Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (11 page)

Dewey lined up sixty-eight witnesses, almost all hookers, pimps, madams, bookers, and jailbirds who admitted they had been promised lenient sentences, immunity, or probation for aiding the prosecution. Dewey’s main strategy was to depict the prostitutes as desperate victims of the Depression, exploited and terrorized by the Combine’s ruthless sentries.

“I tell you, I was afraid,” a former prostitute testified. “I know what the Combination does to girls who talk. Plenty of girls who talked too much had their feet burned and their stomachs burned with cigarette butts and their tongues cut.”

Only three erstwhile prostitutes from Dewey’s large clutch of witnesses provided testimony directly linking Luciano to the accusations. The most damaging allegations came from an admitted heroin addict named Cokey Flo Brown, who said she had accompanied her pimp to late-night meetings with Lucky at which business matters were discussed. According to Cokey Flo, she heard Lucky propose a plan to franchise whorehouses, “the same as the A and P.” She further recalled that Luciano once pondered the idea of placing the madams on salary, instead of allowing them to take a cut from the gross proceeds.

Another prostitute said she had sex several times with Lucky in his Waldorf-Astoria Towers apartment, and after some sessions overheard snatches of his conversations with codefendants. She claimed to have listened in as Luciano gave instructions to punish an uncooperative madam by wrecking her establishment. On another occasion, she testified, Luciano had ordered a hike in prices to increase profits. A Waldorf chambermaid and a waiter identified other
defendants as having often been seen visiting Lucky in his suite. Their testimony hardened Dewey’s case against Luciano by implicating him through association with men against whom there was more concrete evidence.

Defense lawyers attacked the prosecution witnesses as a collection of unreliable drug addicts and felons pressured by Dewey into lying to save themselves from prison sentences. Luciano was the victim of “the distorted imaginations of broken-down prostitutes,” the defense team argued. The attorneys characterized Dewey as a headline-hunting, ruthlessly ambitious prosecutor—“a boy scout” and “a boy prosecutor”—who manufactured a sensational case against Lucky as a catapult for his own political career.

A questionable defense ploy was an attempt to portray Luciano as a successful gambler and bookie, too wealthy and virtuous to taint himself in the sordid demimonde of prostitution. Lucky took the dangerous step of testifying and matching wits with Dewey. Under gentle questioning by his lawyer, the overconfident witness denied ever meeting the former whores who testified against him, maintained he only knew one of his dozen codefendants, and had no knowledge of the so-called Combine or Combination.

“I give to ‘em,” Lucky quipped when asked if had ever profited from or was involved in organized prostitution. “I never took.”

Cross-examination proved more hazardous. Having culled confidential police files and gathered from informers every tidbit about Luciano’s past, Dewey coolly lacerated Lucky. Pounded by Dewey about contradictions in his testimony, a squirming and perspiring Luciano acknowledged that he might have lied or omitted details in direct examination. He could only weakly muster, “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember,” to a spate of Dewey’s questions about his falsehoods on the witness stand.

The prosecutor further undermined Luciano’s denials of acquaintance with many of his codefendants by producing records of telephone calls from his Waldorf Astoria suite to their numbers. Luciano’s explanation that someone else probably used his private phone for personal calls must have sounded lame to the jury. Dewey also produced hotel records that phone calls were made to Al Capone and to a veritable “Who’s Who” list of reputed major criminals in the country.

Dewey dug up Luciano’s tax returns from 1929 to 1935, which showed his highest declared gross annual income was $22,500. Stammering and mumbling, Luciano was unable to explain how he lived like a sultan on his reported income.

Probably the most embarrassing moment for the proud Mafia don was Dewey’s disclosure that in 1923, when he was twenty-five, Luciano had evaded a narcotics arrest by informing on a dealer with a larger cache of drugs.

“You’re just a stool pigeon,” Dewey belittled him. “Isn’t that it?”

