The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (42 page)

Luciano waited at Sing Sing for Dewey’s answer, refusing to talk any further to anyone. Soon, Polakoff was back with the reply. It was an agreement in principle on all but one point. Luciano had demanded immediate and unrestricted parole that would permit his return to New York to pick up the reins of empire. Dewey would have none of it. He agreed to work out a process for parole and freedom when he won the governorship, but it would be granted only on condition that Luciano agree to his deportation to Italy and permanent exile from the United States.

“I knew right away what that little mustached prick was gettin’ at. In order for me to help him, and what’s even more important, not to go against him and hurt his chances to be President, the bastard was willin’ to let me out — but he wanted me far, far away. That meant I’d have to agree to leave my own country, because I was a legal citizen ever since my old man took out papers when I was a kid. They couldn’t deport me if I didn’t agree to it. And I realized another thing he figured: it would make him look
good that he was gettin’ rid of that terrible gangster Lucky Luciano for the benefit of the United States of America.

“But it meant somethin’ else, too. It meant I’d have to stay in jail until the war was over. They couldn’t send me to Italy while we was still at war and it was an enemy country. So, you see what happened? It’s like guys tryin’ to commit a perfect crime. I had worked up the perfect plan, I thought — and every goddamn point of it worked like a breeze, until Dewey come up with his condition. We argued like crazy, tryin’ to get Dewey to change his mind, but it was no use. Dewey was standin’ pat. Finally, I thought, what the hell — it was better than nothin’. At that point, it was a helluva lot better than rottin’ in stir for years and tryin’ to fight a losin’ battle. Also, it occurred to me that maybe somethin’ might happen later and I could find a way to get back after the war was over and everythin’ cooled off. One thing, though; Dewey promised not to put the heat on the outfit like they did from 1939 to 1941. In other words, they would act sensible. And that’s when I said okay, and all the fellas could sit down and work out the details.

“Then we got to the price. Dewey got ninety grand from me. It was supposed to be a contribution to his governor’s campaign. As a matter of fact, the way I remember it, he wanted a lot more. But the way I looked at it, that phony conviction of mine cost me so much money that Dewey oughta pay me to get out of the country. Besides, Costello didn’t exactly forget that lovely doublecross we got from the gentleman from Hyde Park and we wasn’t about to shell out a big bundle in front, like before. We finally settled for twenty-five grand as a down payment. It was supposed to go into a secret Dewey campaign fund, and we agreed to put up the rest, the sixty-five thousand, when I got out. And we did pay it, in cash, in small bills, the minute I set foot on the boat that was gonna take me to Italy. You might say the cash was put in an escrow bag that was earmarked personally for Dewey’s fund. Later on, I made a check about that ninety grand. It never showed on none of our books for tax returns, naturally; but it never showed up on none of Dewey’s campaign returns either.”

Once the deal had been confirmed, Luciano suggested to Haffenden that it would be a lot easier for him to make his contributions to national defense if he were not confined in Dannemora, so
far from everyone he knew and would have to confer with. He would need to have constant contact with his friends in New York and around the country, he told Haffenden, would need to talk personally with couriers who would pass on his orders to the hierarchy of his nationwide organization. Among those he would need to see constantly, he said, were Lansky, Costello, Lanza, Albert Anastasia and Tony Anastasio, Adonis and several others. For them to journey regularly to Dannemora would be a great hardship.

With the concurrence of Dewey and Judge McCook, Luciano was immediately transferred to the “country club” of the New York penal system, Great Meadow Prison in Comstock, just north of Albany. There he settled in comfortably, waiting for the end of the war and his freedom. It was an easy life; he had the run of the prison, food of his choosing was brought in at his expense from the outside, he was allowed to install personal furnishings in his cell. At the request of naval intelligence, a private office was set aside for his conferences with Haffenden and with the steady stream of underworld visitors who poured in several times a week, supposedly involved with the top-secret “Operation Underworld.” Those conferences, however, dealt not with the war effort but with the mob’s own business, in gambling and black markets, and particularly with plans for the postwar years.

