Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (12 page)

Even though most of his mob boss associates were in the Italian Mafia, Lansky had as much say as the Italians. In fact, most people considered Lansky “the brains of the operation,” while the Italians mostly provided the muscle. Because he was short in stature, Lansky was dubbed “The Little Man,” However, this was not a derogatory term. Lansky's vote on any crime issue usually took precedence over anyone else's vote.

After Luciano went to jail on a trumped-up prostitution charge, Siegel convinced Lansky that there was money to be made in the desert of Las Vegas, Nevada, which was then little more than a “comfort station” for weary travelers. Lansky formed the Nevada Projects Corporation, and Las Vegas was born.

Unfortunately, Siegel did not live long enough to reap the mob's Las Vegas profits. Siegel was suspected of skimming the mob's construction cash, and in 1947, Siegel was shot through the eye, as he sat in the living room of his girlfriend Virginia Hill's mansion in Beverly Hills. Rumors arose that Lansky voted against killing his longtime pal Siegel, but in fact, Lansky agreed, saying, “I had no choice.”

Lansky invested heavily in the casino gambling operations in Cuba. However in 1959, Lansky lost everything, when Fidel Castro took over the rule of Cuba from Fulgencio Batista in a military coup.

With the United States government cracking down on the mob in Las Vegas, Lansky fled to Israel to avoid arrest. He tried to claim Israeli citizenship under “The Law of Return,” a rule that gave citizenship to anyone born of a Jewish mother. After lengthy court battles, Lansky's pleas for citizenship in Israel were turned down, and he was sent back to America. In 1973, law enforcement officials tried to jail Lansky on tax evasion charges, like they had done with Al Capone four decades earlier. However, Lansky was acquitted at trial, which gave the government a big black eye.

After undergoing open heart surgery in 1973, Lansky spent the rest of his life as a sickly man. Stricken with lung cancer, Meyer Lansky died at his home in Miami Beach, Florida, in January 1983, at the age of 80.

L
eslie, George Leonidas

George Leonidas Leslie started out in life as one of the privileged class. However, Leslie soon became a criminal, known by the New York City Police as “King of the Bank Robbers.”

Leslie was born in Cincinnati in 1840. His father owned a brewery, and Leslie started out as an academic, graduating from the University of Cincinnati with honors and a degree in architecture.

After both his parents had died, Leslie sold his father's brewery. He gave up his architectural career, and he moved to New York City. There Leslie fell in with a bad crowd,  and he decided he could make a darn good living by robbing banks. It is estimated, that in the 10-year period spanning 1874-1884, Leslie was responsible for 80 percent of all bank robberies committed in the United States; swiping cash estimated to be between 7-12 million dollars.

In New York City, Leslie posed as a man-about-town of considerable means. He belonged to the most exclusive clubs, and he was a regular theatergoer and a patron of the arts. Leslie used this false pretense to gain access to valuable bits of information, that made his bank-robbing life most profitable.

Leslie would often spend as much as three years planning a bank job. When he found a bank to his liking, Leslie would try to get the blueprints of the interior of the bank. If that were not possible, Leslie would visit the bank posing as a depositor. With his experience in architecture, Leslie would then draw up rough plans, detailing the intricacies of the inside of the bank. Sometimes, Leslie would have one of his gang members get a job at the bank, either as a night watchman, or a porter. These “inside men” would provide Leslie with the exact specifications of the inside of the bank, and the make and model of the bank vault.

After obtaining all this valuable information, Leslie would then buy a duplicate of the bank's safe. Leslie spent days, and sometimes weeks, perfecting the art of opening that safe. Leslie shied away from using dynamite to crack the safe, having decided that an explosion would cause too much noise and lead to them being detected.

Leslie method of opening safes included boring a hole underneath the dial, then using a thin piece of steel to manipulate the tumblers into place. To cover almost any contingency in robbing a bank, Leslie had a set of burglar tools specially created for him, which cost the staggering sum of $3,000 -  more than most people, at that time, earned in several years.

