Lucky Luciano ran organised crime like a corporation, board meetings included
The old Sicilian bosses in New York refused to deal with anyone outside their own villages. Charles Luciano thought that was bad business. He would partner with Jewish and Irish gangsters if the money was good, and in 1931 he replaced the idea of a single all-powerful boss with a governing committee.
He was born Salvatore Lucania in 1897 in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, where his father worked a sulphur mine and saved for years for the passage to America. The family reached Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1906. At fourteen he quit school to deliver hats for seven dollars a week, then won 244 dollars at dice and never went back. Even his teenage racket was unusual: he sold protection to Jewish boys against Italian and Irish gangs. When one of them, Meyer Lansky, defied his threats, the two became lifelong partners.
Prohibition, which began in January 1920, gave him an industry. The gambler Arnold Rothstein financed his bootlegging and taught him to dress well and mix with high society. When a heroin sting exposed him in 1923, he repaired his image by buying 200 expensive seats to a heavyweight boxing match and handing them to gangsters and politicians. By 1925 his operations grossed more than 12 million dollars a year. Nobody knows for certain where the nickname Lucky came from; theories include gambling luck, surviving a brutal 1929 abduction, or people simply mangling his surname.
The so-called Mustache Petes, old-guard bosses steeped in Old World codes, stood in his way. Luciano backed one against the other in a gang war, then removed both, and abolished the title of boss of bosses. In its place came the Commission, a council of family heads that turned rival crews into something like a national business with shared rules.
The prosecutor Thomas Dewey finally convicted him in 1936, winning a thirty to fifty year sentence. Through Lansky, a deal was struck to help naval intelligence in the Second World War, and in 1946 his sentence was commuted on condition he be deported to Italy. He died there in 1962, and his body was allowed home to America for burial.
Source: Lucky Luciano
