Haffenden: “How about that Brooklyn Bridge thing?”
Lanza: “Nothing on that.”
Haffenden: “I don’t want any trouble on the waterfront during the crucial times.”
Lanza: “You won’t have any. I’ll see to that. I’ll give you a ring. We’ll get together.”
Haffenden: “OK, Socks.”
Bridges’s planned strike was duly broken by Mob goons under the supervision of Lanza and Albert Anastasia, a man Luciano described as being “willing to kill anybody who came to mind that he got mad about.” When Bridges showed up at an organizing rally in New York City a few weeks later, Lanza handled matters personally. “I had a fight with him,” recalled Joey Lanza. “I belted him, and that was that.” Between 1942 and 1946, there were twenty-six unsolved murders of labor organizers and dockworkers, presumed murdered and dumped in the river by the Mafia, working in collusion with Naval Intelligence.
If one had to draw a balance sheet on who benefited the most from the Naval Intelligence/Mob partnership, the answer would surely be the gangsters. In the first place, the partnership proved fatal to honest labor organizing and left union locals on the eastern seaboard, along with the ILA, ravaged by gangsterism and corruption. The intelligence triumphs were not always clearcut, however. The most successful operation concerned the visits of Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts to what was quaintly described as “a house of ill-fame.” The establishment in question was a male brothel on the East River owned by a German-American with sympathies toward Hitler and the Third Reich. Lansky told Haffenden about Walsh’s patronage and the senator’s name immediately rang a bell. Haffenden recalled that Walsh sat on the Senate committee overseeing the navy, and Walsh was discreetly told to seek his pleasures at a more patriotic establishment (and the good senator no doubt felt it necessary to vote for larger naval budgets for the rest of his senatorial career). Shortly thereafter the brothel was raided. The owner and three Nazi agents were arrested, convicted of espionage and given twenty-year prison sentences.
The navy could claim a more substantial intelligence coup in Sicily. In January 1943 Winston Churchill and FDR met at Casablanca to plan the invasion of southern Europe. Sicily was chosen as the initial point of attack. But there were problems with this choice. The Allies lacked maps, tide tables, pier locations and kindred topographic intelligence. There were 400,000 Axis troops in Sicily and although there were pro-Allied partisans, information about them was cloudy. The Office of Naval Intelligence instructed Commander Haffenden to interview recent immigrants from Sicily, which he did – once again with the assistance of Luciano, who placed the matter in the hands of Joe Adonis. Adonis, whom Senator Estes Kefauver called “the most sinister gangster of them all,” rounded up hundreds of Sicilians for interviews with ONI officers Paul Alfieri and Anthony Marzulla and with ONI cartographer George Tarbox. These interviews produced more than 5,000 files, copies of which were sent to invasion planners in Washington. Tarbox also produced dozens of large-scale maps showing roads, mountain passes, docks and locations of potential sympathizers.
It was at this point that Haffenden began to entertain the idea that Luciano should be dispatched to Sicily in advance of the invasion “to contact natives there and to win these natives over to the support of the US war effort.” He drew up a detailed plan to get New York governor Thomas Dewey to pardon Luciano, have the gangster equipped with these papers and sent to Portugal and thence to Sicily. The proposal made it all the way up to the secretary of the navy, who promptly nixed the plan. Luciano would have to wait in Great Meadow Prison for another three years.
With the first wave of the invading Allied troops in 1943 went several officers primed by informants passed through the Haffenden/Luciano filter. They were led by Lt. Paul Alfieri. Soon after the landing, Alfieri made contacts with members of the Sicilian Mafia, who led him to the headquarters of the Italian Naval Command and assisted him in a nocturnal raid that yielded maps of minefields, codebooks and details of where Axis troops were deployed.
This was certainly a triumph. How much it contributed to the success of the invasion is hard to say. It can be said with certainty, however, that the Sicilian Mafia obtained enormous advantage from the partnership. Hundreds of Mafiosi were released from prison, and in setting up civil authority across Sicily the Allies installed dozens of Mafia capos as mayors, including Don Calogero Vizzini. The Allied commanders even went so far as to make Don Calo an honorary colonel; he returned the favor by using his power to eliminate his rivals and to destroy copies of his robust criminal record.
