The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (53 page)

“Calcedonia was a straight guy and I knew what he told me was the truth. I was practically on the next train south with him and Igea. When I showed up at the factory, Momo wasn’t there, which was lucky for him. But Enea was there, in the office. I could see around the place and I seen the factory part had extra machinery for dippin’ chocolates and mixin’ and so forth, so I was sure they didn’t steal all the money, just all the profits. I stood in the doorway and just looked at this bastard without sayin’ nothin’. He started to get red and I could tell he knew why I was there. I said to him, ‘You son of a bitch. You’re a fuckin’ thief. You been stealin’ from me and you think because you’re from my hometown I ain’t gonna do nothin’. Well, you got a big surprise comin’.’

“The little bastard looks at me and turns green. Then he falls down on his knees and grabs my hand and starts kissin’ it like I’m some kind of priest, and he’s beggin’ me not to kill him. He says he knows I’m in the Mafia and I can kill him any time, only please don’t do it and he’ll make it up to me. I was so mad I could’ve killed him on the spot, because there was no doubt about it, I’d been taken for the first time in my life and it hadda be by a
crummy rotten Sicilian I’d trusted. I told that jerk I was thinkin’ maybe of cuttin’ off his fingers or cuttin’ out his tongue or loppin’ off his ears. The more I threatened him, it was almost funny, the crazy way he was actin’; he was down on the floor, cryin’, kissin’ my shoes, screamin’. I practically scared him to death. Then it occurs to me that maybe the bastard’ll have a heart attack and drop dead on me, so I tell him the only reason I ain’t gonna do none of that shit is because the cops are watchin’ me and I can’t make a goddamn move without their knowin’ about it, and in my book, he ain’t worth goin’ to jail for. Then I said to him, if I ever see him again, that’d be his last minute on earth. He run out of there like a rabbit and I never did see the bastard again.”

Salemi, too, disappeared for a time, taking to the Sicilian mountains for sanctuary and sending inquiries from time to time to his family in Lercara Friddi asking whether it was safe to return.

“I put Calcedonia in charge of the candy business and the first thing he done was grab all the money Enea had socked away. It wasn’t much, only about five grand. Enea and Momo had blown the rest livin’ it up. Then Calcedonia went to work to put the business into shape. He turned his paint store over to another cousin and after that he spent all his time in Palermo. It took him a couple years, but he managed to build the candy business up pretty good. Then, as soon as he got it into the black, I run into another problem that killed off the whole thing. The American narcotics agents began to spread the story that the real reason I was in the candy business was to smuggle junk into the States in boxes of candy. When that story got around, I knew I had too much stacked against me. I told Calcedonia to get the business solid so we’d be able to sell it, which we did. We finally figured that I got taken for forty grand, which is a helluva lot of dough to pay for a couple boxes of candy.”

Luciano’s carefree, almost idyllic life with Igea lasted for about a year. But a web of narcotics involvement was being spun around him, and it began to tighten at the beginning of 1949, at first at long distance. On January 8, Charles E. Wyatt, the customs agent in New York, announced the arrest of several wealthy importers and some others in connection with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar
cache of opium and heroin discovered aboard the French freighter
Bastia
when it docked in New York. But, said Wyatt, he had evidence that Lucky Luciano was “positively involved.” What the evidence was, Wyatt never revealed, and no charges were ever brought against the exiled gangster. But the words were enough, and soon stories about Luciano and narcotics were breaking regularly in America, though always rumors, always claims that he was involved, was the brains behind the traffic, never any solid facts.

Then, on June 25, 1949, the stories came right to his door. In cooperation with American narcotics authorities, Italian police had been trying desperately to track down and stop the growing narcotics traffic from Italy to the United States. Early in June, they received a tip that sometime late in the month a major shipment would be passing through Rome airport. In the third week in June, that tip paid off. A minor American hoodlum named Vincent Trupia was hauled out of the transit lounge on his way from Germany to New York via Rome; in the lining of his suitcase was found six kilograms — a little over thirteen pounds — of pure cocaine. Trupia was hustled off to prison for interrogation. He talked, and among the names he mentioned as Italian contacts was that of Ralph Liguori, a deportee once called “The Pimp,” and a codefendant at Luciano’s vice trial.

