Mastermind of the Mob: Lucky Luciano Quiz

Answer: smallpox

Salvatore Lucania was born November 24, 1897, in Palermo, Italy to Antonio and Rosalia. His father's primary source of income for the six-member family was a low-paying job working in the sulfur pit mines.

In 1906, the Lucania's sailed to America and settled in an American-Jewish location in New York City's Lower East Side, known today as, Manhattan's East Village. The affliction of smallpox marked his face with an acne-scarred facial feature. After medical treatment, he returned to normal health, although the scars were distinct for life.

In 1929, his Sicilian face was further disfigured after he endured a vicious and brutal attack. Historical reports indicate that Lucania was standing on Sixth Avenue when a limousine drove up and three men forced him in at gunpoint. They severely beat him, stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick and knife, slashing his face, and then dumped him on a Staten Island beach to die. Lucky lay on the ground unconscious, and woke up nearly an hour later. He struggled to walk for over a mile before he made it to the Tottenville Police Precinct. An officer immediately took him to a nearby hospital, although, all he wanted was for someone to call him a taxi.

After he survived the remarkable near-death ordeal, he earned the nickname, "Lucky" Luciano. The cruel attack left him with his renowned droopy right eye. Lucky never provided any names of his attackers, instead, had his own investigation done by Meyer Lansky. Lansky found out that Masseria, also known as, "Joe the Boss", was the one who had ordered the hit on Luciano.

Answer: Meyer Lansky

Although he befriended the others, Lansky became his most trusted and loyal childhood friend, and later his partner in his criminal empire. Lansky, being a Jewish from Poland, and Luciano, an Italian, the fearless duo started a hoodlum of tough gangs in 1907.

Just one year since his arrival to the states, Luciano's unofficial crime racketeering began by intimidating his fellow classmates and other vulnerable schoolchildren. If the pay were rejected, he would beat them up. He completed the sixth grade and then dropped out at the age of fourteen.

Answer: shoplifting

The lesson in the early arrest did not teach him anything. He was neither fearful of it, nor embarrassed by it. He was sent to a state facility for youthful offenders, and it was there that he officially changed his name from Salvatore "Sal" to Charles "Charlie" Luciano.

After serving a small term for shoplifting, he was released and put into the custody of his humiliated and hard-working parents. He took a job with a Jewish hat maker delivering his goods. Realizing he could more than triple his pay and make it look as if it was a legal front, he slipped drugs into the hatbands before he made his deliveries.

At the age of ten, he had already been involved in mugging, extortion, and shoplifting. By the age of nineteen, he had spent six months in jail for selling heroin. Still, Luciano refused to alter his insubordinate lifestyle.

Answer: bootlegging

When the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, liquor was in big demand in the Manhattan area and surrounding states. Bootlegging his illegal liquor became his largest and prime operation. It was known as the Prohibition period and the amendment banned the sale, manufacturing and/or transport of any variety of alcohol. For greater revenue sales, he imported the more expensive Scotch whisky, Canadian whiskey, and rum from the Caribbean, using reputable, controlled trucking firms as his legal front.

Lucky ascended as one of the top mobsters and grossed over $100,000 by the year 1925, although much of the enormous monetary amount was used to pay off under-handed politicians and police officials' to keep quiet. Luciano expanded his business with bookmaking, drug trafficking, extortion, high-stakes gambling, the international heroin trade, loan-sharking, and prostitution as well during the American depression era. It was from those ventures that he came to be known as, the father of organized crime and official boss of the powerful, modern day Genovese crime family in America. He expected each person involved the under-ground criminal empire to adhere to his criminal rules and policies. If not, he had them to pay with their life.

Luciano had been influential in union and labor activities as well, and fully controlled New York constructions, garbage hauling, garment and trucking businesses, warehouses, and the docks on the Manhattan Waterfront.

Answer: Commission

In 1930, with the assistance of his childhood friend Meyer Lansky, Luciano organized and became the leader of what he designated, the Commission, or "Unione Siciliano", with his top, trusted men. The organization was considered as the gangster counterpart to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Commission consisted of a twelve-member group that settled all challenges and disputes in the gangland. Wanting to establish order within the cartel, Luciano implemented the effective idea of "crime families," selecting a group of his most faithful Sicilian supporters to head certain districts and territories. Being the top crime boss, he had been a popular figure in society, often seen at fine restaurants, ornate theaters, and elaborate parties and balls. He had been often seen with well-known political and civic leaders, entertainers, such as Frank Sinatra, and other distinguished persons. Being in charge of organized crime, even the VIP's dared not to challenge his supreme authority.

Answer: Thomas Dewey

By 1935, New York's special prosecuting district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey, had collected substantial evidence against Luciano. Dewey invaded eighty Manhattan, New York brothels, and arrested hundreds of madams and call girls.

In exchange for their freedom from prison, they turned state's evidence and offered incriminating information about the prostitution ring in which they were involved. The staff from the prominent Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue where Lucky managed many of his business transactions, testified at the trial that they had witnessed numerous gangsters entering his '39c' suite frequently.

