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From Coney Island to the Commission: Luciano's Blueprint for the Mob
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Two murders in a single year ended the old Mafia — and Lucky Luciano replaced it with something far more dangerous: a corporation. This is how the Commission was born and why every mob boss after him followed the same blueprint.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what doesn't add up. A man convicted of running prostitution rackets, sentenced to thirty to fifty years in a New York prison, ends up helping the United States military plan one of the most consequential amphibious invasions of the Second World War.
To understand what Luciano built, you have to understand what he inherited. By nineteen thirty, New York's Italian underworld was tearing itself apart.
In April of nineteen thirty-one, Luciano invited Joe Masseria to lunch at a Coney Island restaurant called Nuova Villa Tammaro. By all accounts, the meal went well.
Luciano's insight was structural. The problem with bosses of bosses wasn't the violence.
The structure Luciano built was formidable. But it had a vulnerability.
December of nineteen forty-one. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulls the United States into the Second World War almost overnight.
The war ended. Governor Thomas Dewey, the same man who had prosecuted Luciano a decade earlier, commuted his sentence.
In December of nineteen forty-six, Meyer Lansky organized a summit at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba. Twenty major mob bosses attended.
Luciano spent the last sixteen years of his life in Italy, principally in Naples. He was under surveillance by Italian and American authorities for much of that time.
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