To perfect the job he was planning, Leslie sometimes set up a room in a loft he had rented downtown to resemble the inside of the bank he was planning to rob. There Leslie, and the men whom he had selected for that particular bank job, would spend considerable amounts of time practicing exactly how the bank robbery should develop. Leslie would darken the lights, and watch his men go through their maneuvers in the dark. He would  then critique their work.

Leslie’s cohorts consisted of various known criminals, such as Jimmy Hope, Jimmy Brady, Abe
Coakley, Shang Draper, Red Leary, Johnny Dobbs, Worcester Sam Perris, Bill Kelly, and Banjo Pete Emerson.

In May of 1875, Leslie decided to rob the Manhattan Savings Institution at 644 Broadway. Leslie, through his “inside man” at the bank, Patrick Shelvin, found out the make and model of the lock on the bank's vault. Leslie procured an exact model from the manufacturers: Valentine &
Bulter. Then, Leslie spent six months perfecting the opening of the lock.

On October 27, 1875, Shelvin let Leslie and Leslie's crew into the bank at night. When their work was done, they had stolen $3.5 million in cash and securities, almost $50 million in today's money. No one was arrested until May 1879, and as a result, Jimmy Hope and Bill Kelly were convicted and sent to prison. Abe
Coakley and Banjo Pete Emerson were also arrested, but they were acquitted at trial. Leslie was never arrested, and his involvement in the bank robbery was not discovered until after his death.

Leslie’s reputation grew to such gigantic proportions, he was often called in as a “consultant” by other bank-robbing gangs. It is believed, Leslie received more than $20,000, just
to travel to San Francisco to look over plans for a local bank heist.

Yet, if Leslie had one weakness, it was for the affections of  a woman. Leslie began an affair with the girlfriend of one of his cohorts: Shang Draper, a murderous thug of the worst sort.

On June 4, 1884, Leslie's decomposed body was found lying at the base of Tramps Rock, near the borderline between Westchester and the Bronx. He was shot twice in the head. Police speculated that Leslie was killed by the jealous Draper in a house at 101 Lynch Street in Brooklyn. Then Leslie's body was carted to Tramps Rock, by three of Draper's associates, who had been seen near Yonkers at the time Leslie's body was discovered.

However, there was little evidence of the crime, and no one was ever arrested for Leslie's murder.

L
uciano, Lucky

Lucky Luciano was born Salvatore Luciana on November 24, 1896, in
Lercara Friddi, a tiny town near Palermo, Sicily. Luciano immigrated with his family to America in 1907, and they settled in an apartment building at 265 East 10
th
Street. The rumor was that as a 10-year-old Luciano was a terror in Sicily, and he convinced a customs officer at Ellis Island to change his name from Luciana to Luciano, in order to avoid detection by several enemies he had made in the old country.

Luciano was not a model student. As a result, Luciano decided to work  a racket in which he would confront skinny Jewish kids on their way to the public school he attended, and offer them, for a penny or two, protection from him not beating them up. Some kids paid, and some kids Luciano beat up badly. However, one skinny Jewish kid fought Luciano tooth and nail in an all-out street fight. The Jewish kid's name was Meyer Lansky, and they started a lifelong friendship that would be extremely profitable to both.

Luciano dropped out of school at the age of 15, and he worked in a hat factory for a while. Unfortunately, that was not the life for him. Looking for a different kind of work, Luciano started hanging out on Mulberry Street, and soon he became a charter member of the Five Points Gang, under the tutelage of their leader, Paul Kelly, with top-notch hoods Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale as his mentors. Luciano became a “leg-breaker” for the Five Points Gang, and he was suspected of many beatings and maybe even a few murders. However, the Five Points Gang had their hooks into crooked cops and politicians, so Luciano was never brought up on any criminal charges.

By 1920, the Five Points Gang had splintered into several smaller gangs. Luciano saw potential in the rackets of Joe “The Boss” Masseria, who himself saw potential in the rough-and-tumble Luciano. Masseria treated Luciano like a son, and he made Luciano his top gun and second in command in all Masseria's operations.

However, Masseria didn't like the fact that Luciano did business with Jews like Lansky and Lansky's partner Bugsy Siegel; or even with Italians like Frank Costello, who was from Calabria, and didn't have Masseria's required Sicilian bloodlines.

