The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (20 page)

With the crash, Luciano and his friends became convinced that Prohibition would soon die, that repeal was only a matter of time. “The public won’t buy it no more,” he told his close allies. “When they ain’t got nothin’ else, they gotta have a drink or there’s gonna be trouble. And they’re gonna want to have that drink legal.” It was necessary, they decided, to begin to plan for ways to get into the legal whiskey business when that day came. At the same time, they decided to reexamine their whole operation in light of the country’s economic crisis, to see if it might be necessary to get out of some rackets and to put extra effort into others.

One thing they knew; they had some time. On the eve of the crash, Luciano had been caught in the middle. His ambitions and
his very life had been threatened by both Maranzano and Masseria; both were issuing ultimatums and he could not satisfy both and still live, yet he was determined to satisfy neither. But the pressure now eased, for both the ganglords were too concerned with putting their own business into shape in the aftermath of that black week in October, and too busy with their own intensifying rivalry, to devote themselves to the Luciano problem.

In the course of the daily meetings at his apartment, Luciano and his friends realized that in a time of no hope the man who could provide some hope, no matter how ephemeral, some escape, no matter how temporary, would not lack for clients. Such hope could be found in the bottle, in games of chance and in other rackets.

Vito Genovese had another plan to provide the public with escape. Despite Luciano’s admonitions, he had not ceased dealing in narcotics. Now he wanted to expand. The profits, he said, were so much greater than in anything else and once a sale was made, the customer was hooked and he had to keep coming back for more. Luciano was just as convinced that narcotics led only to trouble; he knew that from his own experience. “I kept tryin’ to argue Vito out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe I should’ve thrown him out, but you can’t just throw a guy like that out cold. Especially not after all the things Vito done for me.”

In Genovese, Luciano had a sure gun, and at that moment he needed all the guns he could find, guns that were trustworthy and unquestioning. So he told Genovese, “I don’t wanna know nothin’ about it. If you wanna do it, do it; anybody you wanna do it with, do it with. But don’t tell me about it. I don’t want it and I don’t wanna know about it. Just remember, Vito, if you get in trouble with that stuff, you’ll have to bail yourself out.”

If Luciano, then, ruled out narcotics, he ruled, in a bigger way than ever, in favor of the old idea of usury. The bankers were extremely chary about lending what little money they had, and so potential borrowers had to look elsewhere. Elsewhere meant the underworld, which had amassed millions of dollars in cash during Prohibition — for it did little else than a cash business. Within a year after the crash, so fast did their shylocking business grow that millions of dollars had been put into the street in the form of
usurious loans. With companies failing at a disastrous rate, it became senseless to wreak physical violence on the defaulting borrower. So more and more companies in the garment industry, meat packing, milk, trucking and other industries vital to the city’s economic life began to fall under mob control, to be used as legitimate fronts for illicit activities.

Luciano himself, in these days, had his money out on the street not merely as a loan shark. As the economic panic worsened, some of his society and Wall Street friends, with no little trepidation, came to him for help, prepared to receive it at exorbitant rates. But since they were friends, Luciano was generous. “I wanted to prove to them guys that even a gangster had a heart and was willin’ to help a friend out of a spot. I loaned lots of ’em whatever they needed, and I charged ’em like I was a bank — two or three per cent interest.” Some never repaid, and Luciano merely shrugged off the losses.

While loansharking preyed on the need to borrow, gambling in its various forms played on the dream of a windfall. The numbers racket took a sudden upsurge beyond the expectations of Luciano, Lansky, Costello and the others; Costello’s slots, after a letdown, began to regurgitate a never-ending stream of nickels, dimes and quarters. Betting on everything and anything seemed to be the passion of those who had nothing but hope that a bet would pay off.

The nationwide betting syndicate that had been seeded by Moses Annenberg in Chicago now flourished. If people wanted to bet on horses, they didn’t care about going to the track; what they wanted was to place their bets and get the results as soon as possible. A national telephone wire service, which could bring the results into every bookmaking parlor, was necessary. “I always thought of Annenberg as my kind of guy,” said Luciano. He had provided Annenberg with the goon squads to seize and hold prime corners in Manhattan when Annenberg, as circulation director at the time for Hearst, had led the
Daily Mirror
into New York to challenge the
Daily News
. “And I used to think of the
Mirror
as my newspaper.”

