Now Playing
The Commission: How Luciano Turned Chaos into a Criminal Corporation
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1931, Lucky Luciano engineered two assassinations, dismantled the boss-of-all-bosses model, and built the Commission — the governing body that transformed the American Mafia into a disciplined criminal corporation. This is the chapter that explains why every mob structure that came after looked exactly like his.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Every organized crime structure that followed him used his blueprint. Every commission, every sit-down, every quiet negotiation between rival families traced back to one man and one brutal, brilliant year.
Salvatore Lucania arrived in New York from Sicily in nineteen oh six. He was nine years old.
The conflict that gave Luciano his opening began in nineteen thirty. It was called the Castellammarese War, named after the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo, home region of the faction that opposed Masseria's dominance.
On April fifteenth, nineteen thirty-one, Joe Masseria sat down to a long lunch at a Coney Island restaurant. Luciano was there.
With both bosses gone, Luciano had a choice. He could take the title of boss of all bosses for himself.
Luciano didn't build this alone. The two relationships that shaped his operation most were with Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Bugsy Siegel.
Thomas Dewey was a special prosecutor with ambitions and a target. That target was Luciano.
That path arrived in nineteen forty-two, and it came from an unexpected direction. After Pearl Harbor, Naval Intelligence became acutely concerned about the New York waterfront.
Governor Thomas Dewey, the same man who had prosecuted and jailed Luciano, commuted his sentence in January nineteen forty-six. The condition was immediate deportation to Italy.
Deportation didn't mean retirement. It barely even meant relocation, in the operational sense.
Charles Lucky Luciano died on January twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-two, at the airport in Naples. He was meeting with a film producer named Martin Gosch when he collapsed from a heart attack.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.