“The warden was a guy named Vernon Morhous, a really very sweet guy. Naturally, we had him in our pocket, but there wasn’t nothin’ unusual about that; there ain’t a jail in the world where money can’t buy a little bit or a lotta favors. Morhous made no trouble for me; he gave me anythin’ I wanted that was reasonable; in fact, a couple of times he even let me go to Albany with a guard for a little relaxation, just to walk around the streets without handcuffs. I gave him my word I wouldn’t pull nothin’ and I never did. He trusted me, and I could’ve ruined him if I broke my word.

“But it was no tea party, the time I spent in Great Meadow. The war didn’t end until 1945 and by the time they got through with all the shitty paperwork and red tape, I never really got free until the beginnin’ of 1946. That condition of Dewey’s cost me almost three and a half long years in jail, just because he didn’t have the guts to let me out sooner. Also, we hadda get things movin’ long before the war was over; I mean, to start the wheels in motion.”

The course of the war fascinated Luciano now, for his personal freedom was deeply involved. He covered one wall of his cell with a huge map of the European war zone and marked on it the course of battles and the progress of campaigns. He was elated with news of Allied victories, deeply depressed at word of setbacks. He became a fervent admirer of General George S. Patton and complained frequently that General Dwight Eisenhower was not giving Patton the free hand he needed. Soon Luciano began to see himself as a master military strategist, and to his visitors he talked often of tactical errors and stupidities committed by the military and political leaders.

“I was goin’ nuts. The war was drivin’ me crazy. Around the end of 1943, there was all that talk about openin’ a second front in Europe to get the war over in a hurry, but it was nothin’ but talk, and all the time I was wastin’ away in Great Meadow wonderin’ why the hell those masterminds in Washington couldn’t get the lead out of their asses. Finally, I couldn’t take it no more and I sent word that I had to see Tommy Lucchese and Joe Adonis right away.

“They came up the next day and I told ’em somethin’ hadda be done with this guy Hitler. I said that if somebody could knock off this son of a bitch, the war would be over in five minutes. They started to laugh at me and I got mad. I said, ‘What the hell are you laughin’ at? We’ve got the best hit man in the world over there — Vito Genovese. That dirty little pig owes his life to me and now it’s time for him to make good on it. He’s so fuckin’ friendly with Mussolini and that punk son-in-law of his, that Count Ciano, he oughta be able to get close enough to Hitler to do it.’ I got so wound up and I was yellin’ so loud that one of the guards comes runnin’ in to see what the hell was goin’ on. They’re all lookin’ at me like I’m crazy. And then I suddenly realized what the hell I’d been sayin’. It was funny. But it was no joke to me, really. It shows what it means when they say a guy can go stir-crazy.

“When you’re stuck away in places like Dannemora, or even in Great Meadow, you begin to do one of two things. Either you get sore at the world and you wanna hit back as soon as you can, or you begin to think about your mistakes; not the mistakes you made in general. You got plenty of time to think behind bars and if you’re
workin’ in a quiet place like a library, like I was at Dannemora, you got more than plenty of time to size up your life. I can’t say I was ever sorry or that I should’ve gone straight; that was too late a long time back. But when somebody from my family come up, especially to Dannemora, I couldn’t talk to nobody for a week. I’d see my brother walk out and then I’d go back to my cell and hit my head against the wall. One time it started to bleed and they hadda sew it up. I never really knew for sure in those days just what bothered me, whether I was blind mad because I was stupid and got caught or whether I’d been an idiot for gettin’ mixed up in the rackets and breakin’ the law. I never really understood, myself, about the whole thing until long afterwards.

“Of course, when I got down to Great Meadow I had a lot more visitors; it was easier to get people in. One night, Warden Morhous let me out with a couple of guards. We went to a little place, a kind of roadhouse near Albany. Gay Orlova met me there and she brought along a dozen thick sirloin steaks from a frozen meat locker Costello had in New York. The four of us had a great dinner and then Gay and me went to a nice room upstairs and we spent most of the night together. It was beautiful. And I kept thinkin’, so what, Dewey owes me this.”

