Now Playing
Operation Underworld: The Prison Deal That Helped Win WWII
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Lucky Luciano was serving fifty years in a maximum-security cell — then Naval Intelligence came knocking with a wartime deal that would change everything. This chapter covers Dewey's prosecution, the Meyer Lansky partnership, and how one mob boss helped the Allies plan the invasion of Sicily.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what's genuinely difficult about Thomas Dewey and Lucky Luciano. The same man who put Luciano behind bars for thirty to fifty years later signed the papers that set him free.
Thomas Dewey was not a man who bluffed. In nineteen thirty-five, New York Governor Herbert Lehman appointed him as a special prosecutor with a specific mandate: destroy organized crime in the city.
Before we get to what changed, it's worth stopping on the partnership that held everything together while Luciano was behind bars. Meyer Lansky is one of the most consistently underestimated figures in this whole story.
Then Pearl Harbor happened, and everything shifted. In December nineteen forty-one, Japanese forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
The Sicily dimension is where the mythology runs ahead of the evidence most aggressively. Operation Husky, the Allied amphibious invasion of Sicily in July nineteen forty-three, was the largest seaborne invasion in history at that point.
He didn't go quietly. By late nineteen forty-six, Luciano had made his way from Italy through South America to Cuba.
Luciano spent the rest of his life in Italy. He settled in Naples, maintained connections to American operations, and watched from a distance as the structures he built evolved and adapted.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.