“I told them what I knew,” a downcast Luciano replied, in effect conceding to his peers that he had once violated the code
of omertà.

The jury needed only nine hours to deliberate. Luciano listened stolidly as the foreman intoned guilty verdicts on all counts against him and his main co-defendants. For Lucky it meant a prison sentence of thirty to fifty years. The next year, his appeal was rejected despite recantations by the three principal witnesses against him. Dewey rebutted the appeal with evidence that the recantations were perjuries, obtained from intimidated or drug-addicted witnesses by Luciano’s troops.

Overnight Dewey’s triumph magnified him into a national hero. He lectured on the radio and in movie newsreels (the 1930s equivalent of network television) about the dangers of syndicated crime.

Hollywood noticed his exploits. The popular movie
Marked Woman
, based on the Luciano case, opened in 1937 with Humphrey Bogart playing the lead male role, a dynamic DA modeled on Dewey. Bette Davis starred as the courageous heroine who risked her life to expose vicious racketeers and their abuse of women. In the movie the women were portrayed as naive nightclub hostesses, not prostitutes.

The courtroom contest with Luciano was undoubtedly a boon to Dewey’s political career, almost sending him to the White House. He went on to win elections as DA of Manhattan and governor of New York State, but was unsuccessful as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1944 and 1948.

Lucky Luciano was the only major New York Mafia leader of his era that Dewey or any other prosecutor convicted of a serious felony. The evidence by the three witnesses that tied him directly to the prostitution enterprise was astonishingly thin. Defense lawyers made a monumental blunder by allowing Luciano to testify, thereby opening the door to Dewey’s hammering cross-examination about issues that were extraneous to the charges: his criminal past, his lifestyle, and his links to the well-known Al Capone.

Most Mafia and legal scholars who have reviewed the trial record agree that Luciano as the family boss profited from the prostitution racket; yet, in retrospect, they suspect there is a strong possibility that he may have been framed by compliant witnesses with false accusations. These experts believe
that as the nation’s supreme Mafia godfather, he was too important and busy to micro-manage the bordello business and allow himself to become implicated in the specific counts leveled against him, “aiding and abetting compulsory prostitution.” It would have been out of character for the leader of the nation’s largest Mafia borgata to bother with the minutiae of running brothels, as the prosecution asserted. There is, however, indisputable evidence that members of Luciano’s crime family established a protection racket, compelling the independent madams and brothel operators to pay a franchise fee to stay open. The correct accusation against Luciano should have been extortion, but Dewey lacked sufficient evidence to pin that more complicated charge on him.

Another contemporary big-time boss, Joe Bonanno, who was well versed in the magnitude of the Mafia’s 1930s rackets, was dubious about Dewey’s contention that Luciano was a prostitution profiteer. Lucky’s “earners” most likely dropped his name to intimidate whorehouse owners into paying for protection, Bonanno recounted in A
Man of Honor.
“Lastly, Dewey built up a case not so much against Luciano as against Luciano’s name,” Bonanno pointed out.

Another naysayer with credentials was Polly Adler, New York’s best-known madam of high-class brothels, and an authority on the underworld society of the 1930s and ‘40s. “Certainly,” she bragged in her memoirs, “I believe that in the many years I was associated with prostitution if there had even been even a hint of a rumor of a tie-up between Charlie and ‘the Combination’ I would have heard of it.”

Far from his luxury surroundings in Manhattan, Lucky was imprisoned in the Siberia of the state penal system, the maximum-security Clinton Penitentiary in Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border. As inmate 92168, Luciano was assigned to work in the steaming prison laundry. But just as on the outside, Lucky found a comfortable niche inside prison walls. In return for gifts of food and money and as homage to his godfather status, prisoners substituted for him in the laundry, cleaned his cell, and took care of all his odious prison chores. Little Davie Betillo, a codefendant convicted in the prostitution case, became Luciano’s personal valet and chef, preparing Lucky’s favorite delicacies in a cellblock kitchen that the authorities set aside for his private use.