Finally, Luciano decided Masseria had to go, and because Masseria was now involved in the Castellammarese War with rival Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano threw in with Maranzano with the intention of killing Masseria. To finalize his double-cross, Luciano lured Masseria to a Coney Island restaurant, and while Luciano was taking a bathroom break, Siegel and three other men barged in and shot Masseria to death.

After a few months under the strict rule of Maranzano, Luciano decided Maranzano, and his old-world ways, had to go, too. Furthermore, Maranzano felt the same way about the ambitious Luciano. As a result, Maranzano invited Luciano to a meeting in Maranzano's midtown office, where he planned to have Vincent “Mad Dog” Cole shoot Luciano into Swiss cheese.

Luckily for Luciano, he was one step ahead of Maranzano. Luciano sent four men, led by Samuel “Red” Levine, to Maranzano's office, where they shot and stabbed Maranzano to death. As they left the scene of the crime, the four men passed Cole in the ground floor hallway. They told Cole that Maranzano was already dead and not to bother going up to Maranzano's office. Cole shrugged, did an about-face and quickly exited the building, quite content in the fact that he had been paid in advance for doing absolutely nothing.

Luciano's next move was to unite all the disjointed mobs into separate, but equal groups; Italians and otherwise. With the assistance of Lansky, Luciano formed a National Crime Syndicate. However, Luciano's reign was short-lived.

In 1936, ambitious special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, arrested, tried, and convicted Luciano on a trumped-up charge of prostitution. The key evidence against Luciano was provided by several pimps and prostitutes, who were more interested in staying out of prison than they were about giving truthful testimony. As a result, Luciano was sentenced to 30-50 years in prison.

However, after the end of World War II, Dewey, now Governor of New York, offered  Luciano parole, for his “wartime services to his country.” These services included Luciano's men providing protection on the New York City docks, most likely from themselves. The catch was, Luciano could never return to the United States and would instead be exiled forever to Italy. From Italy, Luciano still kept his fingers in mob affairs, even sneaking into Cuba to help Lansky run his lucrative casino businesses.

By the early 1960's, Luciano, due to several heart attacks, was an extremely ill man. Knowing his days were numbered, Luciano was contemplating providing details for a movie concerning his longtime connections to organized crime. Lansky and his pals were not too happy about these new turn of events. But before they could stop him, on January 26, 1962, Charles “Lucky” Luciano died of a heart attack at a Naples airport. He was on his way to meet an arriving scriptwriter to discuss the details of that never-made biographical flick.

M
adden, Owney

Owney “The Killer” Madden was an anomaly in the world of the 1920 New York City gangsters, mainly because Madden was not Italian or even Jewish. Madden was British, the son of a relocated Irish dockworker, born and bred and dedicated for life to his homeland: merry old England. In fact, even though Madden was an American criminal for six decades, he didn't give up his English passport until 1950, after he was threatened with deportation.

Owen "Owney" Madden was born at 25 Somerset Street, in Leeds, England, on December 18, 1891. In need of work, his father moved the Madden family to Liverpool. In 1903, when young Madden was only 12, his father died, and his mother re-located her family to America, settling on the West Side of Manhattan in a treacherous neighborhood called  “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Madden fell in with a rough-and-tumble gang known as the Gophers, and he became proficient in the favored crimes of the era: robberies, muggings, and labor racket beatings. Madden was adept at using a myriad of weapons, including a slingshot and brass knuckles. However,  Madden's favorite weapon was a lead pipe, wrapped in newspaper.

Madden's main source of income was the  “insurance business,” where Madden sold “bomb insurance” to scores of local merchants who were worried about having their businesses bombed, of course, by none other than Madden himself. As a member of the Gophers, Madden was arrested 44 times, but managed to stay out of prison every time.

When he was 17, Madden earned his nickname “The Killer,” after he shot to death an unarmed Italian in the street, for no reason, other than the fact that he could do so. After the killing, Madden stood over the dead body, and he announced to the assembled crowd, “I'm Owney Madden!”