Lucky Luciano: The Architect of the American Mafia

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And now, back to today’s video. According to the FBI, the moment when Lucky Luciano rose to the top was a watershed event in the history of organized crime. He completely changed and modernized the American Mafia, ensuring that turf disputes, power grabs, and other petty squabbles did not get in the way of their ultimate goal: making money. Under his new system, governed by the Commission, any major decisions were brought to the table and voted on by the highest-ranking mobsters. By getting the families to work together, he transformed the Mafia from a collection of gangs constantly fighting with each other into the most powerful crime syndicate in the country.

Charles “Lucky” Luciano was born Salvatore Lucania in a small sulfur mining town in Sicily called Lercara Friddi. His date of birth is somewhat disputed; it was either November 11, 1896, or November 24, 1897. His parents were Antonio Lucania and Rosalia Caparelli, and he had four siblings. The family emigrated to America when Charles was just nine years old, settling in New York City’s Lower East Side. He attended public school until he was 14, at which point he dropped out and found a job as a clerk with a shipping company. However, he realized that there were faster and easier ways to make money if you were willing to break the law. In fact, Luciano started a few swindles as soon as he arrived in America. He was first arrested when he was only 10 years old for shoplifting. While still in school, he started a protection racket for other Italian and Jewish students. Allegedly, it was a dice game that convinced him he wasn’t meant to just be another working stiff, as he walked away with over $240 in winnings at a time when his job paid him five dollars a week.

As a teenager, Luciano connected with the Five Points Gang, active mainly in Lower Manhattan, where he met many of his future associates, such as Johnny Torrio, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello. He mainly handled protection rackets and some occasional pimping and drug dealing on the side. During one momentous extortion attempt, Luciano met a Jewish teenager who would later help him revolutionize organized crime: Meyer Lansky.

We’re not sure where Luciano acquired the nickname “Lucky.” It could have been from his good fortune at the gambling tables or from his tendency to avoid prison despite being arrested numerous times. It could also have been from surviving a particularly harrowing incident when other mobsters beat him up severely and cut his throat, leaving him with permanent scars. As for his first name, Luciano started going by “Charles” instead of “Salvatore” because he didn’t want to be called “Sal” or “Sally,” which he felt sounded too feminine.

By the time Prohibition came around in 1920, Luciano was already working for one of the most dangerous men in New York, Joe Masseria, who was in charge of the most powerful gangs in the city. Around this time, Lucky also collaborated with another highly influential mobster, Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, who acted as a mentor for Luciano and taught him how to run a criminal empire like a successful business. At the end of the day, making money was what mattered most.

However, Lucky didn’t endear himself to some of the old-school gangsters due to his close association with Jewish criminals like Lansky and Rothstein. Many of them didn’t like working with Italians born outside of Sicily, let alone non-Italians. This mentality only made Luciano feel like it was time for some changes to let go of the old ways and form a new and modern criminal enterprise.

During the late 1920s, a violent power struggle known as the Castellammarese War emerged between two New York factions: one led by Joe Masseria and the other by Salvatore Maranzano. While these two gangs fought to establish themselves as the head honcho, many of their underlings grew dissatisfied with their roles within the organization. They understood that as long as there was a “capo di tutti capi” (boss of all bosses), there would always be multiple people vying for that spot, which meant the gangs would be forced to fight each other instead of focusing on making money.

In May 1929, they held a landmark summit in Atlantic City to discuss the future of organized crime, eventually leading to the formation of the National Crime Syndicate, a loose confederation of gangs from all over the country working together—or at the very least, not actively working against each other. Everyone who was anyone attended the conference, including representatives from New Jersey, Chicago, Florida, Philadelphia, and Detroit. New York had the most representatives from all the Italian crime families, plus the Jewish and Irish mobs.

Two notable absentees were Masseria and Maranzano; they would never have ceded power willingly. Instead, it was decided that both of them had to be eliminated. The first to go was Joe Masseria, in a hit planned by Lucky Luciano himself. As Masseria’s lieutenant, he reached a secret deal with Maranzano to betray his former boss in exchange for his rackets and a position as Maranzano’s new second-in-command. Masseria was gunned down in a restaurant on April 15, 1931, with mobsters like Vito Genovese, Bugsy Siegel, and Albert Anastasia rumored to have been the triggermen.

After Masseria’s death, Salvatore Maranzano became the new boss of bosses. Though his reign lasted only a few months, it was long enough to have an impact. He organized New York’s Italian gangs into the Five Families, a structure that still exists today, albeit under a different name. He also developed the ranking system within the family, with a boss, an underboss, several lieutenants called caporegimes, and then soldiers.

By September, Maranzano realized that Luciano was too ambitious and dangerous to keep around, so he wanted him eliminated. Lucky knew this, so he planned his own hit against Maranzano. On September 10, a four-man squad burst into Maranzano’s office and gunned him down. Several more hits followed on Maranzano’s associates who would not have taken kindly to the reforms that Luciano and his colleagues had in mind.