That was enough for the Italian police. Immediately they arrested Liguori, a friend named Antonio Lo Manto and Liguori’s suspected narcotics contact in Genoa, another American deportee named Mazzarino Discianni.

They arrested Luciano, too, for he and Liguori had been seen together on several recent occasions in Rome. “Sure, I seen Liguori from time to time, just like a lot of other deportees who was in Rome or Naples or everyplace I went,” Luciano said years later, and told police then. “I knew a lot of ’em back in the States, so why shouldn’t I see ’em when they’re in Italy? Especially in 1949, when most of ’em was down on their luck. Even though they was Italian, most of ’em couldn’t even speak the language and that gave ’em no chance to get into any rackets. Some of ’em was even starvin’, so I’d slip ’em a few bucks, a ten or a twenty, sometimes a little more, and I even give a couple of ’em some work runnin’ errands for me. I don’t mean carryin’ junk; it was just that they’d
go to the store and pick up some shirts or ties, shoes, things like that. I didn’t want to give ’em money for doin’ nothin’; after all, they wasn’t my family. But, hell, after a while there was over four hundred American deportees in Italy and most of ’em was just moochers.

“But all of that crap some of the papers was printin’ about me and Liguori bein’ partners, or him workin’ for me, was crazy. There was even one story that Liguori and I set up a business to take American tourists to the cleaners by sellin’ ’em phony antiques or hot money. And there was another story that we was runnin’ a string of clip joints for the tourists in Rome. It was all a lot of horseshit. After all, in 1949, there wasn’t many Americans in Italy anyway because things was tough, like there wasn’t no heat in the hotels, and Americans don’t like that kind of inconvenience. The only thing I ever did, and the police knew about it and never did a fuckin’ thing to stop it, was to arrange for foreigners to buy lire at a black market price. For chrissake, everybody was doin’ that until American Express put the squeeze on the American Embassy because the black market was ruinin’ their business of changing lire and dollars at the legal rate.

“As far as this Trupia was concerned, I never seen him and I didn’t even find out until a lot later that the kid was workin’ as a courier for Vito. Joe Biondo, who was in my outfit in New York, had a lotta contact with Liguori and he’s the one who finally told me about the Vito connection.”

Arrested, Luciano was taken to Rome’s largest prison, the Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven) and jailed for nine days on suspicion of complicity in narcotics smuggling. He was questioned constantly, and fruitlessly, denied that he knew Trupia or anything about his work. Luciano’s apartment was torn apart, but in a five-hour search the police found only the usual household furnishings and a few letters from his brother Bartolo and some postcards from others. “No evidence of anything unusual was found,” one of the investigators reported.

All the time he was held, Igea camped outside the prison gates, besieged the offices of public officials, demanded his release, and so won a degree of admiration for acting like a proper Italian wife whose husband was in trouble.

Finally, Luciano was freed, but not before he was accused of having started a fire in the prison in an attempt to escape. American officials were forced, reluctantly, to agree with their Italian counterparts that there was no evidence against Luciano despite their suspicions and convictions. Trupia had named only Liguori and did not know Luciano. Liguori had named no one. In fact, the whole case eventually collapsed against everyone and Trupia was freed and shipped back to the United States. There he was gunned down on a Harlem street. “Trupia was murdered on order from Vito Genovese,” Luciano claimed years later. “Tony Bender had the contract, but I don’t know who pulled the trigger. But when I found out about it, it proved to me that Vito intended to use Trupia to scare me and prove to me how easy it was for him to set me up.”

When Luciano was released from jail, to greet the waiting Igea and a crowd of reporters and photographers (that afternoon, Italian papers were filled with pictures of the two embracing), he discovered that his troubles were not over. Under pressure of American authorities, the Italian Minister of the Interior and the Guardia di Finanza declared that he was a danger to the state. He was given a few hours to pack his belongings at the Parioli apartment and then shipped back to Lercara Friddi once more, there to live under constant watch and with a strict eight
P.M.
curfew.

