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The Man Who Built the Machine: Luciano and the Birth of the Mob
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Lucky Luciano, American organized crime was chaos — rival bosses, bloody turf wars, and no end in sight. This is how one Sicilian immigrant engineered the Commission, eliminated two bosses in nine months, and invented the modern American Mafia.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before there was a Mafia as Americans came to understand it, there was chaos. Competing factions, rival bosses, and blood in the streets with no end in sight.
To understand Luciano, you have to start where he started. Sicily.
By nineteen thirty, New York's Italian criminal underworld was tearing itself apart. The conflict was called the Castellammarese War.
Here's the key point about what came next. Luciano didn't take the title Maranzano had used.
No man builds something that durable alone. Luciano's most important alliance wasn't with another Italian mobster.
Thomas Dewey had ambitions larger than New York, and going after Luciano was the case he believed would get him there. Dewey was a special prosecutor, aggressive and meticulous, and in nineteen thirty-six he brought Luciano down on prostitution racketeering charges.
After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy faced a problem along the Eastern Seaboard. The ports were vulnerable.
In nineteen forty-six, Governor Thomas Dewey, the same man who had prosecuted Luciano ten years earlier, commuted his sentence. The terms were immediate deportation to Italy.
Deportation didn't mean retirement. Luciano made his way from Italy through Mexico and on to Cuba, arriving in Havana in late nineteen forty-six.
He spent the rest of his life in Italy, watching from a distance as the organization he'd built continued operating on both sides of the Atlantic. He maintained influence.
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