With both Masseria and Maranzano dead, Luciano could have proclaimed himself the new boss of bosses, but he didn’t. Instead, he and several other mob bosses formed the Commission in 1931, a governing body for the American Mafia where all important matters and conflicts were brought to the table for discussion, and every boss got a vote. The boss of the most powerful family was always considered the de facto leader, which in this case was obviously Luciano.

With this new world order established, Luciano and his cohorts concentrated on profitable enterprises. Even while working under Joe Masseria, Luciano ran one of the most lucrative bootlegging businesses in New York. Now, as the head of his own crime family, he became involved in gambling, extortion, loan sharking, prostitution, drug dealing, and bookmaking, not to mention all the extra income he gained by controlling interests in construction companies, trucking companies, garbage collectors, garment stores, the docks, and various union jobs.

He made Vito Genovese his underboss while Frank Costello served as his consigliere. Lansky also held an important position within the Commission and always had Luciano’s ear, but he could never attain a rank higher than associate since he was not a full-blooded Italian. Alongside guys like Costello and Bugsy Siegel, Lucky helped form the public image of the stereotypical mafia boss seen in every mob movie: always dressed in nice suits and fancy silk shirts, dining at expensive restaurants, and partying in trendy nightclubs with famous celebrities.

Luciano enjoyed being a public figure, but this garnered unwanted attention, particularly from prosecutor and future governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. Dewey proclaimed Lucky Luciano to be public enemy number one and made it his mission to bring him to justice. This was not Dewey’s first rodeo; he had previously put bootlegger Waxy Gordon behind bars and was on the verge of doing the same to Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz before Schultz’s murder in 1935. Little did Dewey know at the time that he was the reason for Schultz’s death, as Luciano and the other mob bosses voted to have Schultz eliminated for going against the Commission.

Now that Dewey had Luciano in his sights, he focused on his thriving prostitution ring and the countless brothels he operated. He brought in police officers outside of the vice squad and had them wait on the streets, ready to strike, only telling them the locations of the raids minutes in advance. This strategy paid off as Dewey made hundreds of arrests. Also worth mentioning was his assistant director, attorney Eunice Carter, one of the first Black female lawyers in New York’s history. She was instrumental in building the case against Luciano by gaining the trust of many of the prostitutes and madams caught up in his raids. Ultimately, she got multiple women to testify that Luciano was the boss in charge of the organization, backing up their statements by following the money trail that always led back to him.

By March, Dewey and Carter had built a strong enough case against Luciano to proceed with the arrest. In late March 1936, Luciano was staying at the Waldorf Towers under the name Charles Ross when he got a tip that detectives were on their way to bust him. He quickly left the hotel, drove to Philadelphia, borrowed some money, and then drove to Cleveland, Ohio, where he caught a train to Hot Springs, Arkansas, hoping to lay low until the heat died down. Luciano’s plan didn’t work; he was recognized and arrested in early April, prompting an extradition battle to New York, where he had been indicted on over 60 counts of compulsory prostitution.

A few weeks later, Luciano was back in New York, and by May, his trial had begun. The case against him was strong. Dewey painted an accurate picture of Luciano’s influence and his role within the mob by presenting his connections to numerous other criminals, his numerous arrests, and the testimonies gathered by Eunice Carter. Dewey focused on Luciano’s inability to explain the source of his wealth, as it was clear that Lucky lived the lavish lifestyle of a millionaire despite only declaring a yearly income of $22,500. It seemed that after dozens of arrests with no convictions, Luciano’s luck had finally run out. On June 8, 1936, he and eight co-defendants were found guilty on 62 counts each. Despite attempted bribes, threats, and even attacks on his life, Dewey triumphed, and Lucky Luciano was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison.

Although he was now behind bars, it was business as usual. Luciano still ran his criminal empire with Frank Costello and Vito Genovese carrying out his orders on the outside. However, once he exhausted his appeals and it became evident that he wouldn’t be getting out anytime soon, Luciano ceded power to Costello and named him the new acting boss of the family, much to the displeasure of Genovese, who wanted that position for himself.

That’s how life went for the next few years until Luciano saw a new opportunity for freedom provided by an unexpected source: World War II. Once the United States joined the war, there was growing concern over enemy spies, especially after the SS Normandy, a French ocean liner, caught fire in February 1942 and sank while being refitted in New York Harbor. Although the exact motive for the fire has never been established, the American government feared it was the work of a saboteur. When their efforts to weed out possible spies among New York dock workers did not yield substantial results, the government began thinking laterally and turned to the organization that had already been controlling the docks for decades: the mob.