When Annenberg developed the racing wire, Luciano was a prime customer and a prime backer. “The new racin’ wire had been worked out with the telephone company; to this day that
high-class corporation knows that it’s the heart of the biggest gamblin’ empire in the world. As far as Annenberg was concerned, he never could’ve operated without us. He needed us and we needed him. It was a good thing all around.”

So, while the nation around him was falling deeper into depression, Luciano’s star continued to rise. Even his family was coming at least partially to terms with his activities. “My old man never really changed. I have to be honest, sometimes he knew me better than I knew myself. But he got tired of tryin’ to tell my mother that I’d always be in the rackets. To keep peace, he finally learned how to shrug it off. That Christmas of 1929 was the nicest one we had all through the years up to that time. Everybody was together and for the first time I actually sat down to dinner with my whole family and nobody talked about me bein’ a truant or gettin’ out of the can or nothin’. There wasn’t even no mention of the marks on my face, but every once in a while when my mother would walk past where I was sittin’ at the table, she’d sort of run her hand over my cheek where Maranzano knifed me and I could see that she was cryin’ to herself. Outside of that, it was all very happy and for a fast few hours I almost wished I had a nine-to-five job, like the rest of the crumbs. Then I looked out the window and I seen my Cadillac parked at the curb and I knew that I’d never give that up.”

But moments of calm and a time for major involvement in his own business could not last long. Soon the pressures began to mount. His friend Tommy Lucchese came to see him one day with disturbing news. The negotiations between Reina and Maranzano had reached a climax, and Reina was about to make his move and take Lucchese with him. “This was gonna put us in one lousy spot. Lepke and Lucchese was doin’ great in the moneylendin’ business and they had a guy with them named Abe Reles who was doin’ a lot of the enforcin’ for them. And Tommy said if we could put together a big enough kitty — I mean millions in cash — we could control everythin’ in the district. So if Tommy’s break with Masseria come too soon, it was gonna fuck up the whole combination that I put together in the garment district. Lucchese would be part of Maranzano’s outfit and Lepke was still, through me, with Masseria. I told Lucchese to see if he could
keep Reina from makin’ the move too soon so we could have enough time to set up the garment district with a good foundation.”

But there was to be little time. Soon after the new year of 1930 began, Masseria told Luciano he finally had complete proof of Reina’s impending treachery; he ordered Luciano to devise a plan to stop Reina. “I have to prove to every punk who’s in our outfit,” Masseria said, “that there’s only one boss in the city of New York and only one head of the brotherhood in America — and that’s Don Giuseppe Masseria. If I close my eyes to Reina, then Maranzano will win this war without firing another shot. You must keep Reina with me and I don’t care how you do it, but do it.”

It was a delicate assignment; Luciano called his friends together to discuss it. They met early in January on a fishing boat off Oyster Bay, Long Island, on a cold, snowy night. Along with Luciano there were Adonis, Costello, Genovese, Siegel and Lucchese. Lansky was unable to attend. His wife, Anna, was seriously ill as a result of her pregnancy; with a premature delivery imminent, she became nearly hysterical whenever Lansky left the house. “How the hell could I ask Meyer to leave Anna? So we went on without him.”

The following day, January 15, Anna Lansky gave birth to a son, who was named Bernard after a favorite Lansky uncle. The delivery was difficult and the child was born a cripple. Anna Lansky suffered a breakdown as a result, seeing the physical defect of her child a judgment from God on both her and Lansky. Distraught at his wife’s outbursts at him and over the birth of a crippled child, Lansky fled from New York in the company of a good friend, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, holed up in a Boston hotel for several days drinking himself into oblivion before coming to some kind of terms with his tragedy, and then returned to pick up his life back in New York.

Even without Lansky, the decisions were made. “Tommy Lucchese showed up at last and he brought some very bad news. He’d had dinner with Reina a couple of hours before and he’d learned somethin’ that Masseria didn’t tell me — that Masseria was plannin’ to knock off both Joe Profaci and Joe Bananas
[Joseph Bonanno] who was Castellammarese with Maranzano. If he done that and Reina could be persuaded to stay with Masseria, maybe it would keep everybody else in line. We all agreed then that there was no way to stop the war, and the only thing we should think about was how we could win it.