The Sicilian historian Francesco Renda writes in his thorough history of the invasion that “it was impossible that the Allies would not win, and people still in possession of their faculties, to think and decide with their own heads, drew the necessary conclusions … the mechanism of Mafioso pollution of the island administration and the Allied Military Government was self-propelling in an altogether spontaneous way, also because it met no obstacle on the part of various Civil Affairs officers.”
The key official overseeing this triumph of gangsterism, which would overshadow Sicily for the next two generations, was the head of the Allied Military Government (AMGOT) for southern Italy and Sicily, Colonel Charles Poletti, the former lieutenant governor of New York. Given his familiarity with New York’s affairs, Poletti could scarcely have been in ignorance of the dark background of the man he chose to be his interpreter – Vito Genovese. The brutal Genovese had been the manager of Luciano’s gambling and narcotics network in New York until 1936, when he fled New York to escape indictments lodged by Thomas Dewey for the murder of rival gangsters Willie Gallo and Ferdinand “The Shadow” Boccia. As Genovese left for Naples, Luciano instructed Meyer Lansky “to make sure Vito lands on his feet.”
Knowing of Mussolini’s enmity toward the Cosa Nostra, Genovese arrived in Italy bearing an appropriate gift for Il Duce, in the form of $200,000 in cash. Thus fertilized, the friendship between Mussolini and Genovese flourished to the point where they would dine together and Mussolini would probe Genovese for his knowledge of American culture, particularly films. By 1942, however, Genovese was an agent in the Luciano/Naval Intelligence partnership and was providing a link between navy spies and the Mafia capos of western Sicily, particularly Don Calo. When Poletti (who Luciano later described as “a good friend of ours”) arrived in Naples to take up residence as head of AMGOT, Genovese welcomed him with a present: a 1939 Packard.
Genovese made full use of his position at Poletti’s elbow to enhance his black market operations in Naples, using Allied military trucks in cooperation with Don Calo to smuggle olive oil, sugar and other commodities off the Allied docks in Sicily, thus perpetuating the very sabotage that ONI had turned to the Mob in New York to quell.
Orange Dickey, a former FBI agent working for the US Army investigating black market operations in Italy, probed the Genovese-Don Calo enterprise, arrested Genovese and had him sent back to New York for trial. Following the death – by “enough poison to kill eight horses” – of the prime witness against him, Genovese was acquitted, and prospered mightily thereafter, becoming once again head of Luciano’s drug operations in New York and, ultimately, the city’s chief and most bloodthirsty gangster.
On May 8, 1945 – VE Day – Moses Polakoff filed a petition with Governor Thomas Dewey, seeking clemency for Luciano by the reason of the mobster’s “valuable, substantial and important aid to the US military authorities, which information and aid were conceded to have a contribution to the war.” Polakoff’s petition included a letter from Commander Haffenden of Naval Intelligence who wrote glowingly of Luciano’s patriotic role: “I am confident that the greater part of the intelligence developed in the Sicilian campaign was directly responsible for the number of Sicilians that emanated from Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s contacts.”
Polakoff had also requested a letter of support from former DA Murray Gurfein, by now a colonel in the OSS. To Polakoff’s disgust, the wily Gurfein woul
d only send such a letter to District Attorney Hogan, requesting that it be publicly released only if Naval Intelligence approved. Of course, Naval Intelligence wanted the matter to remain deeply buried.
On December 3, 1945 the New York State Parole Board voted unanimously to grant clemency to Luciano, attaching the condition that he be deported to Italy. This move was possible because, unlike his father and brothers, Lucky had never acquired US citizenship. Dewey took the matter under advisement for a month, during which time he was quietly advised by three key figures and friends: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, John Foster Dulles and OSS man Allen Dulles. On January 3, 1946 Dewey agreed with the parole board and commuted Luciano’s sentence, noting officially: “Upon the entry of the US into the war, Luciano’s aid was sought by the armed services in inducing others to provide information concerning possible enemy attack. It appears that he cooperated in such effort, although the actual value of the information procured is not clear.”