Thus began Operation Underworld, a cooperative effort between the U.S. government and the Mafia to foil sabotage attempts, prevent labor disputes during wartime, help undercover agents, and limit black market theft. The first mobster approached by naval intelligence officers was Joseph Lanza, a mid-level gangster with the Luciano family who ran the Fulton Fish Market. At first, the government just wanted to help their agents go undercover and keep tabs on workers with Mussolini sympathies. However, Lanza recommended they ask his boss for assistance since Lucky still controlled the docks, even though he had been in jail for six years by that point.

Luciano agreed to help and was moved to a more comfortable prison. Although it is still debated whether Operation Underworld was actually of any use, some rumors even suggest that the mob was responsible for the fire on the Normandy in the first place. Once the war was over, Luciano filed an appeal for clemency based on his cooperation. Thomas Dewey, the same man who put him behind bars, was now the governor of New York, and he actually agreed to commute Luciano’s sentence in recognition of his wartime aid.

In early 1946, after almost a decade in prison, Lucky was once again a free man, but his release came with a heavy caveat: he would be deported to Italy and never allowed to return to the United States. On February 9, Luciano was escorted by immigration agents and New York police officers to a freighter called the Laura Keane. Meyer Lansky claims to have bribed the guards to arrange a farewell party for Luciano, with champagne, food, and women brought aboard the ship for a final get-together. According to the police, this never happened, and their account is supported by an FBI report from an agent who was there undercover. So who knows if it actually happened or not?

One thing was certain: on February 10, Lucky Luciano set sail for Italy and would never set foot on American soil again. Just because Lucky couldn’t physically be in New York didn’t mean he was ready to give up the criminal empire he had built. However, Italy was a bit too far from the action, so after his deportation, he made plans to relocate to Cuba. Lansky already had multiple gambling operations in the country, and the mob had pegged it as a great new investment opportunity—not just for gambling but also for prostitution and drug dealing. They would have needed someone to stay in Cuba to look after their interests, so if everything went according to plan, it could have been like Luciano never left.

To that end, the mob scheduled another summit like the one in Atlantic City back in 1929. This one took place in December 1946 at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. However, getting there proved problematic for Luciano since he didn’t want to tip off the U.S. government to his whereabouts. He had to leave Italy a few months earlier and make several trips through South America to lose his trail before finally arriving at his destination incognito.

The main talking points at the Havana conference included the status of the drug trade and a final decision regarding the fate of Bugsy Siegel, who had gotten on everyone’s bad side after bungling the development of the mob’s first hotel in Las Vegas. Luciano also weighed in on the rivalry brewing between his two main subordinates, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Even though Lucky named Costello as the acting boss of his family, it was becoming increasingly clear that Genovese coveted that position and intended to get it one way or another.

According to a semi-biographical account dictated years later by Luciano himself, Vito approached him in private and suggested that Lucky proclaim himself as the boss of bosses, but purely as a symbolic title while Vito himself would actually run the criminal syndicate back in New York. This is what Luciano replied: “There is no boss of bosses. I turned it down in front of everybody. If I ever change my mind, I will take the title, but it won’t be up to you. Right now, you work for me, and I ain’t in the mood to retire. Don’t you ever let me hear this again or I’ll lose my temper.”

After the speech, Lucky also met with Gene Basi in private just to make it abundantly clear that he was still the boss. Unfortunately for Luciano, his stay in Cuba was cut short once American authorities found out he was there. In February 1947, they demanded that the Cuban government arrest and deport Luciano. At first, Cuba refused, but then the United States stopped all shipments of legal narcotics to the country until they complied. This was all the persuasion needed, and the Cuban police arrested Lucky the very next day and deported him.

By the end of the month, it seemed that his plans to continue serving as the mob boss from Cuba had failed. There were rumors that it was actually Vito Genovese who tipped off the American authorities in the first place. Back in Italy, Luciano was immediately arrested and spent a few weeks in jail in Palermo before being released. He would be kept under close surveillance from then on, but this hardly acted as a deterrent for Lucky, who remained involved in the drug trade, often serving as the connection between the Sicilian and American mobs. He was arrested several times in Italy, but each time he was released without charges. It seemed that his luck when it came to avoiding prison sentences had returned.

However, his freedom to travel was increasingly restricted. In 1949, he was labeled a crime threat and banned from entering Rome. In 1952, the Italian police took away his passport. By 1954, Luciano was not even allowed to leave Naples without permission. He had to stay at home every night, check in with the police once a week, and was barred from entering dens of inequity such as racetracks and liquor stores. Despite all of these restrictions, Luciano was still described in the press as one of the chief exponents of the international underworld and the moving force of all unlawful traffic, especially narcotics, between Italy and the United States.

The authorities might have proven powerless to stop Luciano, but he also had enemies on the other side of the law, and they posed a far greater threat—specifically, Vito Genovese, whose ambition to become the new don had never wavered. He