“That’s when we suddenly realized we had to switch our old plans around — that Masseria had to go first instead of Maranzano. Now, when you’re dealin’ with a Sicilian, you gotta think Sicilian or you ain’t got a chance. So I tried to put myself into Masseria’s head and figure out why we wanted to keep Reina alive while he was plannin’ behind my back to knock off Joe Profaci and Joe Bananas. That’s when it got very clear. Masseria would make it look to Maranzano like I had masterminded the hits on those two big shots who was on his side and at the same time I was workin’ to keep Reina from goin’ over to him. The result would be that Maranzano would come after me with everythin’ he had.

“The minute I explained it, Bugsy Siegel said, “We’re always wastin’ time. You Italian bastards are forever chewin’ it over and chewin’ it over until there’s not a fuckin’ thing to swallow. There’s only one way to go — we gotta knock off Reina as soon as possible and Tommy’s gotta pass the word on to Maranzano that it was a hit from Masseria. And we gotta make sure nothin’ happens to Profaci and Bananas.’

“That’s the way we set it up. I picked Vito for the job, with instructions that Reina hadda get it face-to-face, accordin’ to the rules. I really hated to knock off Tom Reina, and none of my guys really wanted to neither. Reina was a man of his word, he had culture, and he was a very honorable Italian. He practically ran the Bronx except for what Dutch Schultz was doin’ with beer and meat, and he had control of the whole ice racket, which was pretty important when you figure that seventy-five per cent of the city didn’t have electric refrigerators and was usin’ ice. But he hadda be eliminated so I could keep on livin’ and keep on movin’ up.”

Luciano learned that every Wednesday night, Reina had dinner with an aunt on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx. On February 26, 1930, Genovese was waiting outside that house about eight o’clock in the evening. When Reina emerged, Genovese called to him.
“Vito told me that when Reina saw him he started to smile and wave his hand. When he done that, Vito blew his head off with a shotgun.”

The suspicion was immediate and widespread, as Luciano and his friends had hoped, that Masseria had ordered the killing and that it had been carried out by one of his assassins, Joe Catania. Masseria compounded the suspicion when he summoned Reina’s top lieutenants — Gaetano “Tom” Gagliano, Tommy Lucchese and Dominic “The Gap” Petrilli — to announce that he was taking over and appointing Joseph Pinzolo as boss of the Reina family interests. “I always thought Masseria was a stupid pig, but I honestly didn’t believe that he was that stupid, to expect Reina’s top guys to swallow all that. As big a shit as Masseria was, he didn’t hold a candle to Pinzolo. That guy was fatter, uglier and dirtier than Masseria was on the worst day when the old bastard didn’t take a bath, which was most of the time.”

Pinzolo immediately tried to emulate his master in dealing with Reina’s lieutenants. Outwardly, they offered few objections, though their dissatisfaction was barely disguised and they carried many of their complaints to Luciano. He was, after all, a close friend to all three, particularly to Lucchese and Petrilli — he had gotten his nickname, “The Gap,” when, as a child, two of his front teeth had been knocked out in a fight. “I sent him to my own dentist on Columbus Circle, and he fixed up the Gap’s mouth with a bridge. Girls used to laugh at him and he had a hard time. After that, he become a real ladies’ man and from that minute on, if I asked him to jump off a buildin’ he would’ve done it.” As Pinzolo became more arrogant, the three lieutenants began to plot his elimination, and in September, Lucchese asked Pinzolo to meet him at an office he maintained on Broadway near Times Square. Lucchese left Pinzolo alone to check out some receipts, and as Lucchese later told Luciano, Petrilli entered and put two shots into Pinzolo’s head, right to his face, according to the rules.

“Nobody mourned, not even Masseria. He told me afterwards, ‘The hit on Pinzolo was a good thing. Now maybe Lucchese and the rest of them guys will stop squawkin’.’ The whole thing was dropped right then and there and Pinzolo didn’t even get the regulation funeral.”