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Authors: Tim Newark

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Ever mindful of good publicity, Luciano thought it would be a great idea if the golden tenor sang at a charity gala he was organizing in Naples. When the temperamental Lanza failed to appear for a rehearsal, it is said that two of Luciano’s henchmen visited him to ensure he would not back out from the concert.
Unable to cope with this pressure and not wanting to perform at all, Lanza checked himself into a clinic in Rome, claiming he had to lose weight rapidly for the good of his health. Luciano was furious. A few days later, when Lanza’s chauffeur came to see him on October 7, Lanza was found in a coma with an empty intravenous tube pumping air into his arm. Attempts to revive
him failed, and the thirty-eight-year-old Lanza was pronounced dead later that day. No official autopsy was performed, but it was said he died from a heart attack.
The principal source of this story is Mario Lanza’s daughter, Colleen, who was eleven years old when her father died, but she recalled the accusation coming from the driver. When they lived in Rome, she suggested that Lanza had contact with some underworld figures.
“Sometimes there were strange, unusual and shady people around the house who Daddy did not approve of,” she recalled, “and he tried to get them out of his home. Often it became quite a violent confrontation.”
The day of her father’s death in the clinic in Rome was traumatic.
“There were many questions about how my father died. I think he was murdered. The chauffeur was in his room—he disappeared and was never found again. He was so totally dedicated to my father that he slept on a cot beneath his bed while he was in the hospital. He awoke suddenly, he said before disappearing, and found Daddy with the intravenous still in his arms and nothing but air bubbles going into his vein. My grandmother forbade me to discuss such things while she lived, but now it really doesn’t matter anymore.”
Later writers have blamed Luciano and his associates for this death as punishment for the severe embarrassment caused to the mobster by Lanza’s no-show in Naples.
 
 
Toward the end of the 1950s, less money was coming through to Luciano. Castro coming to power in Cuba in 1959 put an end to his share of the Mafia casinos in Havana, which he reckoned cost him a quarter of his income. He depended very much on the money sent to him by his friends. Looking at alternative means of income, he saw there was possibly good money to be made from selling his own story. Movies were starting to appear
about his contemporaries, and he began to think about his legacy.
Al Capone,
starring Rod Steiger as the Chicago gangster, appeared in 1959, twelve years after Capone’s death. It was made in a semi-documentary style, telling of the real rise and fall of the mobster, ending with his conviction for income tax evasion. A year later came
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond,
with Ray Danton as the New York hoodlum. In the same year appeared
Murder, Inc.,
based on the book by Burton Turkus and Sid Feder, with actors playing Anastasia and Lepke.
Previous gangster movies had been based on Capone and other leading mobsters, such as Luciano, but had avoided using their real names, creating characters loosely based on them and their crimes. No one wanted to stir up the rage of the Mob. Ben Hecht wrote the story for
Scarface,
the movie modeled on Capone in Chicago in 1932, and he remembered being approached by two of Capone’s henchmen holding a copy of the script.
“Is this stuff about Al Capone?” asked one of the heavies.
“God, no,” said Hecht. “I don’t even know Al.”
“Never met him, huh?”
Hecht insisted that he had left Chicago before Capone came to power.
“If this stuff ain’t about Al Capone, why are you callin’ it
Scarface
?” reasoned the gangster. “Everybody’ll think it’s him.”
“That’s the reason,” struggled Hecht. “Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If we call the movie
Scarface,
everybody will want to see it, figuring it’s about Al. That’s part of the racket we call showmanship.”
In the event, it was very clearly based on him—even featuring a re-creation of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Bamboozled by Hecht’s answer, the gangster said he’d pass it on to Al. He then wondered about the motive of the the film producer Howard Hughes.
“He’s got nothing to do with anything,” said Hecht. “He’s the sucker with the money.”
“OK. The hell with him.”
