The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (2 page)

“Listen,” Gosch said, “right now you’re angry. Some guy brought you a message; they’re trying to stop the movie and they’ve been cutting off your money and threatening you. At this minute, you’re sore at the world. Tomorrow morning, you may feel differently.”

“No, Marty,” Luciano said. “I gave a lotta thought to this. It’s the way I want it.”

Early that afternoon, on the mezzanine of the airport outside Rome, the deal was struck. For the next ten months, Luciano told in detail the story of his life to Martin Gosch, and Gosch was with him at the moment of his death.

What follows, then, is Luciano’s own story, the leader’s story of organized crime and how it came into being, grew and flourished. Parts of it may seem self-serving, and they may well be. Much of it is angry, scurrilous, even defamatory, but that is the way Luciano saw it. It is, in all, the story of an organization and of the man who made the decisions, who gave the orders.

“It ain’t like I didn’t remember Lercara Friddi. After all, I was nine years old when we left there in 1906. Even though I didn’t set eyes on the place again for thirty-nine years, when I got outa jail and they sent me back there, to what was supposed to be my ‘hometown,’ it was like all my memories came back in a couple of minutes. There was the same stink of the sulfur mines outside of our village where my father used to work. There was the same kind of gray dust coverin’ everythin’, and I remembered how it used to get so deep into our clothes that our mothers couldn’t wash it out. And there was the same smell. It was the smell of no money, the smell of bein’ hungry all the time.”

In that poor hillside village of unpaved streets set into the baked, arid interior of Sicily on November 24, 1897, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, christened Salvatore Lucania, was born, the third child and second son of Antonio Lucania and the former Rosalie Capporelli. He was his mother’s favorite from the beginning, supplanting his older brother Giuseppe and sister Francesca, and never completely supplanted, when they arrived, by his younger siblings, Bartolo and Concetta.

“All the time we was growin’ up, it seemed that all my old man ever talked about was going to America. We had a calendar that come from the steamship company in Palermo, which was where you got on the boat. My old man used to get a new one every year and hang it up on the wall, and my mother used to cross herself every time she walked past it. Sometimes we even went without enough to eat, because every cent my old man could lay his hands on would go into a big bottle he kept under his bed. It was his private bank and my mother would count it at the end of every month so we could figure how long it would take before we had enough to go to Palermo and make the boat.”

The bottle was still not full enough in the spring of 1906, and “the idea of missin’ the April sailin’ again was practically eatin’ my father alive. But there was a cousin in Lercara Friddi on my mother’s side, by the name of Rotolo. He had some money from some houses he rented out. My old man was too proud to ask him for a loan. So my mother went to see him in secret and set the whole thing up for Rotolo to hand him a bag of money for the tickets, with a little bit to spare. My old man didn’t find out what my mother had done for more than a year, not until after we was in America. Then he just put money aside and paid Rotolo back in less than two years.”

In the teeming steerage of a creaking ship, in April of 1906, Antonio Lucania led his family, miserable, cold, seasick, to a world alien beyond all their visions. From the quiet, sparsely peopled, familiar ground of Lercara Friddi, where everyone knew everyone, where there were only friends and enemies and relatives, where everyone spoke the same language, where everyone was poor, they arrived in a place where it was a struggle to breathe the air, where there were so many people crowded into so little space that it was a fight just to walk on the sidewalks, where the streets and sidewalks were paved not with gold but with cement and tar, where the night was not dark and starlit but glowing almost like day with artificial light, where the noise made the ears ring, where everyone and everything were strange and terrifying.

It was to the polyglot Lower East Side of New York, below Fourteenth Street and far east near the river, that Antonio Lucania brought his family, to a tiny, dingy, dark flat in a decaying tenement, indistinguishable from the tenements on either side or anywhere in the neighborhood. It was a street, an area, not just of Sicilians, with their warmth and friendship and offers of aid, with their familiar ways. There were Neapolitans and Calabrians and other mainland Italians with their decipherable but still strange accents and customs, and there were the undecipherable, belligerent and hard-drinking Irish. But at least they were all Catholics. For there were also the bizarre, clannish and alien Jews, the anti-Christs the Church had always taught them to fear and avoid.

It did not take long for Antonio Lucania to perceive that he had exchanged the familiar poverty of Lercara Friddi not for a
new world of riches but for a new and even more grinding poverty. His and his family’s world was circumscribed, perhaps even more than it had been back in Sicily. They were limited by their inability to speak the language of this new country, by their unfamiliarity with its customs and mores. They had little knowledge of anything beyond their own street and neighborhood. And their lack of training left them ill prepared to cope with the social and economic realities. Antonio Lucania became a day laborer; though the pay was more than he could have dreamed of earning in Sicily, would have been enough there to provide luxuries, in the United States it provided a bare subsistence.

But he had turned forever from life in Sicily, had made his choice for a new life in America where there was, if nothing else, hope, especially for the children. He applied for and received citizenship as soon as possible, and under the laws then in effect, his wife and five minor children became United States citizens as well.

