The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (43 page)

But, then, Genovese could well afford to offer his services for free to the authorities. “He made more than a million dollars in untraceable cash in almost no time. That connivin’ louse was sellin’ American goods to his own Italian people, things that’d save their lives or keep ’em from starving. He made a fortune outa penicillin, cigarettes, sugar, olive oil, flour, you name it. He even used U.S. Army trucks to ship this black market stuff all over Italy, right behind the army.”

But there was one man on the military government staff who was not so credulous. His name was Orange C. Dickey, a sergeant in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. He began to investigate the losses of vast quantities of vital supplies from Nola and other bases, and soon came upon the name Genovese — signed to papers diverting shipments, assigning trucks, allocating supplies. Dickey looked further and came upon two Canadian soldiers involved in the black market. They told him the password for the operation was “Genovese sent us.” More confirmation followed, and Dickey discovered other interesting facets — that counterintelligence, for one, had suspicions that Genovese, because of his long history of close ties with Italian Fascist leaders, might actually be a German spy.

In the summer of 1944, Dickey reported his findings to Captain Dunn and others in positions of authority. They ordered him to drop the matter. Dickey refused and in August 1944, on his own authority, arrested Genovese on charges of black market activities and possible espionage. But it was one thing to make an arrest and another to make it stick. Dickey could find no one to back him up. In frustration, Dickey sent a message to the FBI in Washington about his apprehension of Genovese, asking whether anybody in the United States wanted him.

Somebody did — the authorities in Brooklyn. During his years in prison, Ernest “The Hawk” Rupolo had grown increasingly bitter and had finally, as Genovese feared, talked about the Boccia murder, had even provided a corroborating witness, a cigar-store salesman and underworld hanger-on named Peter La Tempa. With La Tempa’s testimony that he had overheard the details of the killing, Brooklyn authorities obtained a murder indictment against Genovese and Mike Miranda, and then took La Tempa into protective custody.

Genovese was ordered returned to the United States, to New York, and Orange Dickey was assigned to take him there. Genovese tried to buy Dickey off. “I was offered many things,” Dickey later said. “At one point, I was offered a quarter of a million dollars to let this fellow out of jail.” Genovese also offered jobs, anything that Dickey wanted. All were refused. Genovese then began to threaten Dickey’s life and the lives of his family, but still Dickey
would not be deterred. He brought Genovese back in irons and turned him over to his superiors. Though a civilian employee of the Army, Genovese was technically under custody of and liable to trial by the Judge Advocate General’s office. But the Army relinquished its claim to him.

“You gotta realize that the muscle we had with the Army was pretty good, but I knew there wasn’t a prayer we could get Vito off, because we couldn’t buy a court-martial. Besides, I was up in Great Meadow workin’ on all them complicated things of my own. So, I thought, screw the bastard. It’s time he took care of himself.

“Then Willie Moretti and Frank come up and they said everybody in New York, includin’ Anastasia, was talkin’ about how we couldn’t let Vito take a long rap; they was coppin’ a big plea for him. It was Frank’s idea that we should use muscle to get Vito transferred out of Army jurisdiction over to the Brooklyn D.A., and we worked this out. Vito’s case was gonna be handled by the assistant D.A. of Brooklyn, a guy by the name of Julius Helfand, and we didn’t have a good contact with him. But there was somethin’ we did have — a way to get into the jail where La Tempa was bein’ held in protective custody. Anastasia fixed it up, spreadin’ around quite a bundle of money — which Vito later paid him back — and one mornin’, I think it was in January of 1945, Pete La Tempa woke up with a pain in his stomach. His whole insides was bad, he had ulcers, he needed an operation for gallstones, but he was afraid to let anybody do it. Anyway, he took what he thought was his regular pain pills and went back to sleep. He never got up again.”

With the death of La Tempa, the case against Genovese collapsed; he was held in jail for nearly a year longer and then released.

And then the war in Europe was over. On the very day it ended, May 7, 1945, a petition for executive clemency and freedom for Charles Lucania was sent to Governor Thomas E. Dewey. He quickly turned the matter over to the state parole board, whose members were all his appointees. Luciano’s attorneys told the board he “has cooperated with high military authorities. He is rendering a definite service to the war effort.” And so he should be freed. Haffenden wrote a personal letter lauding Luciano for
his efforts, which, Haffenden said, had helped shorten the war in Sicily and Italy. Precisely what those efforts had been, the board was not told; Haffenden did not say and the Navy refused to reveal any details.

But the parole board knew what the governor wanted. Though it could develop no evidence of any war assistance by Luciano, it nevertheless sent Dewey a unanimous recommendation for his parole.

On January 3, 1946, Governor Dewey announced that Lucky Luciano would be freed — not to remain in the United States but to be paroled to his birthplace in Sicily. “Upon the entry of the United States into the war,” Dewey said, “Luciano’s aid was sought by the armed services in inducing others to provide information concerning possible enemy attack. It appears that he cooperated in such efforts, though the actual value of the information provided is not clear. His record in prison is reported as wholly satisfactory.”

Some years later, in an interview with the New York
Post
, Dewey went a little further: “An exhaustive investigation . . . established that Luciano’s aid to the Navy in the war was extensive and valuable. Ten years is probably as long as anybody ever served for compulsory prostitution. And these factors led the parole board to recommend the commutation, combined with the fact that Luciano would be exiled for life, under law.”