In the wake of the Kefauver hearings at the beginning of the 1950s, there was a public taste for more realistic renditions of how the Mob worked, stories that pulled fewer punches and weren’t afraid to name names. After all, despite what the FBN thought, Luciano was now crime history—not a contemporary criminal mastermind. In 1953, in the organized crime thriller
The Big Heat,
Luciano is even mentioned as an example of how not to conduct underworld business. The Mob boss in the movie is called Mike Lagana, and he talks to one of his gangsters about how crime has changed since the 1930s.
“We’ve stirred up enough headlines. Things are changing in this country,” says Lagana. “Never get the people steamed up—they start doing things. Grand juries, election investigations, deportation proceedings, I don’t want to land in the same ditch with the Lucky Lucianos.”
Luciano probably thought it was time to tell his own version of events. An early reference to him wanting to make a movie about his life came in an issue of the Havana daily newspaper
Alerta,
November 25, 1952, which said that the gangster was going to spend $300,000 on the project.
It was in 1959, however, that Luciano met the film producer Barnett Glassman. Luciano had already spent some of his time in Naples writing a screenplay and showed it to the producer. It portrayed him as a middle-aged gambler who’d been set up by the corrupt Dewey, wrongfully sent to prison, and was now settled in Italy, where he was much respected for his charity work. He had been considering who should portray him.
“Pity Humphrey Bogart is dead,” he said. “Boy, that would have been the man to play Luciano. Now, maybe, George Raft—he’s about the only tough type left”—or maybe Marlon Brando, who’d starred in the much revered gangland movie,
On the Waterfront,
to play a younger Luciano.
Not surprisingly, Glassman was unimpressed by Luciano’s efforts and recommended a professional screenwriter. It took two drafts before Luciano realized he had to reveal more of the
truth about his criminal career to make it an interesting project. The whole enterprise took on more urgency when Luciano visited his doctor later that year. He’d been complaining about pains in his chest and arms, and the doctor confirmed he had a dangerous heart condition.
FBN agent Sal Vizzini, under his guise as Major Mike Cerra, visited Luciano during this period. He was told that Luciano had been ill and he was invited to see him at his apartment at 8 Strado Parco Comela Ricci, overlooking the harbor. He looked thinner than Vizzini remembered. He was living with a twenty-four-year-old shopgirl called Adriana Rizzo. His doctor had told him to take plenty of bed rest and give up smoking, drink, and sex. He could do all that but the last. He remembered something his old Sicilian associate Don Calogero Vizzini had told him.
“He was over seventy and still had to have a girl every day. He knew what to do with them too. I told him he was about to kill himself. He looked me right in the eye and said … ‘pussy is a million times sweeter than honey and I want it till the day I die’—I agree with him.”
Agent Vizzini was given a tour of the modern apartment and noted some of the books in Luciano’s library. They included
The Traffic in Narcotics
by Harry Anslinger,
Brotherhood of Evil
by Frederic Sondern, and
The Luciano Story
by Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten.
The Luciano Story
was the first major biography of Luciano and was cowritten by the author of
Murder, Inc.,
the book that exposed the inside story of the hit men who worked for the Mob in the 1930s.
The publisher of the
The Luciano Story
sent a copy to the FBI in January 1955. Because
Murder, Inc.,
had “contained derogatory remarks concerning the FBI and attributed false statements to the Director,” the FBI decided not to acknowledge receipt of
The Luciano Story
until “we have had an opportunity to make a complete review of it in the Crime Records section.” The subsequent analysis described it as a “readable account,” which
used much of the material contained in
Murder, Inc
. “Of the nine references to the Director or the FBI throughout the book, none appears to be of a derogatory nature.”
In fact, the FBI took pride in the fact that the author said Luciano felt no antagonism toward the director, directly quoting the mobster as saying: “Hoover’s no friend of the hoodlums or the underworld. I like him because he never makes an announcement about what he’s gonna do. He never says a guy is tied up in a racket, and he’s gonna grab him for it. None of that yakity-yak. A guy does somethin’. Hoover grabs him. No announcements. He don’t shoot his mouth off. He’s got efficiency!”
Luciano had also read Ed Reid’s
Mafia,
an exposé of the business dealings of the Cosa Nostra, first published in 1952, but he called it “a pack of lies.”
As agent Vizzini looked in detail at some of the other objects in Luciano’s library, he noticed a painting of a beautiful dark-haired woman hung on the wall—it was Igea Lissoni. Later that evening, they talked about the rumored movie of his life. Luciano complained that he’d been offered only a “lousy” hundred grand plus 10 percent of the profits. Vizzini said Luciano hadn’t been very impressed by the
Al Capone
movie.
“They made Capone look like an ignorant bum,” said Luciano. “Nobody knew Capone better than me and, believe me, he was no ignorant bum. Everything in that picture was phony, except maybe how he got rid of the competition.”
While film producer Barnett Glassman was making a movie in Spain he met a wannabe producer called Martin Gosch. He only had one movie credit on
Abbott and Costello in Hollywood,
but Glassman took him on as his assistant. Gosch was keen to meet Luciano.
“Gosch saw Charlie a number of times in the next couple of years,” said Glassman, “but Charlie never talked to him about his Mob activities or anything like that. You couldn’t get twenty words out of Charlie unless he really trusted you, and he didn’t care much for Gosch.”
They just chatted about the script, but all the time Gosch was keen to take on the project himself. According to Glassman, Luciano phoned his brother in Christmas 1961 to say that Gosch wanted to cut out Glassman and he didn’t like it.
“Tell Gosch, I want to see him,” Luciano is supposed to have said. “Tell him I’m going to lay it on the line to him, that I don’t want to ever have anything to do with him, I never want to see him after I tell him what I think of him.”
Gosch saw his relationship with Luciano somewhat differently. In February 1961, he showed Luciano a final version of the script they had been working on and he approved it, signing a contract for $100,000 and a percentage of the profits. Shortly afterward, however, Thomas Eboli, lieutenant for Vito Genovese while he was in jail, arrived in Naples. Despite several movies about every other mobster being made, Eboli supposedly told Luciano that the Mob back in New York did not want to see his film get made.
“I’m as good as dead,” Luciano then told Gosch. “And maybe you too.”
Supposedly, Meyer Lansky was the key figure behind this request. This seems odd, as Lansky hated Genovese and Eboli would never have spoken for him. According to Gosch, it was then that Luciano softened his disappointment at ending the film deal by telling him that he could take down his life story and turn it into a book to be published ten years after his death.
Almost a year later, Eboli’s brother Pat arrived in Naples to tell Luciano that the movie project had so upset the ruling mafiosi that they had ordered his execution. The only thing that could save his life was if he sent the original script, with his signature of approval on it, to New York so that the bosses had this in their possession. This is Gosch’s story and seems more like a fairy tale. Why did the Mob bosses think that possession of an easily copied script would stop the film being made? But apparently, Luciano agreed to the deal and this was why he set up a meeting with Gosch at the Naples airport in January 1962.
According to Glassman, the meeting was called so that Luciano could sack Gosch from the project and give him a piece of his mind about betraying his colleague. Luciano’s phone was being tapped at the time and, shortly after he arranged for Gosch to fly in from Madrid, his apartment was raided by Italian police who suspected he might be seeing a narcotics smuggler from Spain. Gosch dressed up this story by saying that Luciano was being set up in a fake drug bust by associates of Genovese looking for vengeance. The source for much of this tale was investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who wrote an article for the
Washington Post
in early 1962 entitled “The Last Days of Lucky Luciano.”
Anderson was fed a story by FBN agents that went like this: Eight months before his final meeting with Gosch, in May 1961, a Miami couple called Henry and Theresa Rubino arrived at Luciano’s apartment in Naples. They were looking for a restaurant to buy and Luciano was their adviser, having invested in a few over the years. They visited several nightspots together with Luciano and his girlfriend, Adriana Rizzo. A month later they went back to Miami to sell their own restaurant to raise some money. Luciano wrote a letter to them that was intercepted by the police.

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