Charles Luciano Research Papers

Charles “Lucky” Luciano, born Salvatore Lucania in 1897 in Sicily, probably did more to create the modern American Mafia and the national criminal Syndicate than any other single man. Luciano led a group of young Italian and Jewish mobsters against the older set of so-called “Mustache Petes,” and in the process set the stage for the Mob to grow beyond the limits of bootlegging profits to become, in the words of his friend Meyer

Lansky, “bigger than United States Steel.” Luciano, who moved to the United States and settled in the Lower East Side with his family at age 10, was recruited early into gangster life and was a member of the Five Points Gang in Manhattan. Around the start of Prohibition in 1920, he was recruited as a gunman by Giuseppe

By the mid-1920s, Luciano was reportedly making millions in bootlegging profits. With Rothstein’s murder in 1928, Luciano went back to working for Masseria, who by this time was the self-styled “Boss of Bosses,” and who was going to war with a rival, Salvatore “The Duke” Maranzano.

Luciano secretly sided with Maranzano in the bloody Castellammarese War and helped set up Masseria for assassination in 1931. Before the end of the year, Luciano and other “Young Turks'' would knock off Maranzano, and the era of the Old World

“Mustache Petes” would be over.With Maranzano’s assassination by a gang from

Murder, Incorporated – allegedly including Joe Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia and Vito Genovese, all of whom would go on to well-known roles in the Mob — Luciano inherited the crime family that would eventually become known as the Genovese family.

A natural organizer, Luciano continued the committee of Five Families, which was established by Maranzano and would control East Coast rackets for decades. But rather than naming himself “Boss of Bosses,” as Maranzano had, Luciano called himself the chairman of the board.Further, he established and hosted the first national meetings

Dewey and his assistant, an African-American attorney named Eunice Carter, noticed that many of the prostitutes who were being arrested were represented by the same bondsmen and attorneys working for Luciano.Armed with this information, in

1936, Dewey led raids on brothels throughout the city, arresting more than 100 people, mostly women, many of whom were unable to post the bail of $10,000 set by the courts.

Some of those arrested provided information to the prosecutors that led to Luciano’s arrest and trial that same year. On June 6, 1936, Luciano was convicted of 62 charges of compulsory prostitution; he was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in state prison.Luciano turned over leadership of the national Commission to Frank Costello.That wasn’t the end of Luciano’s story, however. During World War II, the government needed the Mob’s help to keep the New York docks free of strikes, sabotage and other problems. Luciano agreed to help, on the assumption that he would get a break on his sentence. Dewey, the former prosecutor, was now New York governor and in a position to grant clemency.After the war ended, Dewey commuted Luciano’s sentence with