Though Luciano wanted Igea, at the very least, to take a suite at the Villa Igea in Palermo while he tried to extricate himself from Lercara Friddi, she refused to be separated and so accompanied him to his hometown, back to the hotel where he had lived when he first arrived three years before. If Luciano was not happy to be back, the citizens of Lercara Friddi were almost overjoyed at his return. Mayor D’Accurso went so far as to suggest that he might retire as the town’s chief official in favor of Luciano. “Why not?” he said. “Signor Lucanía is a big businessman. The sulfur mine is reopening, more workers are returning to Lercara Friddi, and the population is increasing. We could use someone with his American ideas. Everyone in Lercara Friddi would vote for him.”

The offer was rejected. Luciano had other ideas. He pulled every wire he could and soon won a reprieve. He and Igea left the
village and settled into the Villa Igea in Palermo; from there, he could try more influence to win his way back to the mainland.

“You know what was one of the worst things about that whole time? It wasn’t the prison. The worst thing was that I had to miss the baptism of my godson. I was about to become a godfather just at the time when I was picked up by the police in that Trupia case. Calcedonia’s wife had just given birth to a son. They was gonna name him Francesco and they wanted me to be his godfather. In fact, Calcedonia made a special trip up to Rome to ask me in person. He wanted to assure me that he and his wife would consider it an honor. For the Sicilians, to be a godfather of the whole family or even of a gang was pretty important stuff, but when you become the godfather of a Sicilian kid, well, that’s when you really hit the big time. It carries a lotta responsibility, like you gotta make sure the kid is goin’ in the right direction and if anything happens to him, you gotta agree to step in and help out. In the States, all the guys in my outfit was forever knockin’ out kids and always wantin’ me to be godfather. But I never did. But when Calcedonia come all the way up to Rome, and because he was also part of the good things that happened to me, Igea was the one who urged me to do it. So I agreed that I would go down to Palermo to the church and sign the baptismal certificate and make it all official. It would be the first and only time I would ever be a godfather.

“Then them bastards picked me up on that phony junk thing and I’m sittin’ in jail. I was ready to explode because it was somethin’ I promised Calcedonia I’d do and it was somethin’ I really wanted to do. I got the police to let me send a wire down to Palermo givin’ my power of attorney to a notary there, which is legal, and he acted as my proxy at the ceremony. Later on, I was able to sign the church register myself. Some of the Italian officials who knew about it apologized to me and explained about the squeeze from the Americans.

“Ever since then, I keep in touch with my godson, Francesco. There’s one thing I try to impress upon that kid, that he shouldn’t grow up like me. Every once in a while, I see him lookin’ at me like I was some kinda tin god and I want to reach over and knock that look right off his face. One time we was talkin’ and I told him
he hadda become some kind of professional man. He asked me, did I mean a lawyer? And I said, ‘Not on your life. Lawyers are nothin’ but crooks.’ I said he’s gotta be a doctor, which is the best thing because he can make a good livin’ and at the same time he can help people.”

In 1973, Francesco Lucanía was, indeed, following his godfather’s advice. He was enrolled in the medical college of Bologna University.

Through the rest of 1949 and into 1950, the Villa Igea in Palermo was home to Luciano and Igea. It was a place both had come to love, where they had been happy in the past. Still, he fretted under the constant surveillance, under the eight o’clock curfew, under the other restrictions designed to curtail his movements and activities, and so, when necessary, he tried with some success to evade his watchers. “Naturally, I couldn’t meet nobody in Palermo, so I always found ways to slip across the island to Taormina in case it was somethin’ important, like meetin’ my friends from America.”

As there had been since his arrival in Italian exile, a steady parade of couriers and emissaries arrived from America, bringing money and messages and seeking advice and counsel. Now, instead of meeting him in Rome or Naples, they trooped to Taormina and talked in the warm sun and vacation atmosphere of the resort.

One day, his old friend Meyer Lansky arrived. He was taking the grand tour of Europe, both as a delayed honeymoon with his second wife, Thelma — she had been his manicurist in Miami before his divorce from Anna and their marriage in 1948 — and as a way to avoid for the moment some of the heat arising from the opening stages of the Senate crime investigating committee under Estes Kefauver.