Lucky Luciano – Mafia Murderer and Secret Agent

Tim Newark wastes no time in tearing apart the man, the myth and legend of Lucky Luciano. In illustrating Luciano’s rise to notoriety in the criminal underworld to how he was manipulated like a puppet into believing his own self-proclaimed status as a criminal mastermind. The truth of the matter was that Luciano’s international drug empire and reputation for helping the Allies in Sicily and the Mediterranean win the Second World War was manipulated from above. A reputation built on 25 years of fear was enhanced, supported and even officially recognised to maintain the man, myth and legend of Lucky Luciano.

Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano – or Salvatore Luciana to his mum – was born in Sicily on 11th of November 1897. In 1907 he emigrated to America with his family to live in the notorious Lower East Side district of New York. Much of his early criminal acts were learned whilst running protection rackets with other immigrant gangs. The environment that he grew up in was austere, violent, with high unemployment and strikes a common feature, and making an honest living was at a premium. He somehow managed to shoot himself with his very first gun at the age of 14. But the irony doesn’t end there, as Newark’s portrayal of Luciano highlights numerous other points within the telling of this story. One of the most common features, as it remains today with any ‘wannabe gangster’ is that the reputation may have been built on fear to start with, but it gets perpetuated through others telling it for him.

For the first 25 years of Luciano’s life his criminal reputation for ‘conflict resolution’ and ‘community projects’ didn’t go unnoticed. He was schooled in how to dress, speak and act in different situations; generally shying away from the limelight and self-promotion by others coming through the ranks at the same time. One of these was an affective street-fighter who had been slashed during a fight over a girl – Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, a man who liked to fluff his own ego as he drove around in an armour-plated Cadillac.

With the lifestyle comes, inevitably, the prison sentence and Lucky was no exception – well not at this stage of his life, questions would later be asked of his willingness to ‘co-operate’ with the authorities. Suffice to say that Tim Newark’s research challenges Lucky Luciano’s commitment to the ‘omerta’ – the mafia code of silence and refusal to give assistance or any evidence to the police or authority figures. Within 2 days in 1923 Lucky had sold two-ounces of morphine and an ounce of heroin to narcotics agents. He broke the omerta code, but both the address and $150,000 worth of drugs that they found were his own. The case against him was dropped for supplying the information. However, the smell of ‘informer’ haunted him and numerous other drug dealers were arrested: ‘…because Luciano gave names to the police…it revealed that Luciano was willing to negotiate with the authorities. This knowledge would encourage future secret deals with the government.’

Many years later whilst sitting in a prison cell, Luciano gave the go-ahead for his henchmen to give every assistance possible to Naval Intelligence. Luciano boasted: ‘There’ll be no German submarines in the Port of New York.’ Time Newark provides evidence to show that government agents had much bigger plans for him, his American and Sicilian associates and their geographical knowledge of the local area.

Apart from the odd snipe at Richard Hammer’s ‘The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano’, accusations of it being ‘fraudulent’ by the journalist Tony Scaduto, and wander down memory lane every now and then, this book reads very well. Tim Newark used primary official documents found in Palermo, Washington DC, London and New York to clear away the variations on the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter, good stuff.