As he waited impatiently in Great Meadow for the war to end, Luciano was suddenly faced with a major new problem. Vito Genovese was back, in jail in Brooklyn, facing a trial for the old murder of Ferdinand Boccia. The question that had to be decided was whether Genovese should be helped, and if so, how much help should be given.

Luciano’s initial feeling was to turn his back on his old lieutenant; for years, bitterness against Genovese had been festering and growing within him. “Vito went over there with a bundle big enough to choke a horse. When the war started, he didn’t have to live in a country that was an enemy of the United States; there was plenty of safe places for a guy with money. But he was just rotten greedy. We heard everythin’ he was doin’ — word got back to us through Lisbon and other places because we had plenty of pipelines in and out of Europe. We heard Vito had gone big into junk.
Anythin’ that easy for him was hard to pass up, even if it meant betrayin’ his own country.

“He found out that Mussolini’s son-in-law took cocaine, and that was all Vito hadda know. From then on, he was Ciano’s personal supplier. He had Ciano hooked so bad the bastard couldn’t live without him. One time, Ciano flew him to Istanbul in his own plane, right in the middle of the fuckin’ war, for chrissake, so he could set up a big connection in Turkey, and he arranged to bring the stuff back to a couple of refiners in Milan. And, believe it or not, Italian pilots actually ferried the junk over to Africa, even to Tangier, all the time that Rommel had control of North Africa. That prick, Vito — junk was his whole life. Once, in 1944, Joe A. brought Steve Maggadino from Buffalo to see me at Great Meadow, and Maggadino showed me a letter he got from Vito sayin’ that he hadda work out a new way to transport the stuff because the Americans took over North Africa and screwed up his route. And he was mad about it, that his own country was beginnin’ to beat the shit out of the Nazis.

“But what Maggadino didn’t know, because Vito couldn’t write it in a letter so open, was that he was beginnin’ to feel the pinch between the Americans makin’ their way up into Italy and his friend Mussolini and all of his crowd runnin’ like hell out of Rome. Vito never had the brains to figure that might happen and he didn’t have no connections with the new guys who took over. So he was up shit’s creek without a paddle and as usual he was screamin’ to me for help. I’m locked up at Great Meadow, four thousand miles away, and he turns to me to fix up his stupid situation.

“I told Maggadino that I’d already sent word to Costello to make sure Vito wound up on his feet in Italy. I was thinkin’ of myself when I did that, because all the plans I was makin’ would mean that I’d have to go to Italy, at least for a while, and I might need Vito over there with me. As it happened, the Army appointed Charlie Poletti, who was one of our good friends, as the military governor in Italy and Poletti kept that job for quite a long time. His headquarters was in a place called Nola and Vito wound up as the official Italian-American interpreter. Maybe if I had it to do
over again, I would’ve arranged for Poletti’s troops to line Vito up against a wall and shoot him.”

In mid-1944, Italy surrendered to the Allies and the American forces promptly established a military government under the direction of Colonel Charles Poletti, a former New York lieutenant governor, and, for a short period after the departure of Herbert Lehman for wartime service, acting governor. The bilingual Genovese appeared at the headquarters one day and was immediately hired as official civilian interpreter. Within weeks, he established himself at the head of a vast black market operation throughout Allied-occupied Italy; on his payroll were a number of American military and civilian officials, and a small army of Allied soldiers who opened the doors of Army warehouses for him, who drove military trucks in his employ, and who sold merchandise at his direction. His position in the inner circles of the American military government gave him freedom of movement and, for a time, freedom from suspicion.

Captain Charles L. Dunn, the provisional officer at the huge supply base at Nola, employed Genovese as his personal interpreter in January of 1944, and wrote that he “has been invaluable to me . . . is absolutely honest and, as a matter of fact, exposed several cases of bribery and black market operations among so-called civilian personnel. He . . . is devoted to his adopted home, the United States of America.” Major E. N. Holmgren, civil affairs officer at Nola, used Genovese as an interpreter for more than a month and said that he “would accept no pay; paid his own expenses, worked day and night, and rendered most valuable assistance to the Allied Military Government.” Major Stephen Young, for whom Genovese also worked, said: “I regard him as trustworthy, loyal, and dependable.”