“As far as my mother and father was concerned, the best thing about America was the schools. They was free. Back in Lercara Friddi, we had only Catholic schools and you hadda pay to go to them.” The five young Lucanias — quickly Americanizing their names so that Giuseppe became Joseph; Francesca, Fannie; Bartolo, Bart; and Concetta, Connie (“Me? I was the holdout, because I figured that if they started to shorten my name, I would be called Sal. Hell, that’s a girl’s name, and they wasn’t gonna hang that on me”) — were enrolled in Public School 10. “It wasn’t easy to go to an American school and not know a goddamn word of English. Maybe, in my whole life, that was the worst time I ever experienced, the first couple years at P.S. 10.” Salvatore was nine, the oldest kid in his class, forced to sit in the back of the room and ignored by his teachers until he could respond in English. It was an experience familiar to the children of almost all immigrants; some adjusted to it quickly, driven by a thirst for knowledge and what education could bring; others were almost narcotized, enveloped by bewilderment; still others, and Salvatore Lucania was one, resisted stubbornly and belligerently and turned to the streets. “All the other kids in my class was like little babies, but they could talk English and I didn’t know what the fuck they was
sayin’. Maybe that’s why I fought so hard to get outa school, out into the streets where a lotta people spoke Sicilian-Italian and they knew what I was sayin’ and I could understand them. I picked up my English on the streets. That’s the one thing I regret in my life more than anythin’ else, that my grammar is lousy and I don’t have too many good words and I talk with a New York accent.”

During his five years of formal education, from the ages of nine to fourteen, first at P.S. 10 and later at P.S. 40, Salvatore Lucania, trapped by ignorance, resistance and greater age and size, watched with a kind of bitter envy the smaller, younger kids, especially the Jewish kids (against whose “corrupting” influence he was constantly warned at home and by the Church), avidly absorb the knowledge and lessons that escaped him, that seemed to soar through their brains to a region beyond his reach. But there was something he learned by watching them; it stayed with him through the years, overcame his suspicions and the inculcations of home and Church, and, unlike most of his Sicilian and Italian associates in later life, drew him to them and opened the way to friendship; they had brains, they were smart, they could prove extraordinary allies.

He was certain, though, that the “old broads,” as he called his teachers (none of whom he could remember by name), had nothing to teach him. But almost without realizing it, he did learn a concept from them that he would eventually bend and distort for his own use. This was the time of union struggle for acceptance and power, and that struggle germinated and flourished on the Lower East Side where the only work available was in sweatshops at long hours and low pay. “Some of the mothers of guys I knew used to work on them sewin’ machines, and if they got up to get a glass of water or open their mouths to breathe some air, some bastard foreman could fire ’em just like that.” In such a climate, Samuel Gompers became a hero and his fledgling International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union a cause to be devoutly espoused. “The old broads in school was always hammerin’ away about union. Of course, what they meant was Washington and Lincoln and the whole country. But to us, unions was somethin’ that had to do with gettin’ people a couple bucks more or a chance to work a few hours less, a chance to organize and become strong. I used those
ideas in the twenties, with Lepke and Tommy Lucchese, when I figured out a way to organize the unions and take ’em over. Later, when the newspapers were callin’ me the head of the labor rackets in New York, I used to wonder if my old teachers knew that they was the ones that taught me all the principles about organizing people.”

In the classroom, Lucania’s behavior only infrequently brought him into open conflict with authorities. That, perhaps, was because he was so rarely in the school. He became a chronic and persistent truant, appearing only to make what profit he could. Very early he had noticed that some of the older Irish and Italian kids were waylaying the younger and smaller Jewish kids on their way home from school, beating and robbing them. Lucania turned this to his profit. For a penny or two a day, he sold his protection to the potential victims. If they paid, they could be sure that their daily trips to and from school would be made in safety, for though young Lucania was never a giant, he was tough enough and old enough to make his promise of protection stick.

It was all part of the widening street world he was learning. In that world, he scrounged for money any way he could get it. Realizing early that “some people had money and some people didn’t,” he had determined that he was destined to be one of those who had it. He ran errands, carried packages from a neighborhood ice cream parlor, the grocery, for anyone who needed an errand boy. Soon he discovered there were easier ways; he branched out into pilfering whatever was lying loose.

But his was still a limited world, made narrow by Sicilian parental authority. The truant officer was often at the door of the Lucanias’ flat, and those visits were invariably followed by a beating from his father. His mother tearfully pleaded with him to finish school, and he would promise that he would. (When he quit at fourteen, after the fifth grade, and got his working papers, he was sure that he had made good on that promise.) But the truancy persisted, and finally on June 25, 1911, the Board of Education took its ultimate stern measure: he was committed to the Brooklyn Truant School, to remain for four months.

“This first time I was locked up is like a fog to me. This was a place where you was supposed to learn that it was wrong not to go
to school. They worked our asses off, just doin’ nothin’. And what a kid learns in that place is how to steal better, or how to pick pockets, all that stuff. When I came out after four months, I knew school and me was through. I also knew I hated Brooklyn. Even later, when I was runnin’ things in Manhattan, I always managed to stay away from Brooklyn and let the guys over there play their own games without interference.”

As he walked through the school gates, his father was waiting for him, to take him home. “We had a lot of trouble gettin’ back to our neighborhood because Brooklyn was like a foreign country. We got lost on the El and it was almost dark by the time we reached home; it took us more than two hours. All durin’ that time, my old man only talked about one thing — go back to school or get a job. I wasn’t goin’ back to school.”

But the only jobs available were those of errand boy, and even those were not easy to come by. The neighborhood was filled with other boys his age, sons of immigrants, who had quit school, were ill educated, held menial jobs if they worked at all, and dreamed of riches, of someday making the big score. “My old man kept sayin’ the neighborhood was gettin’ worse, that there was gangs of young guys around my age who was knockin’ off stores, grabbin’ handbags from old ladies, stuff like that. He said every kid in the neighborhood was growin’ up to be a crook.