Born: November 24, 1897, Sicily, Italy
Died: January 26, 1962, Naples, Italy
Nicknames: Lucky, Charlie Lucky
Associations: Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky,
Frank Costello, the Five Families, the Commission,
Bugsy Siegel Charles “Lucky” Luciano, born Salvatore
Lucania in 1897 in Sicily, probably did more to
create the modern American Mafia and the national
criminal Syndicate than any other single man.
Luciano led a group of young Italian and Jewish
mobsters against the older set of so-called
“Moustache Petes,” and in the process set the stage
for the Mob to grow beyond the limits of bootlegging
profits to become, in the words of his friend Meyer
Lansky, “bigger than United States Steel.”
Luciano, who moved to the United States and settled
in the Lower East Side with his family at age 10,
was recruited early into gangster life and was a
member of the Five Points Gang in Manhattan. Around
the start of Prohibition in 1920, he was recruited
as a gunman by Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, and
a few years later Luciano went to work for Arnold
Rothstein, another seminal figure in early organized
crime. By the mid-1920s, Luciano was reportedly
making millions in bootlegging profits.
With Rothstein’s murder in 1928, Luciano went back
to working for Masseria, who by this time was the
self-styled “Boss of Bosses,” and who was going to
war with a rival, Salvatore “The Duke” Maranzano.
Luciano secretly sided with Maranzano in the bloody
Castellammarese War and helped set up Masseria for
assassination in 1931. Before the end of the year,
Luciano and other “Young Turks” would knock off
Maranzano, and the era of the Old World “Moustache
Petes” would be over.
With Maranzano’s assassination by a gang from
Murder, Incorporated – allegedly including Joe
Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia and Vito
Genovese, all of whom would go on to well-known
roles in the Mob — Luciano inherited the crime
family that would eventually become known as the
Genovese family. A natural organizer, Luciano
continued the committee of Five Families, which was
established by Maranzano and would control East
Coast rackets for decades. But rather than naming
himself “Boss of Bosses,” as Maranzano had, Luciano
called himself the chairman of the board.
Further, he established and hosted the first
national meetings of what became known as the
Commission, a national criminal syndicate, all in
the name of avoiding unnecessary bloodshed and
maximizing profits for all the families. But all of
that meant Luciano was a very public leader of the
Mob, and that drew attention from law enforcement,
and specifically from a young prosecutor in New York
named Thomas Dewey. Dewey and his assistant, an
African-American attorney named Eunice Carter,
noticed that many of the prostitutes who were being
arrested were represented by the same bondsmen and
attorneys working for Luciano.
Armed with this information, in 1936, Dewey led
raids on brothels throughout the city, arresting
more than 100 people, mostly women, many of whom
were unable to post the bail of $10,000 set by the
courts. Some of those arrested provided information
to the prosecutors that led to Luciano’s arrest and
trial that same year. On June 6, 1936, Luciano was
convicted of 62 charges of compulsory prostitution;
he was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in state prison.
Luciano turned over leadership of the national
Commission to Frank Costello. That wasn’t the end of
Luciano’s story, however. During World War II, the
government needed the Mob’s help to keep the New
York docks free of strikes, sabotage and other
problems. Luciano agreed to help, on the assumption
that he would get a break on his sentence. Dewey,
the former prosecutor, was now New York governor and
in a position to grant clemency.
After the war ended, Dewey commuted Luciano’s
sentence with the understanding that the Mob leader
would leave the United States, which he did,
returning to Italy as a deportee. Luciano still
maintained his ties to the American Mafia as a sort
of elder statesman. The same year that he debarked
to Italy, Luciano came to Havana, Cuba, and along
with hobnobbing with celebrities such as Frank
Sinatra, hosted a meeting of top-level mobsters from
all the major American crime families.
Pressure from the U.S. government – specifically a
threat to ban the export of American medicines to
the island country – forced the Cuban government to
deport Luciano back to Italy.Luciano spent the rest
of his life under close Italian police scrutiny.
Luciano often met with American tourists and sailors
and frequently professed his love for the United
States. He died of a heart attack in 1962 at the
Naples airport, where he had gone to meet with a
movie producer considering a biography of Luciano.