After stretches in the reformatory and boot camp with the Five Points Gang and Al “Scarface” Capone, Lucania set out on his own, operating a racket nicknamed “the Broadway Mob” that reflected the diversification that Rothstein preached and the diversity of Lucania’s own Lower East Side upbringing. Salvatore Lucania or Charlie “Lucky” Luciano as he began to be called (hell, Meyer’s last name was originally Suchowljanski, not Lansky—and plenty of people called Benny Siegel, “Bugsy” behind his back) became a favorite of fellow Sicilian Joe the Boss. Joe admired Lucky’s nerve and brains even if he couldn’t understand his eagerness to consort with fetuso punks whose families came from northern Italy or Russia.
With Rothstein pointing the way, Charlie Lucky saw how the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Morgans, DuPonts, and other old money corporate big shots regulated the country’s legitimate economy. Monopoly and vertical integration—manufacture, distribution, and collection under the same control—that was the way to make a real living in the land of the free. The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Volstead Act that followed made the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages a federal crime. But every man enjoyed a glass of beer, a friendly wager, and the company of a woman. Owning the supply lines and establishments that provided those services and cooperating with other owners from other parts of town and across the country to share the risk and rewards would reduce losses and increase profits. Under Lucky Luciano, American crime got organized.
Now twenty-three, Charlie Lucky set up a trucking company as a bootlegging front. His old friends Frank Costello and Vito Genovese ran the operation. They owned the east side docks and saw to it that the scotch from Scotland, rum from the islands, and whiskey from Canada were unloaded, stockpiled, sold, and delivered with as little hassle as possible. While clearing close to a half-million dollars a year tax-free servicing his territory, Luciano grew eager to expand and form alliances with other operators. It didn’t matter one bit to him where they were from.
Lucky Luciano’s genius was weaving the old—the Sicilian Cosa Nostra traditions of silence and loyalty, with the new—opening up the rackets to any and all earning possibilities and partnering with Jews, Irish, blacks, and anyone else, all in the name of profit. In Luciano’s view Joe the Boss had taken big-time earning as far as he could. Joe’s kind of backward thinking placed grudges and ancestry over money. Prohibition wasn’t going to last forever. Any idiot could see that. Yet Joe Masseria and up-and-coming rival boss Salvatore Maranzano wasted a portion of the twenties’ precious and obscenely profitable years in a bloody and costly turf war with each other. First off, that had to stop. Under the pretense of a leisurely meal and a card game Luciano arranged for two of Benny Siegel’s guns to install four new holes in Joe’s head at his favorite restaurant in Coney Island and Maranzano declared himself the winner.
But Marazano was only a slight improvement on Joe the Glutton. A former candidate for the priesthood with an obsession with Roman history and customs, Marazano resented Charlie Lucky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese’s ties with non-Italian gangsters. Like Joe the Boss Maranzano respected Luciano’s ambition and earning power, but saw his New World ways as a threat. For good reason. Eventually some more of Luciano’s old neighborhood allies paid a call to Maranzano’s plush offices in the Helmsley Building dressed as IRS auditors. Legend has it that they unknowingly passed the hitman Maranzano had hired to kill off Charlie Lucky in the hallway on the way in. Lucky’s men lined everyone against the wall of Marazano’s office then shot and stabbed the boss and his retinue to death. Their gunshots were muffled by the plush shag carpeting and enormous Roman tapestries decorating his office.
Charlie Lucky didn’t substitute ego for brains and install himself as “boss of bosses,” the way his two predecessors had. Instead, he streamlined, unified, and stabilized a volatile group of gangs by cherry picking the things that worked for Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. The Sicilian code of silence—omerta—that both Joe and Salvatore swore by would remain. Shutting up paid off handsomely, no matter what you called it. Charlie Lucky learned that the hard way while being tortured at blowtorch and knife point on a Staten Island beach while still in Joe the Boss’s employ. If the more sentimental bosses wanted to make it some kind of blood oath, that was just okay with him.