Guards, aware of Luciano’s criminal stature, never disturbed him. He spent most of his time playing cards, strolling around the prison, and watching handball
and baseball games. Inmates lined up in the recreation yard for the opportunity to talk with him.

“He practically ran the place,” a guard observed. “He used to stand there in the yard like he was the warden.”

Prime Minister

L
ucky Luciano was gone but his crime family was intact, functioning just as smoothly as when he had been at the helm.

In accordance with Mafia tradition, a boss’s crown can be relinquished only by death or by abdication. Thus, even behind prison walls five hundred miles from New York, Charlie Lucky remained as titular leader of his family, with the authority, if it pleased him, to transmit commands to the city through reliable messengers who visited him in Dannemora.

But the gang’s day-to-day operations and urgent decisions had to be in the hands of someone on the scene. Before departing for prison, Luciano turned over the administrative reins of the borgata to a regent, Frank Costello, appointing him as acting boss. At the start of Luciano’s imprisonment, there was still a faint hope that his conviction would be overturned on appeal and he would return to the throne before long. When the appeal failed in 1937, Luciano was seemingly doomed to spend the rest of his life in prison. Costello, by default, assumed the title of boss of America’s largest Mob family, with more than three hundred soldiers under his command.

Dewey’s conviction of Luciano paradoxically proved the wisdom of Lucky’s managerial strategy for Mafia survival. Costello easily filled Luciano’s shoes, and the rest of the borgata’s structure—the capos, the crews, the soldiers, the associates
—remained secure. The law-enforcement establishment may have rejoiced at the victories over Luciano and Capone, but they failed to understand a seismic change had occurred in the families of organized crime: the viability of Mafia families was not endangered by the imprisonment of a top man. Unlike the loosely organized Jewish and Irish ethnic gangs fashioned haphazardly by the likes of Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden, a cohesive borgata did not disintegrate at the sudden absence of its head man.

Dewey and his successors for decades after the 1930s successfully prosecuted dozens of mid- and low-level Italian-American and other ethnic mobsters. Under the prevailing laws, Dewey focused on individuals, not on their organizations. It is doubtful that Dewey—the most distinguished and respected rackets prosecutor of his era—and other leading law-enforcement authorities visualized the dimensions of the Mafia’s makeup and power.

In 1937 Frank Costello was a highly regarded and well-known figure in New York’s underworld and in the nation’s Mafia legions. Yet he took control of the Luciano family without exciting the faintest interest or concern within New York and federal law-enforcement agencies.

Christened Francesco Castiglia in 1891, he was the youngest of six children in a family from Cosenza, a mountain village in Calabria, a province in the toe of Italy. The family emigrated when Costello was four; space in steerage was so tight, he said, that he slept in a large cooking pot. The journey ended in East Harlem, and like so many of his future Mafia partners, he exchanged rustic poverty for an urban slum.

At seventeen and twenty-one, Costello was arrested for robbing women in the streets, but alibis provided by relatives and friends won him acquittals. He was less fortunate at twenty-three, when he was picked up for carrying a concealed gun and served ten months in prison. He later claimed that he never again packed a gun and that his prison stretch taught him to get results by using his head instead of violence.

Out of prison, Francesco Castiglia legally changed his name to Frank Costello, apparently because he felt an Irish name sounded more American, and teamed up with Lucky Luciano in Joe the Boss Masseria’s gang. Financed partly by Arnold Rothstein, Costello became a premier bootlegger. He was particularly successful in running vast hauls of expensive Scotch whiskey from Canada to the New York area. Influenced by Luciano’s open-door ethnic policy,
Costello had no compunctions about forging temporary partnerships and making deals with Jewish and Irish rumrunners. Costello’s underworld pals said he would later boast that one of his prohibition collaborators in the 1920s was Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy.