On October 1929, three men forced Salvatore Lucania into a limousine at gunpoint. He was beaten, stabbed, and strung up by his hands to a beam in a Staten Island warehouse, left for dead with a permanent scar and a droopy eye. He survived that ordeal and went on to become one of the most powerful figures in the American criminal underworld, known to history as Lucky Luciano. Born on November 24, 1897, in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, Luciano was eight years old when his family immigrated to the United States in April of that year.
They settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood populated heavily by Italian immigrants. At 14, Luciano quit school and took a job delivering hats for $7 a week, but left after winning $244 in a dice game. That same year, his parents enrolled him in the Brooklyn Truant School. Still a teenager, Luciano founded his own gang and also belonged to the old Five Points gang.
Unlike other street gangs focused on petty crime, Luciano charged Jewish youth ten cents a week for protection against Irish and Italian gangs. It was during this period that he first encountered teenage Meyer Lansky, attempting to demand protection money from him while the two walked home from school. Luciano respected Lansky’s resolute response to his threats, and the two formed a strong alliance. Between 1916 and 1936, Luciano was detained 25 times for offenses including robbery, blackmail, illegal gambling, and assault, but he never went to prison.
It remains unclear exactly how he acquired the nickname “Lucky,” although it may have resulted from repeated misspellings in newspaper reports. By 1920, Luciano had come into contact with future Mafia figures Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. That same year, Lower Manhattan gang leader Joe Masseria selected him as one of his mercenaries. Around that time, Luciano and his close friends began working for gambler Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, who immediately recognized the opportunity presented by Prohibition and taught Luciano how to run a bootleg alcohol business.
With Rothstein’s help, Luciano, Costello, and Genovese launched their own bootlegging operation. Luciano learned from Rothstein how to behave in high society, but in 1923 he was caught in a sting operation selling heroin to undercover agents. Though he served no jail time, his reputation among wealthy associates and clients suffered once he was exposed as a drug dealer. To restore his standing, Luciano purchased 200 high-priced tickets to the Jack Dempsey versus Luis Firpo boxing match in the Bronx and gave them out to influential gangsters and politicians.
Rothstein then took him on a shopping trip to Manhattan’s Wanamaker’s department store to buy expensive attire for the fight. The plan worked, and Luciano’s reputation remained intact. By 1925, Luciano was running illegal gambling and bootlegging operations in New York and Philadelphia that brought in over $12 million annually, providing him a personal income of about $4 million. He quickly rose to become top aide in Joe Masseria’s criminal enterprise.
Unlike Rothstein, Masseria had poor manners, little managerial experience, and no formal education. By the late 1920s, Salvatore Maranzano, a Sicilian boss who had come to run the Castellammarese clan, was Masseria’s main rival. When Gaetano Reina, one of Masseria’s lieutenants, sided with Maranzano, Masseria ordered Luciano to set up Reina’s hit. Reina was killed on February 26, 1930, and the bloody Castellammarese War followed.
Masseria and Maranzano both claimed to uphold old-world Mafia principles of honor, tradition, respect, and dignity. They were wary of hiring non-Sicilians, refused to work with non-Italians, and some of the most traditional bosses only allowed men with ties to their own Sicilian village to work for them. Luciano, by contrast, was willing to work with Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangsters alike as long as there was money to be made. He was reportedly shocked when traditional Sicilian mafiosi criticized him for his friendship with Costello, whom they called “The Dirty Calabrian.
”
Luciano began forming relationships with younger mobsters who were born in Italy but started their criminal careers in America and resented their bosses’ conservatism. He wanted to apply the lessons he had learned from Rothstein to expand gang enterprises into criminal empires. Future mob bosses including Costello, Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis, Joe Bonanno, Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, Tommy Gagliano, and Tommy Luchese eventually joined this group as the war dragged on. They believed their bosses’ conservatism and greed kept them in poverty while Irish and Jewish gangs prospered.
