroin trafficking
In 1947, Luciano moved to Naples where he led a great lifestyle until his death. The mafia continues to supply him with funds, regularly, without ever failing, even after having "officially" lost his title of king of crime. Officially the head of an import-export company, he forged links with the Italian mafias, the Camorra, the Ndrangheta and the Sicilian Cosa nostra. Considering the enormous potential profits of a booming market, he tries to organize international heroin trafficking, despite the reservations he had previously expressed towards Vito Genovese, a precursor in this activity. But these attempts remain unsuccessful.
In October 1957, he organized at the Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo the "Yalta of Crime", a conference attended by the main Sicilian sponsors as well as representatives of the Five New York Families, including Joseph Bonanno and his consigliere Carmine Galante. He thus concretized solid links between the American and Sicilian Mafias and set up networks of heroin trafficking, the opium coming from Turkey. He would also have forged decisive links with Corsican traffickers and the Marseille underworld, in particular Antoine Guérini, whose trafficking networks were known as the French Connection.
Last years and deaths
In 1959, from Naples, he trapped Vito Genovese during a heroin transaction of which the federal authorities were notified. In the early 1960s, he came into conflict with Meyer Lansky, whom he suspected of embezzling sums owed to him, but gave up acting.
In his 60-room villa, 484 via Tasso in Naples, Luciano no longer looks like the hoodlum he once was. He says he looks like a "retired dentist". He has lived for 11 years with Igea Lissoni, a Milanese 20 years his junior, who died of breast cancer in 1958. For several years, he has suffered from heart problems. Under treatment, he has a box of pills on him. On January 26, 1962, he came to Naples-Capodichino airport to pick up the script for a film about his life, brought by the director's assistant Barnett Glassman. Just after swallowing one of his pills, he collapses, struck down by a heart attack. It is 5:26 p.m., he was 64 years old. There is no autopsy.
American law does not consider that a corpse has any nationality, Salvatore Lucania known as Charles "Lucky" Luciano is buried in the United States, in the family vault which he acquired in 1935 at St. John's Cemetery in Middle Village, New York. A funeral procession of more than 2,000 people accompanies him.
Filmography
In 1972 in the Terence Young film, Cosa Nostra, Lucky Luciano is played by Angelo Infanti.
The Italian director Francesco Rosi made a biographical film, Lucky Luciano, in 1974, in which he recounts the life of the mafia boss in Italy, after his expulsion. The main role is played by Gian Maria Volontè.
In the second film of his trilogy on the mafia (The Godfather), Francis Ford Coppola stages a meeting of the main godfathers in Havana and evokes the relations between the Cuban government of the time and organized crime.
In 1991, in the film The Untamed (Mobsters, by Michael Karbelnikoff), the role was played by Christian Slater.
Andy Garcia also played him in Bill Duke's 1997 film Lords of Harlem.
In 2010, Vincent Piazza starred as Prohibition-era Lucky Luciano in the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire, created by Terence Winter.