On February 11, 1942, just over two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and the United States entry into World War II, the war came to New York’s harbor. Moored in the docks on the Hudson River was the French liner the S.S. Normandie.
Since the attack of Pearl Harbor the allies had lost more than 120 merchant ships to German U-boats in the Atlantic, in waters off the American coast. The S.S. Normandie, one of the fastest ships around, was being converted into a high speed troopship, with the hopes it could outdistance the German’s naval power. Unfortunately, it was never given the opportunity. On the night of February 11, 1942, the S.S. Normandie lit up the New York sky as fire gutted the vessel, eventually capsizing it. The largest vessel destroyed in the war to that date.
Naval Intelligence in New York, known as B-3, headed by Lieutenant Commander Charles Radcliffe “Red” Haffenden, immediately sent its more than 150 agents into the New York area looking for answers. While U.S. Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C. issued a statement claiming the Normandie fire was due to “carelessness,” possibly started by a welder’s torch during the conversion, in an effort to stem any civilian panic that may arise, they secretly suspected Nazi sabotage. Fishing fleets made their way daily into the harbor and Navy Intelligence feared German or Italian-speaking dock workers might be signaling information to offshore enemy submarines or refueling or resupplying German U-boats off the American coast.
What Navy Intelligence didn’t know was that the destruction of the S.S. Normandie was part of a Mafia plot to benefit the head of the national crime syndicate, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who’d been imprisoned in New York’s desolate Dannemora Prison, near the Canadian border, since 1936.
The New American Mafia
In 1906, when American immigration officials allowed the parents of Palermo, Sicily-born Salvatore Luciana (1897-1962) to bring him into the country, they had no idea the impact this young man would have on the emergence of organized crime in America.
Luciano was a new breed of gangster. He wasn’t tied completely to the traditions and restrictions of the ‘Mustache Pete,’ (the older Mafia leaders), who would only deal with others of Sicilian origin and fight with everyone else who wasn’t. A leading member of New York’s notorious Five Points Gang by 1916, Luciano was quick to jump on the possibilities for wealth prohibition brought. Together, with two gangsters of Jewish origin, Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, he set up a bootlegging operation. To make matters worst to the ‘Mustache Petes,’ not only was he in business with two Jews, but he was also associated withy Frank Costello, a Calabrian.
Luciano was a smart young man. Along with this operation, he’s also established himself as a chief aide in New York’s largest Mafia family headed by Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, a ‘Mustache Pete.’
In 1928, when the Castellammarese War broke out between Joe the Boss and another ‘Mustache Pete’, Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano managed to play a dangerous game by being affiliated with Joe the Boss, yet forming relationships with key Maranzano soldiers. Many of the younger killers working for these bosses were equally upset with their bosses’ old ways.
The Castellammarese War raged on until 1931 when Luciano betrayed Joe the Boss, having him killed at a Coney Island restaurant by Siegel and two others. Maranzano had won, and as a reward he made Luciano his second-in-command and declared himself “Boss of Bosses.” Maranzano wasn’t stupid, however, and he knew Luciano was ambitious. He decided Luciano needed to be eliminated. He decided too late. Luciano, who earned the moniker “Lucky” after pulling off the rare feat of surviving a one-way ride, had Maranzano murdered by four gunmen posing as government agents. They gained access to his office and proceeded to shoot and stab to death the “Boss of Bosses.” Maranzano’s death, for all intents and purposes, marked the end of the ‘old Mafia’ in America.
Along with Meyer Lansky, Luciano formed a national crime syndicate, which included such directors as Lansky, Joe Adonis, Dutch Schultz, Louis Lepke and Frank Costello, and together they set about controlling bootlegging, prostitution, narcotics, gambling, loan sharking and the labor rackets in the U.S.
The Lay of the Law
As the leader of the national crime syndicate, Luciano became a prime target for prosecutions, who all wanted to earn the reputation of having brought down the crime leader. This included New York’s special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, who in 1935 caught an unexpected break with the arrest of Polly Adler, a notorious New York madam.
At the Women’s Court, where the prostitutes nabbed in the raid were being arraigned, Eunice Carter noticed that certain girls, represented by the same lawyer, were always acquitted. She convinced Dewey there was a pattern happening here and that it would lead to top mobsters. She was right. The investigation led to the mass arrest of pimps on February 1, 1936 all over New York and in Philadelphia. These arrests led several to implicate Luciano as the top man.
Dewey and his team had determined that Luciano, who was living in style at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel under the name Charles Ross, controlled 200 madams and 1,000 prostitutes, who paid him for protection. With pimps, prostitutes and madams talking, Dewey raised enough evidence to indict Luciano, who was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas and extradited to New York. On May 11, 1936, he stood trial with nine others on compulsory prostitution charges. Luciano was found guilty on 62 counts and sentenced to 30 to 50 years imprisonment, a tougher sentence than any other that had been handed down for the crime. (In his memoirs, The Last Testament of Charles Luciano, Luciano makes a strong case that he was set up by Dewey on manufactured evidence and that a man of his stature in the underworld would be well removed from the day-to-day activities of something considered as low as prostitution, even amongst gangsters).
America’s top crime boss was headed for prison for the rest of his life. The ironic part in all this was Dewey, the prosecutor who had put him away, owed his life to Luciano. For the longest time Dewey had been targeting Dutch Schultz and as such, Schultz had gone to the syndicate asking permission to eliminate him, but was refused. Taking out a high profile prosecutor such as Dewey would have brought too much trouble to members of the syndicate. Determined to do so anyway, Schultz stormed out of the meeting, signing his own death warrant. The syndicate had him killed before he could hit the prosecutor.
