Now Playing
Blood in Coney Island: The Hits That Built the Commission
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1931, Lucky Luciano orchestrated two murders that ended the Castellammarese War and abolished the boss-of-all-bosses throne forever. What he built in their place — the Commission — became the constitutional blueprint for organised crime in America.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before nineteen thirty-one, New York's underworld ran on chaos. Feuds, factions, blood grudges carried over from villages in Sicily.
To understand how Luciano took power, you have to understand what New York's underworld looked like just before he did. By nineteen thirty, two major factions controlled most of the city's Italian criminal networks.
On April fifteenth, nineteen thirty-one, Joe Masseria sat down for a meal at a restaurant in Coney Island. He'd come with Luciano.
The structure Luciano built in the months after Maranzano's death was something genuinely new. He organized New York's criminal networks into five families, each with its own leadership, its own territory, its own operations.
Luciano's rise didn't happen in an ethnic vacuum. The older generation of Sicilian mob leaders had kept rigid boundaries between Italian and Jewish criminal networks.
Thomas Dewey was a special prosecutor in New York with a specific mandate: break organized crime. He was methodical, well-resourced, and politically ambitious.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States military had a serious security problem along the New York waterfront. The docks were essential to the war effort.
In nineteen forty-five, Luciano's legal team filed for commutation of his sentence. The argument was that he'd served the country during wartime.
Luciano arrived in Italy but had no intention of staying there permanently. By late nineteen forty-six he'd traveled through South America to Cuba, which at that point offered the right combination of proximity to the United States and sufficiently flexible governance.
Luciano died at Naples airport on January twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-two. He was sixty-four years old.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.