Some of Maranzano’s Roman legion–style organization stayed in place, too. It was a new country and a new century with a new deal on the horizon. Ring kissing, ceremony, swearing allegiance, and symbolic acts of discipline had their place, but ultimately decisions would be made with one thing in mind only—making a buck. Though it was mostly bullshit to Lucky, the mustache Pete pomp helped morale and curbed unchecked individual ambition.
With Joe the Boss out of the picture, my grandfather’s illegal business came under Lucky Luciano’s control. By day Papa sold food and coffee. At night you could also get booze—Lucky’s booze. Most days Luciano operated out of the back room of Celano’s Garden, a restaurant on Kenmare Street. Celano’s Garden was strategically located a few blocks from the curb exchange Luciano ran on the corner of Mulberry Street—an unofficial depot and marketplace where bootleg booze was bought and sold, loaded and unloaded from trucks, car trunks, wheelbarrows, and handcarts. Sitting in one place too long made Charlie Lucky nervous and he liked to move around the neighborhood. Papa’s café became a regular destination in Charlie Lucky’s rounds. A few times a month Luciano’s limo would pull up and the uncrowned king of organized crime would come in and have espresso with my grandfather and bounce my uncle Paul on his knee.
When he got into a beef, my grandfather didn’t call the cops. Like everyone else in New York making a living off the Eighteenth Amendment, he called Lucky Luciano. A neighborhood competitor approached Giovanni about selling him a few extra barrels during a periodic booze drought. When it came to buy them back from Papa, the guy welshed and refused to fork over the fair market price they’d agreed to when supplies opened up again. Charlie Lucky ruled in my grandfather’s favor. When Giovanni’s prized Cadillac, the same one he lent out for the Columbus Day parade and drove his wife, my mother, her sisters, and brother to the Jersey Shore was confiscated by the police during a liquor run, Luciano saw to it that it was stolen from NYPD headquarters and returned to my grandfather.
With repeal on the horizon, my grandfather began investing in the stock market, while Lucky Luciano took more of Arnold Rothstein’s advice and solidified his narcotics connections. My grandfather lost nearly everything in the crash of 1929. After a long illness he went the straight and narrow for the rest of his life, working as a military contractor making parachutes. Lucky Luciano began forging the international dope network that would prime the pump for the heroin trade I fought in Alphabet City in the eighties. I had no way of knowing all this as Papa cursed out Mike Douglas. As far as I knew I was just the son of a cop.
Avenue D
They have names like School Boy, Macatumba, Londie, ChaCha, and Animal. They arrive in tricked-out Jeeps, Beamers, and Mertzs done up in gloss black, camo, or Day-Glo custom finish, with spoilers on top, speakers inside, and glowing neon underneath. They come and go at all hours—taking stock of their dope spots and their corner hand-to-hand guys, collecting cash, vanishing into the buildings to see an employee, a relative, or a girlfriend inside. They show off to each other while hanging out across the street from their spots clustered around Third Street and Avenue D holding a pitbull leash in one hand, and picking lint off flash designer clothes that would cost me a month’s pay with the other. They have leases in the rat-and-roach-infested projects but own houses in Queens, apartments in Manhattan, and second homes in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. They’re barely midway through their twenties and making “way” money—mounds of cash so big you don’t count the bills, you weigh them.
With millions of dollars in money and drugs changing hands every week, Avenue D should be like Dodge City—constant rip-offs, infighting, renegade big hau
l dope and money grabs, back-and-forth volleys of insults and gunfire. But when these guys in the Third and D crew beef with each other or within other crews they settle it fast, so fast all I ever see is the aftermath—a body leaning against a stairwell that’s painted with brains, a car left running on East Houston Street with the remains of two overambitious teenagers locked in the trunk, a lifeless rat-bitten face down in the bushes in East River Park, a family of four dead in their project apartment, kids seated in front of the TV each with a small caliber bullet in their head, Mom hacked to pieces in the bedroom, Dad tortured to death with a stun gun and a blowtorch in the shower. Arguments end bad, but they end. A sudden, swift execution, a body or a stack of bodies then back to business as usual.
