Lucky Luciano
More perhaps than any other single man, Lucky Luciano created the modern face of the Mafia: making vast profits from drugs, operating across borders, invisible; bolstered by international agreements and alliances and ruled by representative councils. An associate once said of him and his long-time friend Meyer Lansky:
‘If they had been President and Vice-President of the United States, they would have run the place far better than the idiot politicians.’
Salvatore Luciani arrived in New York with his parents at the age of 10 – and was almost immediately in trouble, for theft and later drug-peddling. Then, in his early twenties, he met and became the mentor of a young Polish immigrant called Maier Suchowjansky, better known as Meyer Lansky. By that time, Luciano was a member of the gang run by Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, a union and organized-labour racketeer, and was making himself a reputation as a hit-man. Lansky was soon co-opted into the gang as a strategist during the early days of Prohibition, though he’d have nothing to do with the brothels Luciano ran on the side.
It wasn’t long, however, before they outgrew Orgen’s gang and looked for new opportunities, together with a friend of Luciano’s called Vito Genovese. Prohibition made the three of them increasingly powerful. Luciano later claimed that he personally controlled every New York police precinct and had a bagman deliver $20,000 a month to Police Commissioner Grover A. Whelan. He also boasted about the company he moved in: the politicians and stars he met at parties and the gatherings at the Whitney estate. The politicians, even presidential candidates, courted him for campaign funding and help at election time. The beautiful people wooed him for World Series baseball tickets, girls, dope and drink.
There remained one major obstacle, though, to Luciano’s assumption of absolute power. For the most important criminal power-brokers in New York, even during Prohibition, were two old-style Mafia bosses, Salvatore Maranzano and Giuseppe Masseria. Luciano favoured Masseria, but he soon changed his mind when Maranzano had him picked up, strung up by his thumbs and tortured. The final inducement to change allegiances was a slash across the face from a knife held by Maranzano which needed fifty-five stitches. The reward? The Number Two spot in the Maranzano outfit if Luciano first killed Masseria.
Masseria was gunned down in the middle of dinner in a Coney Island restaurant, after Luciano, his dining partner, had left for the bathroom; Maranzano proclaimed himself the Capo di Tutti Capi at a meeting of the New York Mafia families, which he proposed to bring together under one roof as La Cosa Nostra. Luciano and Lansky, though, had other ideas. And a few months later, four of their men, posing as internal-revenue investigators, arrived at Maranzano’s Park Avenue headquarters, demanding to see both the boss and the books. Maranzano was stabbed and shot to death in his inner office.
Lucky Luciano is credited with forming the basis of the modern Mafia
In victory, Luciano took over Maranzano’s idea. He established the New York Commission – sometimes known as the National Crime Syndicate – and its enforcement arm, Murder Incorporated. He became, in effect, the boss of bosses; and even though he was jailed in 1936 for twenty-five to fifty years, on vice charges, he continued to exercise power. For after the United States entered the war, the government needed help, first against sabotage in the Mafia-controlled New York docks, and then with the invasion of Sicily.
Luciano agreed, in return for early release after the war ended. Pro-Mussolini Italian spies and saboteurs were flushed out; German spies were quietly assassinated; and when the US Army landed in Sicily, special units carried, not only the Stars and Stripes, but a special flag carrying the letter ‘L.’ The Mafia eased their path through the island, making sure that its members took over the running of the towns and villages they passed through. By the time the US Army moved onto the mainland, it had taken over virtually all of Sicily.
It was, in a way, Luciano’s greatest coup, and when released and deported to Italy in 1945 – after making a huge donation, it’s said, to the Republican Party – he took full advantage. After a brief interlude in Cuba, he settled in Naples, and from there organized in Sicily the setting up of the same sort of ruling Mafia commission he’d established in the United States. He also moved the Sicilian families into drugs; and is said to have established the so-called French Connection, an alliance between Turkish growers, the Sicilian families, Corsican gangster-processors in Marseilles and US Mafia importers and distributors.
