The door to Lucania’s opportunity had been opened. The opportunity came one evening when Lucania was eighteen. Coming home from work at Goodman’s, tired and dirty, he saw Scanlon’s car parked in front of his house. He ran up the four flights to his flat, grabbed a dishrag from the kitchen, raced back down and started briskly polishing the pusher’s car. A few minutes later, Scanlon appeared, watched until the job was done, and then tossed Salvatore Lucania a quarter. You would expect Lucania to take the quarter and leave, but Lucania did not want the quarter, he wanted recruitment. Lucania was about to be a part of something bigger than he could have ever imagined. Lucania handed the quarter back and told Scanlon he wanted to work for him. Scanlon …show more content…
For the next months, Lucania combined his work for Goodman with his work for Scanlon, secreting Scanlon’s narcotics in the hat bands of the ladies’ bonnets he was delivering. Each morning he would set out carrying a dozen or so hat boxes to Goodman’s customers, stopping off here and there to make a delivery to one of Scanlon’s customers. There were no set wages for the work, just a handful of bills, a ten or a twenty, adding up in some weeks to as much as a hundred dollars. It would have taken him more than four months to earn that much from Goodman (Gosch, 1975). Charlie’s victorious money earning was cut short, almost instantly. It looked like easy work for easy money (Gosch, 1975). But it didn’t last. Charlie was convinced that one of his friends, jealous of his new affluence, had tipped off the cops (Gosch, 1975). He was spotted on a number of occasions going in and out of a poolroom on East Fourteenth Street, a hangout for addicts and pushers, and police kept a close watch on him. Early in June of 1916, he was arrested outside the poolroom. He was caught selling heroin and served six months at a reformatory for unlawful possession of