Vaya con dinero. Go with the money. The dealers coexist just peacefully enough to work the D profitably at all times. It’s too clean for there not to be someone at the top ultimately calling the shots. A DEA agent I work with down the line will dub the Third and D crew “the Forty Thieves.” They were thieves—they stole people’s lives with dope and bullets. It’s still months before I hear the name Davey Blue Eyes. But I know from where I grew up that there’s more to this iceberg than I can see. Somebody is the top guy. The knock-around, mobbed-up guys I knew growing up were too young, mean, crazy, fucked up, or just plain dumb to keep things together by themselves, and so are Avenue D’s Forty Thieves.
It’s just common sense. Somebody somewhere is enforcing the peace, keeping supplies going, sanctioning necessary killings and earning themselves a generous cut of the profits for doing it. Like the Lucchese family’s boss Vic Amuso in my home neighborhood in Brooklyn or John Gotti over in Ozone Park, Queens, there has to be a guy or core group of guys that everybody on the D is scared of and beholden to enough that order prevails. Maintained from above. Or else. Just like when I was a kid.
Part of every dollar exchanged for every bag sold by the Third and D crew goes back up the supply line to whoever that somebody is running the big store. The supply line, the food chain, whatever you want to call it is plain enough to see at curbside but who was at the top is a mystery. All that Gio and I can do is what we’ve been doing since I arrived in Alphaville—bust anyone and everyone we see working the Avenue D dope machine, toss them, scare them, or buy them or both, get them talking and listen to them. By taking out the lower floors we hope we’re weakening the pyramid. The big picture? It’s still too wide a view to make out. Days and weeks of twenty-question sessions with everyone we bust are beginning to fill in the details a little.
We make every possible collar we can. We terrorize customers, hassle the dealing crews, even stake out a store on St. Mark’s Place that sells the glassine dope bags these guys use—anything to make business hard to conduct and dealers looking to negotiate their way out of getting taken off the street for a day, a weekend, or ten years upstate. Always, in every side street, apartment, stoop, interrogation room, and RMP backseat conversation we have with everyone we bust, bribe, or bullshit, we ask for a name. Who’s heavy? Who’s your boss? Who’s his boss? Who’s the man?
A name I hear a lot early on after getting promoted to plainclothes Operation 8 is Sabu. I’m still getting a handle on who’s who, who knows who, and who doesn’t know shit. Everyone’s working some angle and there are a lot of people on the D with the liar’s golden touch for telling you what you want to hear. But the name keeps coming up. Sabu. I repeat it back to the people I cuff or let go and heads nod. “Sabu, he’s for reals, yo…He got style…” There’s a shrugged consensus that he’s popular. Maybe more important or better connected than the other corner dealers and hand-to-hand guys?
We put Sabu under the microscope—full shifts watching him from an empty apartment, our own cars, rooftops, taking photos, keeping logs, the whole bit. When we get close we listen. Sabu looks and sounds the part—a gravelly voiced, pimped-out, dark-skinned Hispanic guy in his early thirties, always dressed in a bloodred ankle-length leather trench coat no matter what the weather, always strutting around the avenue checking in with other dealers and shooting the shit with the people he knows out front of the buildings. And he knows everybody. The junkies, the neighborhood kids, the small-time dealers, and girls from the block all say “hey.” But no two people we bust can tell us exactly where he fits into the picture. Everybody’s too focused on their own role. We decide to ask the man himself.
“Mira, no Rambo,” Sabu croaks in a gravelly matinee villain tone. We pick him up and find dope and money when we toss him. Sitting in a chair rubbing his wrists at the Command, he looks like he’s going to cry.
“Who’s been saying this shit about me? I only have the one spot. I need to make some extra cash, you know? You see me. I’m outside all the time ’cause I gotta work my corner myself. I can’t get nobody to work that doesn’t rip my shit off! Why would I be on the street if I didn’t have to?”
