Lucky Luciano: The Mobster Who Ran Organized Crime Like a Company

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On April 15th, 1931, a man playing cards with crime boss Joe Masseria in a Coney Island restaurant excused himself to use the restroom. As the door closed, gunmen walked in and killed Masseria at the table. The man in the bathroom was Salvatore Lucania, known as Lucky Luciano. Born in Sicily in 1897 to a sulfur miner, he arrived on New York's Lower East Side in 1906, quit a $7 a week job delivering hats after winning $244 at dice, and began selling protection for 10 cents a week. One kid who refused to pay, Meyer Lansky, became his lifelong partner.

This episode follows how Luciano turned feuding street gangs into something closer to a corporation. The gambler Arnold Rothstein taught him that violence was bad for business and how to dress and dine like a legitimate executive. After a 1929 beating meant to kill him, he arranged the deaths of both old-world bosses, then abolished the title of boss of all bosses and created the Commission, a board that divided territory and settled disputes. Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey still put him away for 30 to 50 years, and a wartime deal with naval intelligence got him out.

• After a 1923 heroin arrest hurt his standing, Luciano bought 200 of the best seats to the Dempsey versus Firpo fight and gave them to politicians, judges, and journalists.
• Four Jewish gunmen supplied by Lansky posed as government tax agents to get past Salvatore Maranzano's bodyguards and kill him in his Manhattan office.
• In 1935 the Commission had Dutch Schultz killed to stop him from assassinating Dewey, the prosecutor pursuing them all.
• Assistant district attorney Eunice Carter built the case that led to simultaneous raids on 200 brothels, carried out by rookie officers and state police to avoid leaks.
• Dewey, by then governor of New York, commuted the sentence in 1946 on condition of deportation to Italy, and Luciano died of a heart attack at the Naples airport on January 26, 1962.