Abstract
In or around 1935, Salvatore Lucania, alias Charlie Luciano, was considered as “the head of the underworld in New York City.”1 He held court at the Waldorf Towers Hotel and, together with his associates from Chicago and other big cities, he monitored his empire, invested his earnings, and raked in considerable wealth from his bootlegging activities. He was very well connected politically thanks to Albert C. Marinelli, a Tammany boss. His name was touted by the New York Times’s Meyer Berger, who included him among the six top “modern racketeers” in the city—here modernity corresponds to the post-Prohibition era. Berger did not view the six bosses as ethnics, though most of them were Jewish and some were Italian. According to him, they had all withdrawn from the firing line and had become businessmen, or at least were “anxious to have the world think of them not as racketeers but as real business men”; as such, they could only be considered American.
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Notes
J. R. Davis, “Things I Couldn’t Tell Till Now,” in Collier’s Magazine, August 3, 1939, p. 44.
A. Block, East Side-West Side, Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950, Cardiff, University College Cardiff Press, 1980, p. 8.
W. F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1955, pp. 113–15 explains that second generation Italian-Americans used this pejorative term as well.
M. A. Gosch and R. Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Boston and Toronto, Little Brown, 1975, p. 46.
B. Turkus and S. Feder, Murder Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, London, Gollanz, 1952, pp. 72–73, focused on a similar topic: Maranzano went too far in trying to contrast the Manhattan garment syndicate ruled by Luciano’s Jewish friends Lepke and Gurrah.
Turkus and Feder, Murder, Inc., p. 73 and, for instance, G. Selvaggi, Rise of the Mafia in New York from 1895 through World War II, Indianapolis, Bob-Merril, 1978;
G. Wolf and J. Di Mona, Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1974, p. 96;
D. Cressey, Theft of the Nation: The Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America, New York, Harper & Row, 1969, p. 44.
Detective Ralph Salerno in MCH, p. 233; A. Block, Space, Time, & Organized Crime, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 1994, p. 4 ff.
R. Carter, “The Strange Story of Dewey and Luciano,” in The Daily Compass, September 4, 1951;
but see also S. J. Woolf, “Dewey Points a Way to Crush Racketeering,” in NYT, August 29, 1937.
D. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History ofAmerica’s War on Drugs, London and New York, Verso, 2006, p. 19 and p. 16.
H. S. Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 238.
R. Campbell, Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1977, p. 139.
D. Bell, The End of the Ideologies, Glencoe, Free Press, 1964, p. 165.
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© 2015 Salvatore Lupo
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Lupo, S. (2015). History and Myths of Organized Crime. In: The Two Mafias. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_4
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