Lucky Luciano

Salvatore Lucania was eight when his family left a sulfur-mining town in the hills southeast of Palermo and landed on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His father Antonio had worked the mines at Lercara Friddi and wanted out. The son lasted to 14 in school, took a job delivering hats for seven dollars a week, won 244 dollars in a dice game and never went back. His parents enrolled him in the Brooklyn Truancy School. On the street he sold Jewish boys protection from Italian and Irish gangs at 10 cents a week, and one of the boys he tried to shake down, Meyer Lansky, refused so flatly that Lucania made him a partner instead. Between 1916 and 1936 he was arrested 25 times and served no prison time at all.

Prohibition made him rich. He ran liquor with Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, learned the trade from Arnold Rothstein, and by 1925 was grossing more than 12 million dollars a year as Joe Masseria's top aide. Then he sold Masseria out, and five months later had Salvatore Maranzano killed too. What he put in their place was not a throne. In 1931 he called the bosses together and proposed a Commission: a standing board to divide territory and settle disputes before they turned into wars. He declined the title of boss of all bosses. The structure outlived him by decades.

The thing that finally caught him was not the killings. In February 1936 the special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey raided some 200 brothels in Manhattan and Brooklyn and arrested 16 men and 87 women. Assistant district attorney Eunice Carter had spent months building the case among those women, many of whom described being beaten by the men running the houses. The judge set minimum bail at 10,000 dollars, far past anything they could pay, and Carter persuaded a number of them to testify rather than serve more time. In June 1936 a jury convicted him on 62 counts of compulsory prostitution, and he drew 30 to 50 years. All four women who placed him at the top of the ring later recanted. Selwyn Raab has called Dewey's evidence against him astonishingly thin. Witnesses at the trial testified otherwise.

He never became an American citizen, and in 1946 that mattered. Dewey, by then governor, commuted the sentence after nine and a half years on condition he not fight deportation, and on February 10 a freighter carried him out of Brooklyn. The reason given was wartime help to Naval Intelligence. Its value is still argued: the officer who ran the operation dismissed it in 1947, and a 1954 inquiry by William B. Herlands concluded the opposite. Luciano died of a heart attack at Naples airport on January 26, 1962, meeting a film producer. Much of what is now repeated about him comes from The Last Testament, published in 1975 and quoting him on events that happened after he died.

Lucky Luciano's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Commission company
  A standing board of crime family bosses, meant to divide territory and stop wars before they started 1931
• The Five Families structure other
  Maranzano's five-family map of New York, which Luciano kept and made permanent 1931
• Operation Underworld cooperation mission
  His wartime deal with the Office of Naval Intelligence — its actual value to the Navy is still disputed 1942
• The Havana Conference other
  A week of meetings at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, held while he was under deportation orders 1946
• The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano book
  A purported memoir drawn from talks with producer Martin Gosch, doubted by The New York Times before it was even published 1975

• 1906 aged ~9 Arrives on the Lower East Side at eight years old The family left Lercara Friddi, a sulfur town in the province of Palermo.
• 1923 aged ~26 Caught in a sting selling heroin to undercover agents He served no jail time, but being named publicly as a drug peddler cost him standing.
• October 1929 aged 31 Abducted, beaten and stabbed, and left with a scarred face and a drooping eye His attackers were never identified. He gave conflicting accounts of who they were for the rest of his life, and the nickname may or may not date from this.
• April 15, 1931 aged 33 Gunmen kill Joe Masseria at a Coney Island restaurant Luciano had secretly agreed with Salvatore Maranzano to engineer his own boss's death.
• September 10, 1931 aged 33 Four men sent by Luciano stab and shoot Maranzano in his Manhattan office Maranzano had declared himself boss of all bosses months earlier. The story of a nationwide purge that followed has been debunked.
• 1931 aged ~34 Proposes the Commission at a meeting of bosses in Chicago He turned down the title of boss of all bosses, believing it only made a man a target.
• June 18, 1936 aged 38 Sentenced to 30 to 50 years for compulsory prostitution A jury had convicted him on 62 counts earlier that month, on evidence from women arrested in the February raids.
• February 10, 1946 aged 48 Sails from Brooklyn to Italy after Dewey commutes his sentence He had served nine and a half years. He was never naturalised and argued to the end that he could not lawfully be deported.
• January 26, 1962 aged 64 Dies of a heart attack at Naples airport Italian narcotics agents had followed him there intending to arrest him. He was buried in Queens.

• Frank Sinatra 1915–1998
  Crooner and actor whose voice and charisma made him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. performed at the Havana conference
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. investigated by
• Al Capone 1899–1947
  Gangster whose criminal empire made him the defining symbol of Prohibition-era organized crime. Commission ally
• John Gotti 1940–2002
  Boss of the Gambino crime family, convicted of murder and racketeering later boss in the Five Families