His life finally caught up with ‘Lucky’ Luciano when he died on January 26th 1962 in Naples Airport after drinking a cup of coffee. He may have had a heart attack; he may have been poisoned. But it seems typical of the man that he was due to meet an American film producer who wanted to make a film of his life – and that there were Interpol agents, by report, keeping watch.
‘Count’ Victor Lustig
‘Count’ Victor Lustig, born in 1890 into a respectable Czechoslovakian family, was an inveterate Lothario with a passion for gambling. But he was also the most famous conman of the 20th century. For the ‘Count’ was the man who successfully sold the Eiffel Tower – and not once, but twice.
Whether Victor Lustig was actually his real name no one ever really knew. For in his wanderings across Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century, he seems to have had twenty-two different aliases and to have been arrested forty-five times under one or other of them. It was as Victor Lustig, though, that he had his brilliant idea. One day in 1925, he read in a Paris newspaper that the Eiffel Tower was in desperate need of renovation, and that it might even have to be demolished. In short order, then, he got hold of some headed notepaper from the Ministry of Posts, which was responsible for the Tower’s maintenance, and sent out letters to five rich financiers, inviting them to a private meeting with the ‘deputy director-general’ of the Ministry at the Hotel Crillon.
At the meeting in a hotel suite, the financiers were told that the business they were about to discuss was top secret, hence the need for a discreet meeting with loyal Frenchmen at a venue outside the Ministry. The decision, regrettably, had been taken, he said, to pull the Eiffel Tower down, since it was now impossibly expensive to maintain. It was to be sold off for the value of its 7,000 tons of metal, he said; and he asked the five if they’d care to submit bids for it.
All agreed, but Lustig was only really interested in one of the bidders, a nouveau-riche scrap-metal merchant called André Poisson. So when the bids were in, he rang Poisson to tell him that his had been successful. Now, if he’d care to bring a certified cheque to the Hotel Crillon, the business could be concluded.
Poisson dutifully came to the hotel; whatever suspicions he might have had were allayed when Lustig apologetically asked for a further amount of money, in cash, to help smooth the wheels. Poisson immediately agreed and happily handed over the cheque, worth millions of francs, in return for a bill of sale. When a French ministry official asked for a bribe, after all, that clearly meant he was the real thing.
Lustig and a confederate he’d employed immediately left town, and stayed away until they realized that they’d got away with it: Poisson had been too embarrassed to go to the police. So they returned again to Paris, repeated the process, and sold the Eiffel Tower to another scrap-merchant. Though this dealer did finally go to the police, by that time they were already far away.
Lustig’s career as a con-man was not over now by any means, but he never reached such dizzy heights again. He worked the trans-Atlantic liners; sold a ‘banknote-duplicating’ machine to multi-millionaire Herbert Loller; and even tried to involve Al Capone in a Wall-Street investment scam. Then, in the early thirties, he went into counterfeit money. In 1934, he was arrested for producing $100,000-worth a month and thrown into New York’s Tombs Prison. He escaped and went to ground in Pittsburgh. But after some years of life as retiring Robert Miller, the police were tipped off and he was rearrested, on a charge of having distributed an awesome $134 million-worth of fake bills over his career. He was sentenced to twenty years, first in Alcatraz and then in Springfield Prison, Missouri, where he died in 1947.
Chizuo Matsumoto (aka Shoko Asahara)
In the 1980s, a partially blind Japanese masseur called Chizuo Matsumoto (aka Shoko Asahara) claimed to have travelled to the Himalayas and to have achieved nirvana there – he said he could now levitate and even walk through walls. A group of believers gathered around him into an organization called AUM Supreme Truth and in spring 1989 they applied to the Tokyo Municipal Government for registration as a religion.
The bureaucrats had their doubts. For Asahara, as he preferred to call himself, had a police record for fraud and assault; and there were already complaints that AUM was abducting children and brainwashing them against their parents. In August, though, they caved in after demonstrations by AUM members, giving it not only tax-exempt status, but also the right to own property and to remain free of state and any other interference.
