A BIOGRAPHY OF SALVATORE LUCANIA

ALSO KNOWN AS LUCKY LUCIANO

A new biography of Lucky Luciano,[1] The Luciano Story,[2] recently landed on my table. The famous gangster, whom Italy is now honored (and burdened) to host, and the crime syndicate are also the subject of a Broadway show I saw not long ago; and of the movie New York Confidential,[3] based on a book with the same title written by journalists Lee [sic] and Mortimer that came out a couple of years ago. All these coincidences made me revisit this particular aspect of American life and the questions that surround it: how much of what is told about gangster life is true? How important is it in the life of the United States? And what does all this mean? First of all, I wonder where the information comes from. As we know, the number one rule of criminals is to not attract any attention. Gangsters surround themselves with silence; they use the phone cautiously in fear that their conversations may be monitored and; as far as I know, there are no collections of gangsters’ letters. The only physical documentation available is lists of their clothes and hotel bills. Their operations presumably must be recorded by some form of bookkeeping, although nothing has ever been brought to light during trials. At the same time, every single witness that has testified in court against them was a criminal himself, involved in the same activities, and therefore with very little credibility. In order to find out what gangsters do, one must spend time with them and participate in the same activities, and in fact the little we know comes from spies, traitors, prostitutes and informants. The first operations of the little Mafia of Giuseppe Masseria[4] concerned the illegal smuggling of fellow Sicilians to the United States. Once they had settled down, their main occupation was extortion of small retail businesses and protection from possible troubles, troubles that the Mafia itself would cause. It is the old concept of the medieval tribute in a society dominated by the powerful, still present in a modern society that was still in part medieval.

Many gangsters of the new generation, like Luciano, were born in Italy but went to crime school in the slums of the Lower East Side, starting in first grade. They would graduate from the juvenile penal system and, finally, complete their academic training in penitentiaries where they were taught by elderly, experienced criminals. Here they would learn how the system works and how to adapt the criminal networks to take advantage of the new developments in society. The kind of gangsterism [sic] invented by Lucky Luciano had a broader vision and bigger ambitions. To begin, one must bear in mind that organized crime, or, as I call it here, gangsterism, flourished in response to the law that for several years prohibited the sale of alcohol, the period known as Prohibition.[5] The law was very unpopular even among the citizens who had voted for a senator or house representative who, for political opportunism, supported the law. Paradoxically, in those circumstances organized crime provided a social service. Luciano and others jumped to the opportunity to supply liquors, wine and beer to a whole nation thirsty for alcohol and deeply unhappy with the new restrictions. This was the turning point for all gangsters. They were no longer the small bore Mafiosi of yore, illiterate and narrow minded. The new generation was thinking bigger and had sharper organizational skills, indispensible to manage a web of intricate and complex commercial networks. To make things even more difficult was the fact that their business was entirely illegal and, therefore, required secrecy; with safe houses and hide-outs; far from the eye of law enforcement. A national enterprise of this kind required executives with great talent; able to adapt instantly to new circumstances and maintain control over clandestine distilleries and transportation networks, active mostly at night; that reached all the way into the heart of the cities and from there to individual outlets. It was also necessary to bribe the police in order to ensure a certain degree of safety and, of course, to use violence to punish traitors; induce fear in possible spies and get rid of the competition. Countless murders have been attributed to the big bosses of this enterprise, although the large majority of the victims were also mobsters, often from competing gangs. Very few of these crimes were committed against innocent citizens, and the death toll for these was certainly lower than that for car accidents due to drunk driving or the distraction of drivers who fool around with a girl friend instead of paying attention to the road.

In the absence of reliable sources of information, with a bit of imagination, American journalists have tried to reconstruct the lives of the new generation of gangsters. It’s a little bit like the Storia della rivoluzione americana [sic] by Carlo Botta,[6] who filled his pages with passages from speeches by Washington and Jefferson who, if they could read the book, would be quite surprised to find in it things they never said. Lucky Luciano’s biography, for instance, is full of dialogues that, had they been recorded with a tape recorder, would sound very plausible. In reality all they show is the virtuosity and creativity of the writers and their knowledge of street slang.