War Hysteria
“So I said to them [Lansky and Costello] that they had two things to work on without delay. First, there hadda be somethin’ that would deal with sabotage and it hadda be front page stuff that would make it necessary for the Navy or someone to come to us for help,” explained Luciano in the Gosch Hammer written biography, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (1975, 1975).
Luciano didn’t like prison and was determined to play every angle he could think of to get out. With WWII raging on overseas, and America newly in the war, he figured he could use patriotism as a means of gaining his freedom, he just didn’t know how. It was Albert Anastasia (1903-1957), the Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc. who came up withy the solution. He and his brother, Tough Tony Anastasio (they spelled their last names differently) took their plan to Costello, who in turn took it to Luciano, who approved of it. If all went well it would give him the leverage with the government he needed, as they needed him to keep the docks safe.
With that, Tough Tony was given the task and the S.S. Normandie burned.
A Lack of Co-operation
During the 1940s, or during any decade before or after, life on New York’s docks moved to its own beat and to its own rules. This is what Haffenden and his agents quickly discovered.
“It was part of their being,” said B-3 Lieutenant, Maurice P. Kelly, upon attempting to question longshoremen. “They just refused to talk to anybody, war effort or no war effort. They didn’t know whether it interfered with somebody who was running the pier, and until such time as they got definite orders to co-operate, it was a different situation...They didn’t know. They didn’t see him. They didn’t know the guy you were inquiring about.”1
Haffenden and his men were at a loss, so they turned to New York District Attorney Frank S. Hogan who put them in touch with Murray I. Gurfein, head of his rackets bureau. Gurfein, who by 1941 had managed to bring seven counts of extortion and conspiracy charges against Joseph “Socks” Lanza, boss of the Fulton Fish Market and elected head of Local 16975 of the United Seafood Workers, put the Navy in touch with him through his attorney.
Lanza was more than willing to help the Navy, and did so to a degree, introducing his agents to seamen and captains who promised to supply B-3 with news of any suspicious going-ons. Yet, despite his help, 47 more merchant ships were sunk off the Atlantic coast in the months of April and May, prompting the Navy to seek out a higher power. Hogan suggested they contact Moses Polakoff, one of Luciano’s lawyers, who introduced Haffenden to Lansky, who in turn took the Navy’s request to Luciano.
Anastasia’s plan had worked perfectly. The authorities had enlisted the mob to help them defend and protect New York’s docks and aid the war effort. ‘Operation Underworld’ was underway and for the rest of the war there was no sabotage, union disputes or delays to shipping on the docks. Luciano was moved from Dannemora Prison to the more palatable Great Meadow Prison in Comstock. Luciano was also given free reign to meet with Lansky and Costello on a frequent basis, presumably to discuss matters concerning the war effort, but undoubtedly to issue orders in the running of the crime syndicate and his crime family.
Anastasia was ordered not to burn anymore ships, a disappointment to the former Army sergeant who hated the Navy. “He was sorry,” Lansky recalled, “not sorry he’d had the Normandie burned, but sorry he couldn’t get at the Navy again.”2
The War Rages On
On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. Italian leader Benito Mussolini made the fateful mistake of siding with Hitler, and until the end of the war, which would find both him and German leader Adolph Hitler dead, he’d be the German dictator’s puppet.
In New York, Mafia leaders came to detest the Italian leader, who set about taking on the Sicilian Mafiosi. His prefect, Cesare Mori had not only imprisoned and tortured many of these men, but had also executed dozens without trial. They all had relatives in New York.
When it was decided that the Americans and the British would invade Italy, with initial landings in Sicily, once again the U.S. authorities and Haffenden turned to the Mafia.
“Haffenden was looking for Italians that he thought had a knowledge of Sicily and all the surrounding islands there, and had relatives,” recalled Lansky. “I went to [Joe] Adonis to find me such Italians…I didn’t know the people…The American-Italians were the ones that got me the foreign Italians to bring up to the Navy through Charlie Luciano.”3
On July 10, 1943, the U.S. 7th Army landed at Gela and Licata on the south Sicilian coast. While true crime scholars have debated whether or not Luciano played any role in assisting the invasion, four Naval Intelligence officers at the vanguard of it used information gathered by the Mafia in New York and quickly captured Italian Naval Command headquarters and captured documents showing the location of the enemy’s entire Mediterranean fleet and maps of minefields.
The Payback
Based on Luciano’s perceived war efforts, on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, Polakoff swore out a petition for a grant of executive clemency on behalf of Luciano. Governor Dewey accepted this under the condition that upon release from prison, Luciano be immediately deported back to Italy. The crime leader agreed and on February 10, 1946, aboard the S.S. Laura Keene, the mobster sailed from New York Harbor to his homeland.
Of course, many were outraged by his release, wondering how so prominent a criminal could receive such consideration from the government. At the time, neither the government nor the Navy was broadcasting their use of the Mafia during the war. In 1954, Dewey, still governor of New York, came under attack with allegations he’d been paid off to allow Luciano’s release. He immediately commissioned a full inquiry into the matter, headed by William B. Herland, which over the course of eight months uncovered Operation Underworld and would clear Dewey’s name, but pressure from the Navy, which saw uncovering the deal as a public relations disaster for them, managed to have the report remain confidential until 1977.
The mob didn’t broadcast it either. Their role in the burning of the S.S. Normandie was revealed almost three decades later with the posthumous memoirs of ‘Lucky’ Luciano and was later confirmed by Lansky when he revealed the truth to his Israeli biographers. MI
- Lacy, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. Little, Brown and Company, 1991.
- Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia: From Accardo to Zwillman. Facts on File Publications, Inc., 1987.
- Short, Martin. Crime Inc.: The Story of Organized Crime. Thames, Mandarin, 1984.
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