Less than three months later, a young human rights lawyer who had been battling the cult on behalf of worried parents vanished into thin air, along with his wife and infant son. It later transpired that a television company had shown an interview with the lawyer to senior AUM members before its transmission, but it hadn’t bothered to tell the lawyer this. Nor did it bother to tell the police either, after the lawyer’s disappearance.
In the period between 1989 and 1995, AUM hit the news in a variety of ways, mostly as a public nuisance. But the locals who protested its setting up of yoga schools and retreats in remote rural areas didn’t know the half of it. For during these years AUM – which attracted many middle-class professionals – began using them to stockpile the raw materials used in making nerve agents: sarin and its even more deadly cousin VX. Its members tried to produce conventional weapons, AK-47s, but they also travelled deep into research on botulism and a plasmaray gun. When in 1993 neighbours complained of a foul smell coming from an AUM building in central Tokyo, the police took no action. But then they weren’t to know that scientists there were doing their best to cultivate anthrax.
Then on the night of June 27th 1994, in the city of Matsumoto 150 miles west of Tokyo, a man called the police complaining of noxious fumes, and subsequently became so ill he had to be rushed to hospital. Two hundred others became ill and seven died. Twelve days later, this time in Kamikuishikimura, a rural village three hundred miles north of Tokyo, the same symptoms – chest pains, nausea, eye problems – reappeared in dozens of victims. And though this time no one died, the two attacks had something sinister in common. For the Matsumoto deaths, it was discovered, had been caused by sarin, hitherto unknown in Japan; and the village casualties by a by-product created in its manufacture.
The villagers were convinced that the gas had come from an AUM building nearby and by the beginning of 1995, the newspapers – if not the police – had begun to put two and two together. One paper reported that traces of sarin had been found in soil samples near another AUM retreat; another explained the attack on Matsumoto, for three judges who were to rule on a lawsuit brought against AUM lived in a building there next to a company dormitory where most of the casualties had occurred.
Still the police took no action. Nor did they move when in February a notary, a well known opponent of the sect, was abducted in broad daylight in Tokyo by a van that could be traced to AUM. In early March, passengers on a Yokohama commuter train were rushed to hospital complaining of eye irritation and vomiting; and ten days later the method in which they’d probably been attacked was found. Three attaché cases – containing a liquid, a vent, a battery and small motorized fans – were discovered dumped at a Tokyo station.
Perhaps forewarned of a coming police raid, AUM took preemptive action. At the height of the morning rush hour on March 25th, cult members released sarin on three subway lines that converged near National Police headquarters. Twelve died and over five thousand were injured. There was panic all over Japan. But, though the police did raid some AUM facilities the following day, they still failed to find Asahara and his inner circle. The price they paid was high. For on March 30th a National Police superintendent was shot outside his apartment by an attacker who got away on a bicycle. A parcel bomb was sent to the governor of Tokyo; cyanide bombs were found and defused in the subway system; and when a senior AUM figure was finally arrested, he was promptly assassinated, like Lee Harvey Oswald.
Through all this, Asahara and a number of his ministers were in almost daily touch with selected press. In fact he wasn’t arrested, hiding out in a steel-lined room at AUM’s compound at Kamikuishikimura, until almost two months after the Tokyo attack. And it was only very slowly, even then, that his motives and the extent of his crimes were unravelled.
The ex-masseur had started AUM Supreme Truth, it seems, for the money he could make and he early recruited members from another sect who knew the religion business. But then he’d become infected by his own propaganda and when sect members ran in national elections in 1990 – and lost in a big way – he decided to bring down the government in preparation for a final Armageddon that would take place in 1997. Everything he undertook from then on was bent to this single purpose. In an atmosphere of obsessive secrecy, he organized bizarre initiation rituals and assassinated or abducted anyone who stood in his way. He demanded that members give up their worldly goods to him and had them killed if they refused. He operated prostitution clubs, made deals with drug syndicates, and instigated break-ins at government research laboratories. . .
The full extent of his crimes is still not yet known. For the trials and appeals of both Asahara and his high officers continues. Meanwhile, so does his cult – under a new name Aleph. It’s still remarkably popular.