Answer: Arkansas

After he posted his bail, Lucky Luciano was determined that he would not stand trial for something he affirmed he was not involved in. He fled from New York State to the southern state of Arkansas. After being recognized in Hot Springs, an Arkansas judge ordered an extradition.

However, Luciano was bailed out by a paid-off police detective before he could be transported. Dewey sent a group of New York detectives down south to bring Lucky back to stand trial. At his court appearance in 1936, he was indicted, tried by a jury, and was convicted on sixty-two counts of compulsory prostitution. The judge sentenced the thirty-eight year old Charles Luciano to serve thirty to fifty years in Clinton Prison at Dannemora, New York.

Although incarcerated, his mafia dealings did not cease. He continued to rule his cartel while imprisoned with an iron fist, issuing his orders through Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. He was known to have operated the largest prostitution ring in American history in the 1930's.

Answer: U.S. Naval Intelligence

At his age, he acknowledged that he was facing certain life in prison. Even as powerful as he was, Lucky Luciano could not foresee any way out of his situation. Then as luck would have it for him, World War II started when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Lucky realized that he was in the perfect position to bargain and make his own demands and requests of either being moved to a better prison or a possible early parole. Orders were given to Lansky to send out the message that he could help in the war effort at home and abroad. The Naval Intelligence confronted Luciano with his proposition. After serious contemplation by the government, and knowing that he had connections world-wide, the choice was made to accept his offer, but not until they had him moved to a more secure and protected site.

On May 12, 1942, Luciano was moved to Great Meadow Prison in Comstock, New York. The Naval Intelligence made frequent, unrecorded visits to solicit his much needed help, and Luciano, who declared himself a loyal American citizen, obliged with all the assistance they needed, and more. Many people believed that the allied invasion of Sicily would not have been as triumphant for the U.S. had it not been for the help and valuable information that Lucky Luciano had supplied.

Answer: Cuba

Lucky Luciano began to think that the U.S. had foregone their end of the bargain. The same person who had put him behind bars in the first place, was the only one who could have him released. Former district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey, had been elected governor of New York, and in January of 1946, he finally commuted his release from prison in exchange for his aide in the war.

Unfortunately, for Lucky though, conditions were attached to his newfound freedom back into the world. He was to be deported to Rome, and although he was genuinely hurt by having to leave the United States, a country he had grown to love and claimed as his own since he was nine, reluctantly agreed. Immediately after leaving prison on February 10, 1946, prison guards took him directly to Ellis Island, where on Sunday, at 8:50 a.m., Charles "Lucky" Luciano boarded the S.S. Laura Keene for Italy, never to return to America. Even though deportation made him relocate, he never lost his status as the "boss of bosses".

He continued to use his control over the American cartel, but no more than one year had passed, he became displeased by the way the Commission and activities were being run back in the states. Though the Italian government held firm rules on Luciano's lifestyle, he still managed to escape Italy and flew to Havana, Cuba, where he could conduct his business affairs more effectively through runners and telephone conversations.

The news of Luciano's presence in Cuba soon got back to the U.S. authorities, and all shipments of medical drugs to Cuba were threatened to be stopped by the government if they did not return him back to Italy. After his forced return, he settled in Naples where he began directing drug traffics and smuggling aliens into America, using a medical supply store he had purchased as the cover for his illegal businesses.

Answer: massive heart attack

After returning to Naples, Luciano found the true love of his life, an Italian dancer named, Igea Lissoni. She was twenty years younger than he was, but the two spent eleven years together living the life of luxury in their sixty-room house on Via Tasso, before her fight with breast cancer ended. Since his deportation banned him from marriage, it has not been confirmed if they were ever secretly married. He became a very charitable person, helping many poor Italian families financially. When Igea died, so did part of Luciano.

His control of the American Mafia diminished, as did his illegal projects in Italy as well. He had already suffered several minor heart attacks and concluded that at the age of sixty-four years old, retirement was his best option. He granted permission for a scriptwriter to document his memoirs and make a film of his life. Although this concept would not appeal to the dangerous mob, Lucky was unwavered by his decision. On January 26, 1962, he walked up to greet the American film producer at Naples International Airport. Luck had run out for Charles "Lucky" Luciano when he grasped his chest, collapsed, and died of a fatal heart attack.

Because of the terms of his 1946 deportation, it was not until ten years later in 1972, that his family was allowed to ship his body back to the country he had always longed for, America. More than 2,000 people attended his funeral, and he was entombed at Saint John's Cathedral Cemetery in Queens, New York. Two of his close friends, Vito Genovese (1969) and Joseph Profaci (1962), lay nearby, what once was their boss!

http://www.biography.com/articles/Luciano-Lucky
http://crime.about.com/od/gangsters/a/luciano.html
http://www.hoodlumonline.com/History/lucky.html
http://crimelibrary.com/gangsters/murder/murderlucky.html
www.gangstersinc.tripod.com/LuckyLuciano.html
www.newyorkdailynews.com