Tommy Lucchesi led one of New York City’s most powerful crime families for decades, yet he spent only one brief stretch in prison during his entire criminal career. His only conviction came in 1921, when he was sentenced for auto theft and served thirteen months at Sing Sing before being paroled in 1922. From that point on, he avoided prosecution for more than four decades while building an organization that came to dominate the city’s Garment District, its airports, and key labor unions. Born in Palermo, Sicily, on December 1, 1899, Lucchesi immigrated to the United States with his family in early 1911.
They settled in East Harlem, then a heavily Italian neighborhood in Manhattan. His father worked in a machine shop until 1915, when he lost his right thumb and forefinger in an industrial accident. The younger Lucchesi soon fell in with neighborhood friends, including a teenage Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and together they formed the 107th Street gang, stealing wallets and breaking into stores under the protection of local mob boss Gaetano Reina. The accident that wounded his father indirectly shaped Lucchesi’s own identity.
During his 1920 arrest for auto theft on Long Island, a police officer compared his deformed hand to that of Major League Baseball pitcher Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown. The nickname stuck, and Lucchesi reportedly despised it. Despite the humiliation, the arrest and brief prison term proved to be the only time he ever served time. By the 1920s, Lucchesi had become a top figure in the Reina crime family and a strong ally of Luciano, who was then rising through the underworld alongside Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky in partnership with Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein.
When the Castellammarese War erupted in early 1931 between rival bosses Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano secretly sided with Maranzano. Masseria was killed on April 15, 1931, at a Coney Island restaurant, with gunmen allegedly including Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Lucchesi played a key role in what came next. He warned Luciano that he was marked for death when Maranzano summoned Luciano, Genovese, and Costello to a meeting at his office on September 10, 1931.
Believing the meeting was a trap, Luciano dispatched four Jewish gangsters, secured with the help of Lansky and Siegel, who killed Maranzano. Luciano then established the Commission, a governing body for organized crime that brought a period of relative peace to the New York underworld. After Luciano was arrested in 1936 and deported in 1946, Lucchesi’s own boss, Tommy Gagliano, kept a deliberately low profile. Gagliano preferred to issue orders through close allies, and Lucchesi became the family’s public face.
Lucchesi attended the mob’s Havana conference in 1946 as Gagliano’s representative and later formed an alliance with Louis Buchalter, with whom he controlled the Garment District. When Gagliano died of natural causes in 1951, Lucchesi was the obvious successor. The family was quickly renamed the Lucchesi crime family. He appointed Stefano LaSalle as underboss and Vincenzo Rao as consigliere.
That same year, he formed alliances with Vito Genovese, then underboss of the Luciano family, and Carlo Gambino, then rising in the Anastasia family, with a shared goal of gaining control of the Commission. Lucchesi kept close ties with New York City politicians, including Mayors William O’Dwyer and Vincent Impellitteri, while focusing on money-making operations and avoiding prosecution. Through control of key unions and trade associations, his family came to dominate Manhattan’s Garment District and the related trucking industry. He also ran a narcotics trafficking network with Santo Trafficante Jr.
, the boss of the Tampa crime family, building on a long relationship with Trafficante Jr. ’s father, the former Tampa boss. In 1952, the government moved against him. On November 17 of that year, U.
S. Attorney General James P. McGranery initiated denaturalization proceedings, claiming Lucchesi had failed to disclose his full arrest record when applying for citizenship. While that case moved through the courts, Lucchesi and his allies moved against the leaders of the Luciano and Anastasia families.
On May 3, 1957, Vincent Gigante shot Frank Costello, then the Luciano family’s street boss. Costello survived but stepped down, leaving Genovese as the new boss. On October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber shop, and Carlo Gambino took over his family. On April 8, 1958, the U.
S. Supreme Court overturned the denaturalization ruling against Lucchesi on a legal technicality. The next day, however, Attorney General William P. Rogers filed a new case against him.
Family ties soon cemented Lucchesi’s alliance with Gambino. In 1962, Gambino’s eldest son, Thomas, married Lucchesi’s daughter, Frances. Gambino gave Lucchesi a $30,000 wedding gift at the ceremony, attended by over one thousand guests. In exchange, Lucchesi gave Gambino a share of his rackets at Idlewild Airport, now John F.
Kennedy International Airport. Together, the two controlled airport management, security, and all airport unions—and, with that, much of New York City’s organized crime. In 1963, Joseph Bonanno and Joseph Magliocco hatched a secret plan to murder Commission bosses Carlo Gambino, Lucchesi, Stefano Magaddino, and Frank DeSimone in order to take over the Mafia Commission. Joseph Colombo was given the murder contract by Magliocco.
Instead of carrying it out, Colombo reported the plot to the Commission. Realizing Bonanno was the true mastermind, the Commission ordered both men to explain themselves. Bonanno fled to Montreal. A shaken Magliocco confessed everything, was fined $50,000, and was forced to retire.
Lucchesi died of a brain tumor on July 13, 1967, at his Long Island home in the Lido Beach area. More than one thousand mourners attended his funeral, including politicians, judges, police officers, racketeers, drug pushers, pimps, and hit men. His first choice as successor, Antonio “Tony Ducks” Corallo, was in prison at the time, so the Commission selected Carmine Tramunti as temporary acting boss until Corallo’s release.
At the time of his death, Lucchesi had not spent a single day in prison in 44 years.