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From Coney Island to the Commission: How Luciano Rewrote the Rules
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Two mob bosses dead in one year, and Lucky Luciano walked away holding power no single man had ever held before — then gave it up by design. This episode traces how the Castellammarese War ended, why Luciano abolished the title of Boss of All Bosses, and what the Commission meant for American organized crime.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Two funerals in one year. That's the simplest way to describe what happened to American organized crime in nineteen thirty-one.
By nineteen thirty, New York's Italian underworld was tearing itself apart. Two factions had been fighting for dominance for well over a year.
In April of nineteen thirty-one, Joe Masseria sat down to dinner at a Coney Island restaurant. Luciano excused himself during the meal.
Here's the key point about what Luciano did after those two deaths. He didn't make himself boss of all bosses.
No account of Luciano's rise makes sense without Meyer Lansky. The two had known each other since their teens on the Lower East Side, and their partnership was one of the most effective in the history of American organized crime.
The man who brought Luciano down was Thomas Dewey, a special prosecutor who made his reputation going after organized crime in New York during the nineteen thirties. Dewey built a case around prostitution racketeering, and in nineteen thirty-six, Luciano was convicted and sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison.
After Pearl Harbor in December of nineteen forty-one, Naval Intelligence became acutely worried about the security of New York's waterfront. The docks were critical to the war effort, and there were real fears about Nazi sabotage.
When Allied planners began preparing Operation Husky, the amphibious invasion of Sicily in nineteen forty-three, one of the persistent challenges was local intelligence. Sicily's terrain was complex.
By nineteen forty-six, Thomas Dewey was no longer a prosecutor. He was the Governor of New York.
Luciano was deported to Italy, but that didn't mean he was done. He made his way through various routes to Cuba, which at the time was a functioning mob-friendly environment under Fulgencio Batista.
What Luciano built, taken as a whole, was a system. Not a gang.
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