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The Commission: How Luciano Abolished the Boss of All Bosses
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Lucky Luciano didn't seize the throne after killing his rivals — he abolished it. This chapter traces the 1931 double-hit on Masseria and Maranzano, the birth of the Commission, and the organizational genius that made Luciano the most influential mob architect in American history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what's genuinely difficult about Lucky Luciano. He was convicted of running a prostitution racket.
To understand what Luciano built, you have to understand what came before it. And what came before it was chaos.
Luciano was aligned with Masseria, at least on paper. But he'd already concluded that Joe the Boss was a liability.
Luciano didn't declare himself boss of all bosses. That's the detail that matters most.
By the mid-nineteen thirties, Luciano was the most powerful organized crime figure in America. That made him a target.
After Pearl Harbor in December of nineteen forty-one, Naval Intelligence faced a specific problem. The New York waterfront was vulnerable.
Thomas Dewey was now Governor of New York. The same man who had put Luciano in prison was now in a position to let him out.
Luciano settled in Italy, but he had no intention of disappearing from the American operation. In December of nineteen forty-six, Meyer Lansky organized a summit at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba.
On January twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-two, Charles Luciano arrived at Naples airport to meet with a film producer named Martin Gosch, who was developing a project about Luciano's life. Luciano suffered a heart attack at the airport and died.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.