There are two kinds of wrongs in analyzing this phenomenon. Some, with an anti-American agenda, tend to simplify things greatly and see the entire life of this continent as dominated by gangsters. Some minimize it, as if it were irrelevant and meaningless. The entire gangster world is not particularly large but what is really important is the fact that it’s not going away despite the efforts of law enforcement. It is a phenomenon on the margin of American life; it is being fought vigorously; it has been squeezed into a corner; forced into a clandestine life, in hiding and invisible; except for the times when it explodes in extreme forms of violence. The mob only dominates certain environments and more precisely the least American of them: the areas of cities with recent immigrants that have not yet been assimilated. But despite this fact, the phenomenon is connected to American life and it is a product of American life itself. The criminal element is present in all societies; however, the form that crime takes in American life is America’s own and it will never change until America remains America. Take for instance the chapter in Lucky Luciano’s biography about the blossoming of a new modern mentality in Sicilian Mafia. When Luciano was a boy, Mafia was a culture and a habit limited to Italian immigrants. The boss, Giuseppe Masseria, enjoyed playing traditional card games with friends; didn’t own a car and wouldn’t dream of sitting in a box at the Metropolitan Opera House; nor of going to the track to bet on horses in the company of a flashy and dumb starlet wrapped in a mink fur coat. He would never think of expanding his operations, based in New York, to Chicago or Los Angeles or Miami. Forget then about keeping on top of the developments that took place after World War II, when the networks expanded all the way to Italy, France, Turkey and China. Giuseppe Masseria was eliminated in a non-descript Italian restaurant while Luciano, who had ordered the hit, was washing his hands in the men’s room. From that day he has come a long way, engaged in a journey that is perfectly compatible with that of America and mirrors her expansionist policies, her vitality, her risk-taking mentality and finally the vagaries of political life.

The question everybody asks is why Luciano was set free after World War II, after being sentenced to thirty five years in prison following a world-famous trial whose prosecutor was New York’s Attorney General Thomas Dewey.[7] It is definitely a mysterious affaire that not even the recent biography can explain. The widespread rumor, never disputed--by the way--was that during World War II Luciano helped the U.S. Army intelligence before and after the invasion of Sicily. With his help, American intelligence established solid relationships with the local Mafia bosses. Another possible explanation attributes the judicial pardon to the presidential election in which Dewey was a candidate. The gangsters’ real strength is not in their viciousness or their courage. It reside in the fact that American society, or at least a significant portion thereof, needs certain services that are prohibited by law. In order to provide those services it is necessary to find men willing to take the risk. Gangsterism was and is still today the expression of a form of social dissent, not simply a case of thugs and bullies who impose themselves onto society (although this aspect does exist in some particular cases). The gangsters’ principal activity consists in supplying the paying public with forbidden forms of entertainment. At this time, in America, one of the biggest forms of entertainment is gambling, from lotteries to horse races and other sports events. Gambling is a pleasure that attracts an enormous public: maybe it is a metaphor for our own lives. Don’t we gamble when we get married; when we choose a career rather than another; and even when we accept an invitation to dinner? And let’s not even talk about decisions like investing in real estate; or buying merchandise on sale that we don’t immediately need but that, we hope, we will already own when the prices rise. Morally there is the additional fact that nobody forces a gambler to gamble. Just providing the opportunity is not like hurting someone intentionally. No one has ever heard of gangsters that would threaten people who don’t gamble. Organized crime also engages in another, rather unsavory, activity: providing mercenary love, where suppliers are generally not the cream of society. This is a topic that would require a long disquisition, but suffice it to say that American gangsters are doing in this country what many ancient and modern states consider useful for the public good. From the documentation presented at the trial, it would be hard to conclude that Luciano—who was tried and convicted by Dewey for this crime—was any worse than people in other countries that practice the same trade openly with a license and with no need for secrecy.

My conviction that gangsters perform a social function has been reinforced by an additional issue: narcotics. Recently, I read several proposals supported by medical doctors who maintain that the government should supply narcotics at a fair price to addicts, under strict surveillance. The most dangerous aspect of drug addiction is the need to procure money, at any cost, to buy the substance. The addicts pay exorbitant prices to the dealers and, in order to get the money, they end up as prostitutes, thieves and murderers. These are awful consequences. It is nevertheless true that it’s impossible to correct these consequences by prohibition alone. When laws and society reveal themselves to be inadequate, full of errors and unrealistic absurdities, there come the gangsters, ready to fill a desperate need. Obviously, they do so with moral indifference, brutal callousness and vampirism; which are made even worse by the risk and the secrecy of illegal activities. With gambling, thus, it is not surprising that many newspapers in New York support the public take-over of this business; with the goal of absorbing into its coffers the millions of dollars that end up in the gangsters’ pockets.

There have been and there still are other gangster activities that would be difficult to list under the rubric of social usefulness. Organized crime is involved in counterfeit currency distribution; extortion of labor unions; and protection of unscrupulous business people, among others. But even in these sectors, gangsters would not be able to operate unless the general climate of society didn’t give them the opportunity. One last thing must be said: in America the tradition of fighting outlaws is an old and established duty that is often left to a free press. It is not a coincidence that one of the few activities immune from the effects of organized crime is precisely journalism.

New York, March 16, 1955