In May 1929, Luciano, Johnny Torrio, Lansky, and Costello hosted a conference in Atlantic City with the goal of creating a National Crime Syndicate that would allow Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs to pool their resources and profit from organized crime. With Masseria struggling in the war, Luciano saw a chance to change sides. In a covert agreement with Maranzano, Luciano consented to plan Masseria’s demise in exchange for the rackets Masseria left behind and the opportunity to serve as Maranzano’s second in command. When Masseria learned of Luciano’s treachery, he approached Joe Adonis about killing Luciano, since Adonis had joined the Masseria faction.
Adonis instead alerted Luciano to the murderous scheme. Masseria was killed on April 15, 1931, at Nuova Villa Tammaro, a Coney Island restaurant in Brooklyn. According to reports, Anastasia, Genovese, Adonis, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, along with other gunmen, burst into the restaurant while the men were playing cards, after Luciano allegedly excused himself to use the restroom. The Castellammarese War ended when Luciano took control of Masseria’s gang and was appointed Maranzano’s lieutenant with Maranzano’s approval.
After Masseria’s death, Maranzano restructured the Italian American gangs in New York City into five families, each led by Luciano, Profaci, Gagliano, Vincent Mangano, and himself. Maranzano reduced the rackets of the competing families in favor of his own. Though Luciano appeared to agree with these changes, he was merely buying time before deposing Maranzano, having concluded that Maranzano was even more avaricious and petty than Masseria. By September 1931, Maranzano realized Luciano posed a threat and hired Irish gangster Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll to kill him.
But Luchese warned Luciano that his death was imminent. On September 10, Maranzano ordered Costello, Genovese, and Luciano to report to his Manhattan office in the Helmsley Building. Believing Maranzano intended to kill them, Luciano decided to act first. He sent four Jewish gangsters, whose faces Maranzano’s people had never seen, to Maranzano’s office, organized with the assistance of Lansky and Siegel.
Two of the gangsters disarmed Maranzano’s bodyguards while posing as federal agents. The other two, with help from Luchese, who was there to identify Maranzano, killed him. This hit served as the first in what became known as the “Night of the Sicilian Vespers. ” The bodies of two additional Maranzano allies, Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo, were found in Newark Bay a few days later on September 13.
The head of the Pittsburgh crime family, Joseph Siragusa, was fatally shot inside his residence. The October 15 disappearance of Joe Ardizonne, head of the Los Angeles family, was also regarded as part of an alleged scheme to swiftly overthrow the Old World Sicilian bosses. However, the notion of a planned mass purge under Luciano’s direction has since been disproved as a myth. Because he founded the Commission in 1931 and eliminated Maranzano’s position as boss of bosses after the Castellammarese War, Luciano is regarded as the founder of modern organized crime in the United States.
He was also the first official boss of the modern Genovese crime family. By creating covert alliances with other bosses, Luciano chose to quietly maintain control through the Commission. Luciano did not completely ignore Maranzano’s changes, though. He considered the crime families’ “made man” ceremony a Sicilian anachronism.
He promoted his most dependable Italian associates to important positions within the newly formed Luciano Crime family. Genovese was promoted to underboss and Costello was made consigliere. Adonis, Michael Coppola, Anthony Strollo, Willie Moretti, and Anthony Carfano served as caporegimes. Lansky and Siegel could not hold official positions in any Mafia family because neither man was Italian, but Lansky served as Luciano’s principal adviser and Siegel was a trusted associate.
Later in 1931, Luciano organized a meeting in Chicago with several bosses and suggested creating a Commission to act as the governing body for organized crime. The Commission has been described as Luciano’s greatest invention because it was created to resolve all conflicts and determine which families controlled which regions. It served as a vehicle for Luciano to covertly maintain control over all the families and avert further gang conflicts. The Commission was put to the test for the first time in 1935, when Dutch Schultz was told to abandon his plans to kill special prosecutor Thomas E.
Dewey.