On February 9 a jolly crowd of mobsters converged on the cargo ship the SS Laura Keene, onto which Luciano had been led, after his release from Great Meadows. Hoisting champagne glasses and wolfing down lobster were Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Mikey Lascari and Meyer Lansky, who had thoughtfully brought along two suitcases for Luciano, one containing clothes and the other $1 million in cash. When Luciano arrived in Italy, he was met by a band adorned in red, white and blue uniforms playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Establishing himself in Naples, Luciano quickly picked up the black market operations abandoned by Vito Genovese. It was a lucrative enterprise. One of Luciano’s subordinates later said that they “bought a quintal of grain from the Farm Board for 2,000 lire and sold it on the black market for more than 15,000 lire.” He also established business ties with Don Calo in Sicily, setting up a number of front companies, including a candy factory, a hospital supply company and a fruit export enterprise. The gangsters even engaged in some real estate deals with Princess Anna of France. Luciano was not the only Mafioso deported. Over the next five years more than 500 Italian-born gangsters would follow him back to Italy. These felons would form the primary workforce for Luciano’s most important venture: the reinvigoration of his global drug empire.
Heroin was still the name of the game. At first, Luciano was able to get a cheap and almost unlimited supply from a legal source, the Schiaparelli Company, a pharmaceutical giant based in Milan. Luciano bought 200 kilos – about a quarter of a ton – of Schiaparelli heroin a year, shipped it to Cuba, where it was adulterated and then smuggled into Miami and New York. The Cuban operations were overseen by Santos Trafficante and his son Santos Jr.
Luciano was so intrigued by Cuba that he visited the island in 1947, convening a meeting of his national crime board there. At this meeting, attended by Genovese, Lansky, Anastasia, Trafficante and Sam Giancana, the logistics of the new heroin network were worked out and the plans to hit Bugsy Siegel were finalized. Luciano made plans to settle in Havana. When this news reached Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the drug czar convinced Fulgencio Batista that Luciano’s presence in Havana would be a public embarrassment for the US-backed dictator. A BNDD report from the time noted that Luciano had made “Cuba the center of all international narcotics operations.”
Anslinger also put pressure on the Italian government to eliminate the legal sales of Schiaparelli heroin, which finally came to a halt in 1950. Luciano was prepared for this eventuality, however, having made a connection with Sami El-Khoury, a Lebanese opium merchant. El-Khoury, who used Luciano’s money to buy off Lebanese police and customs agents, imported raw opium grown on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey to Beirut, where it was manufactured into morphine base. From Lebanon, the morphine base was shipped to Luciano’s heroin laboratories in Sicily and, later, Marseilles. The drug was then shipped to Cuba, often inside wax oranges, each capable of holding 120 grams of heroin.
The official indulgence shown toward Luciano’s narcotics network persisted well into the 1950s. Even though Anslinger had sent several BNDD agents, notably Charles Siragusa, to haunt Luciano’s every move in Italy, they could never make an arrest stick. In fact, until 1956 there was not one major arrest of a gangster in the heroin hierarchy, even though Siragusa once caught Luciano with nearly a half ton of smack being readied for shipment to Havana. Lucky Luciano was the original Teflon Don.
The navy watched the re-emergence of Luciano as the world’s leading crime lord with trepidation. When word of the ONI’s role in his release from prison began to leak out to the press (Walter Winchell actually suggested Luciano was in line for the Congressional Medal of Honor), the navy made haste to obscure its tracks. Archivists at the Office of Naval Intelligence were told “to collect and destroy by burning” all records and maps generated by the Luciano/Naval Intelligence relationship. Agents who had been involved in the affair were told to deny any relationship with the mobsters. Acting on these orders Captain McFall told the New York Post in 1948 that Luciano had contributed nothing to the war effort.
