Many buildings in Naples are marked as the
place where this or that painter, politician or poet
lived. But famous crooks? I wasn't sure; thus, I
wandered up to via Tasso 484 on the off-chance that
there would be a plaque somewhere. I don't know what I
was expecting: maybe "In this building American
mobster, Lucky Luciano, lived the last 16 years of his
life." No such luck. Anyway, we have at least a bit in
common: not only did Lucky live about five minutes
from my house, but we were both born on November 11.
Charles "Lucky" Luciano
was born Salvatore Lucania in Lercara Freddi near
Palermo in Sicily in 1897. He emigrated at the age of
nine to New York with his family, got started early on
his life of crime and never looked back. The New York Times of
Jan. 27, 1962, reporting on his death, cited an early
probation report on Luciano that said, "His freedom
from conscience springs from his admitted philosophy:
'I never was a crumb, and if I have to be a crumb I'd
rather be dead.' He explains this by stating that a
crumb is a person who works and saves and lays his
money aside: who indulges in no extravagance. His
description would fit the average man." Time magazine
called him "...Horatio Alger with a gun, an ice pick
and a dark vision of Big Business" for he was the one
who turned disparate mob families in New York into a
corporation-like "crime syndicate." Between 1919 and
1936, when he was finally arrested and prosecuted by
special rackets prosecutor, Thomas Dewey, Luciano was
involved in drug trafficking, assault, gambling,
bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking, and slot
machines. The nick-name "Lucky" comes from the fact
that he survived being "taken for a ride" by rival
mobsters early in his career. They just beat him up
and left him with scars.
On
his conviction in 1936 he was sent to Sing Sing to
serve 30-50 years, but released in 1946 when his
sentence was commuted by Dewey, who in the interim had
been elected governor of the state of New York. The
condition for the release was that Luciano be deported
and not attempt to return to the United States. The
word was that Luciano had helped the US war effort
first by enlisting and organizing the workers of the
Port of New York in the US effort against German
submarines constantly lurking off the coast and then
by convincing the Mafia in Sicily to come out of
hiding and help the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943,
but neither Dewey nor Luciano would comment. Luciano
said he "couldn't talk about those things." The Armed
Forces denied it. (It is, however, part of Neapolitan
post-war lore that organized crime returned to Italy
only because the Allies were willing to set anyone up
in power who claimed to be an anti-Fascist.)
Although Luciano
said that he didn't feel comfortable living in Italy and
was even under house arrest in Naples on various
occasions, his life was not all that bad. He had an
apparently bottomless well of money and even looked the
part of the Hollywood gangster—tailor-made clothes, fast
cars and beautiful women. Though he said that he never
married because "I have enough problems," he did have a
longtime girl-friend, Igea Lissoni, a nightclub dancer.
They were reported to have married in November, 1949,
but both denied the report. She died of cancer in 1953
at age 37, leaving Luciano devastated.
In
January, 1962, Lucky Luciano died at Capodichino
airport in Naples of a sudden heart attack as
authorities were preparing to arrest him in connection
with an international drug trafficking ring. He had
just met with Martin Gosch, a US film and TV producer
who was interested in making a film about his life.
While his family in America went through legal hoops
to have his body returned to the United States,
Luciano had a funeral in Naples. He went out in style;
it was one of those affairs with eight black horses
drawing a black and silver funeral carriage. He lay in
a chapel until authorities decided to allow his
removal to the United States. He was finally buried at
St. John's Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens, New York
in the family vault. There were 300 hundred people in
attendance. Emanuel Perlmutter's report in the New York Times
from February 8, 1961, closes with,
As the
guards closed the bronze doors of the vault, a small
stained-glass window in the rear was briefly visible
to onlookers. It depicted a bearded saint leaning on a
shepherd's staff. A newspaper man stopped [Luciano's
brother] Barolo Lucania as the mourner's car was about
to leave and asked him if he knew the identity of the
saint in the window, "I don't know," the brother
replied. "I'm not acquainted with saints."
[Also see this letter from Larry Ray in
his "Remembering Naples" portion of this encyclopedia.
It contains a personal recollection of Lucky Luciano.]
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