It turns out that the crime Sabu is guilty of is operating a small-time dope concern and impersonating a big-wheel dealer from a seventies blaxploitation flick. Wheedling with us he sounds like a Puerto Rican Orson Welles. Up close the truth is pretty easy to see. And smell. The only shots Sabu calls are for rum at the bars along Houston Street. His breath reeks of booze 24-7 and he’s on his way to death while on the list for a liver transplant before he’s fifty. Sabu’s second home isn’t a beach house near Santa Domingo, it’s a tool shed at the Pitt Street Pool—the man we were auditioning for super villain is moonlighting selling dope from his job as a custodian for the City Parks Department to pay gambling debts. The next time I see him he’s in a green uniform skimming the pool at Pitt Street.
Two
There were two kinds of people in Canarsie when I grew up there. The neighborhood was home to scores of city employees, especially NYPD and FDNY personnel, but it was also Lucchese country. Originally based in the Bronx, the Lucchese mob grew out of a racket that controlled the horse-and-wagon ice delivery trade in the teens. With the support of Charley Lucky and under the leadership of Gaetano Reina, Gaetano Gagliano, and his underboss Gaetano Lucchese (“Tommy,” “Tommy Gun,” or “Three Fingers Brown” depending on which paper you read back in the day), the Bronx operation spread to Manhattan, Jersey, and Brooklyn. When Luciano created the Mafia “crime commission,” the Luccheses became one of the fabled Five Families that ran American organized crime for most of the last century. After Gagliano stepped down and Lucchese took over in the fifties, Canarsie became one of the family’s strongholds. The majority of the kids I went to school with, played sports with, and hung around with went home at night to households owned by cops or by wiseguys.
Growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was half NYPD and half mob was like a real-life version of the Looney Tunes cartoon with the wolf and the sheepdog. The episodes all began the same way—a big dog named Sam and a wolf named Ralph would walk through a meadow, each with a lunch pail in their hand.
“Morning, Sam.”
“Morning, Ralph.”
“How’s the missus, Sam?”
“Good, Ralph. Yours?”
The wolf and the sheepdog go to a tree with a time clock on it and punch in. Their workday boils down to Ralph stealing sheep by any means he can figure out while Sam tries to keep him from getting any. The whistle blows, the sun sets and the two of them punch the clock and head home together, lunch pails once again on their hips. In Canarsie, you were either in a sheepdog family or a wolf family. Both sides literally lived next door to each other. In the cartoon the sheepdog usually won, but in real life the wolves made out a hell of a lot better than the dogs. The Canarsie Lucchese crew is all over GoodFellas. They masterminded the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK and collected an eight-million-dollar payday. Nobody ever made a movie about the housing police. All my father ever got was a weekly paycheck and, eventually, a pension and a letter from the mayor.
My father and his kid brother Nick, better known throughout Canarsie as “Chickie,” grew up playing ball and hanging out with Vic Amuso. Chickie
took a job with the Transit Authority, my father became a cop, and Vic began his career as an enforcer and foot soldier for the Colombo family and Crazy Joe Gallo. When Gallo was gunned down at Umberto’s Clam House for ordering the Joe Colombo hit, Vic jumped ship for the Luccheses. Vic made his bones in kickback schemes and narcotics, did time, got out, and went back to earning. The dope sold in Alphabet City in the eighties no longer came from Vic, but the Lucchese family was still profitable and Canarsie was still his.
Make a fist with your right hand and turn it toward you with the pinky finger at the top. If you picture that fist as Brooklyn, then Canarsie is the knuckle of your thumb pointing down. Long before they were packed off to the Midwest and Canada, the Algonquin Indians named a coastal wilderness on Jamaica Bay where they fished and hunted, “Canarsie” after their word for “fort.” The Lower East Side was the last stop on the L line in Manhattan, and Canarsie was the end of the line in Brooklyn. And like the Lower East Side much of Canarsie was originally swamp and tidal marsh. The borders that kept the Algonquin safe until the Europeans came also tell the story of how the neighborhood resisted change once the creeks and marshes were filled in and successive generations of immigrants claimed the new land there for themselves.
Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 3