Then, in 1950, Thomas Dewey’s opponent in the gubernatorial race, Representative Walter Lynch, accused Dewey of taking bribes from Luciano. This accusation was followed by a story in True magazine that purported to quote Luciano himself as bragging that he had given the New York Republican Party $75,000 to spring him from Dannemora. Both Luciano and Lansky later dismissed the story, with Lansky noting ominously that reporters would misquote Luciano at their peril. When Commander Haffenden was publicly quoted confirming Luciano’s association with the navy agents, the navy began to smear Haffenden, suggesting to some that he was mentally unbalanced and to others that he had perhaps entered into an illicit partnership with the Mob during the 1940s and was now trying to cover his own ass.
In 1951, hearings on organized crime presided over by the Tennessee populist Estes Kefauver attempted to pursue the story. The Mafia wouldn’t talk and officials from the CIA (speaking on behalf of their predecessors at OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence vigorously denied any wartime relationship with Luciano. This was followed by the outlandish charge made by State Senator Louis Cioffi, a Democrat, on the floor of the New York General Assembly in Albany that Luciano had bribed Dewey with $300,000.
There was ample reason to suspect that navy may have planted the stories against Dewey, both to cover their own tracks and to strike back at the governor for criticisms launched by Dewey at the intelligence community during his run against Truman in 1948. Ironically, Dewey’s attacks on Truman’s foreign policy were crafted by his secret advisers, John Foster Dulles and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. After Truman learned of Forrestal’s covert dealings with Dewey, the navy secretary was told his days in the administration were numbered. On his last day as secretary of the navy, he sat at his desk in a trancelike state for hours, mumbling that commies, gangsters and Jews had done him in. Forrestal eventually ended up in Bethesda Naval Hospital. On May 22, 1949, as he was transcribing a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax, Forrestal took a pajama cord and tried to hang himself from an open window. The cord snapped and he fell 120 feet to his death.
In 1954, as the allegations against Dewey reached a crescendo, New York Commissioner of Investigations William Herlands began a probe of the matter. Herlands subpoenaed the Mafia leaders, members of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the New York Department of Corrections. He unearthed hundreds of hours of tapes of conversations between navy spies and Mafia leaders. Then Herlands hit a wall in the US Navy. The Office of Naval Intelligence said it would consent to cooperate under three conditions: no classified information would be turned over; the navy security officers could monitor all interviews with former agents; and Herlands’s final report could not be released to the public.
The director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Carl Espe, feared, with considerable justification, that publication of the Herlands report “might bring harm to the Navy … [and] jeopardize operations of a similar n
ature in the future.” In a letter to Herlands, Espe wrote: “It would seem inevitable that publication of this Report would inspire a rash of ‘thriller’ stories … Just where imaginative and irresponsible publicists would stop in the search for spicy bits for the public palate is hard to guess. That there is a potential for embarrassment of the Navy is apparent.”
Herlands acceded to the navy’s demands. He extracted damning testimony from McFall, Alfieri, Marzullo and other navy agents involved in the Luciano operation. He also tracked down the former head of the navy’s counterintelligence program, then living in Portland, Oregon, who admitted that the deals with the Mob were approved at the highest levels of the US government. The Herlands report concluded that “the evidence demonstrates that Luciano’s assistance and cooperation was secured by Naval Intelligence in the course of the evolving and expanding requirements of national security.” The investigator kept his word. The report was given to the navy and to Dewey, but not to the public. The Herlands report then lay dormant for twenty years. After the death of Dewey, Rodney Campbell, who had been picked to edit Dewey’s papers, unearthed it and, with the approval of the Dewey estate, wrote a remarkable book on the subject called The Luciano Project.
But the thirty years of navy denials and aspersions against Dewey had solidified into the conventional wisdom of the press. That practitioner of fantasy Claire Sterling in her 1986 book on the Sicilian Mafia’s heroin trade, Octopus, discounts the Luciano/navy collaboration as a kind of gangster legend. Even though Octopus came out ten years after the publication of The Luciano Project, Sterling did not mention the Herlands report, citing instead the official denials before the Kefauver committee
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