On February 2, 1946, Luciano walked through the gates of Great Meadow Prison for the last time. He was taken to Ellis Island in New York harbor and held there while the final preparations for his exile were completed. En route through Manhattan to the harbor ferry, he had a fleeting glimpse, his first in a decade, of the city whose underworld he had ruled, a city he, in his way, loved. For a week, from Ellis Island, he could see the skyline, so near yet so unapproachable.

“When they drove me through the city I asked the detectives to stop, just for a couple minutes. I only wanted to get out and put my feet down on the street in Manhattan. I wanted to feel it under me. I wanted to know that I actually walked in New York without bars hemmin’ me in. But them guys said they couldn’t allow it. So we went right on through the ferry and across the bay. All the
time, for the next week, I’d stand outside on Ellis Island and stare over at the buildin’s. I’d look at the Chrysler Buildin’ and think back a few years to when Walter Chrysler used to come up to Saratoga and gamble at my clubs and sometimes I’d okay his markers. Once I was good enough to okay Chrysler’s markers and now I couldn’t even walk into his buildin’. And there was the Empire State. Once the guy behind that fantastic buildin’, John Raskob, needed my okay so his best friend, Al Smith, could run for President. From Ellis Island, I couldn’t even take a ride in one of his elevators.

“That week of waitin’ was real rough for me. I kept sayin’ to myself, ‘Fuck ’em all. I’ll be back.’ I swore I’d figure out some way to change the deal.”

Thrown together in the chaotic frenzy of wartime, without thought to grace or beauty or comfort or speed or permanency, with concern only for utility, destined to live for a few years and then to rust on the scrap heap of the useless remnants of battle, the S.S.
Laura Keene
, like so many of her sister Liberty ships, had tossed and churned her way across the treacherous North Atlantic for a season or two, loaded with vital cargo and miserable crew.

Early in 1946, a battered, barnacled hulk, she was granted a few years of extra grace, was refitted and assigned the task of bringing home some of the troops who had helped defeat the Axis, and carrying away, along with cargo necessary for the troops that remained and for the starving populations of Europe, men no longer welcome on American shores.

On the morning of February 9, 1946, the
Laura Keene
was docked at Pier 7 off the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn. At noon, she would sail for Genoa, Italy, carrying with her America’s most notorious criminal. Brought ashore from Ellis Island and hustled aboard, Charlie “Lucky” Luciano was about to begin his years of exile.

It was a cold February morning in New York, the icy wind whipping off the harbor. Reporters had gone to the dock to witness the departure and to attend a shipboard press conference promised them by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service — the agency in charge of Luciano’s deportation. But when they arrived, there was no press conference and they were told there would be no statement and no interviews. Luciano wanted to talk to no reporters, and as a federal prisoner until he had passed the three-mile limit, his wishes had to be respected.

When the reporters tried to get to the ship, they were met by a solid mass of longshoremen, armed with sharpened baling hooks.
They had been sent to guard the pier and insure privacy by Albert Anastasia and his brother, “Tough Tony” Anastasio. The reporters appealed to officials from District Attorney Frank Hogan’s office, who were on the scene. The appeal for access to the ship was denied. The reporters could only stand, freeze, and watch in frustration as the longshoremen threatened and barred them, and then opened ranks to permit the passage of one long black limousine after another, the passengers hidden behind curtained windows. At precisely noon, the
Laura Keene
began her slow passage through the channel and out toward the open sea. What had happened through the morning on board was unknown to those who had stood outside in the cold, a hundred yards distant.

“A couple days before the sailin’, Polakoff brought Lansky and Costello over to see me at Ellis Island. They said they was gonna throw a big farewell party for me on board the ship and that friends of mine was comin’ from all over the country. They asked me if I needed anythin’, and I said my brother Bart had been over a few days before with a trunk full of my clothes he had stored away. Believe it or not, a lotta the suits still fit, though they was a little tight because I put on some weight from all that good food that was bein’ sent in to me at Great Meadow. We arranged that all that stuff he had been savin’ for me from the Waldorf Towers would be put on board. But I said it might be a good idea if Frank and Joe A. stocked me up with a bunch of clothes in the new styles from Cye’s store, maybe one size larger. I figured I’d be able to take off the extra weight durin’ the two weeks it took to get to Italy.

“Then I told ’em to make sure there was some dough because I was gonna need plenty of that when I got to Italy.” The fortune Luciano had amassed during his years in power had been, to a great extent, dissipated during his years in prison. The cost of his trial, his appeals and his various legal and extralegal maneuvers during that decade had come to more than a million dollars. More had gone as his share of the expenditures necessary to insure the success of his organization and his position even in absentia. “The story went around in 1946 when I shipped out that I was carryin’ from a million to forty million dollars in a trunk. That was all horseshit, but I never did nothin’ to deny the reports. I knew my
Italians pretty good and I figured that I would get more respect as a millionaire than just as Charlie Lucky, the American big shot. When I told Meyer to make sure there was some dough, I meant it, because I needed it. He told me not to worry about that neither, because everybody was gonna bring somethin’ to the party and I’d have more than enough to see me through until we all got together again. I already had plans for that reunion.

“Then Meyer asked me if there was anythin’ else I needed for the trip. I said, ‘Yeah, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a few broads to keep me company out on the ocean.’ At first, I thought Gay Orlova was gonna come with me, but she had a lotta trouble with all that red tape about passports and where she was born and that kind of crap, so she had to cancel out. When I mentioned girls, Meyer started to laugh and he said, ‘I took care of that, too, Charlie. Three very nice ones are gonna go along with you. We worked that out with Dewey’s guys. We’re givin’ the girls some extra dough so they can take a vacation in Paris on the way home.’