The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words Read Free Page A

to me. This was a place where you was supposed to learn that it was wrong not to goto school. They worked our asses off, just doin’ nothin’. And what a kid learns in that place is how to steal better, or how to pick pockets, all that stuff. When I came out after four months, I knew school and me was through. I also knew I hated Brooklyn. Even later, when I was runnin’ things in Manhattan, I always managed to stay away from Brooklyn and let the guys over there play their own games without interference.”
    As he walked through the school gates, his father was waiting for him, to take him home. “We had a lot of trouble gettin’ back to our neighborhood because Brooklyn was like a foreign country. We got lost on the El and it was almost dark by the time we reached home; it took us more than two hours. All durin’ that time, my old man only talked about one thing — go back to school or get a job. I wasn’t goin’ back to school.”
    But the only jobs available were those of errand boy, and even those were not easy to come by. The neighborhood was filled with other boys his age, sons of immigrants, who had quit school, were ill educated, held menial jobs if they worked at all, and dreamed of riches, of someday making the big score. “My old man kept sayin’ the neighborhood was gettin’ worse, that there was gangs of young guys around my age who was knockin’ off stores, grabbin’ handbags from old ladies, stuff like that. He said every kid in the neighborhood was growin’ up to be a crook.
    “When I looked around the neighborhood, I found out that the kids wasn’t the only crooks. We was surrounded by crooks, and plenty of them was guys who were supposed to be legit, like the landlords and storekeepers and the politicians and cops on the beat. All of ’em was stealin’ from somebody. And we had the real pros, the rich Dons from the old country, with their big black cars and mustaches to match. We used to make fun of them behind their backs, but our mothers and fathers was scared to death of them. The only thing is, we knew they was rich, and rich was what counted, because the rich got away with anythin’. One time, we got a big prosciutto ham that was sent to my mother by a cousin in Lercara Friddi. We got all excited because it was the first package that ever come from home. My old man got out a hammer and opened up the crate, and there was this beautiful ham all wrapped up in burlap. We was ready to attack it right then, but my mothersaid no, a prosciutto ham has to be hung up for a while so that the air could get at it and it wouldn’t be too soft.
    “The next day, a guy named Moliari knocked at our door after dinner. It was Tuesday, and he come to collect his dollar. He was a moneylender, the fat bastard, and he specialized in Sicilians. I think my old man had borrowed some money to buy a new bed for my sisters and he was about three or four weeks behind in payments. So Moliari come up with two guys to take back the bed. When he got a look at that prosciutto ham hangin’ in the kitchen, the son of a bitch took it like it belonged to him and started to walk out. When he got to the door, he said to my mother somethin’ like, ‘I’ll take this; you don’t want your girls to sleep on the floor.’ But I fixed that shitheel good. About two months later, we knocked off his apartment and we grabbed over four hundred dollars. That was the most expensive prosciutto the son of a bitch ever stole.”
    Out in the street, young Lucania, looked at by his contemporaries with some awe because he had served time, became the leader of a gang, his leadership reinforced by the lessons in crime he had learned during his four months in Brooklyn and could now teach his followers. His gang, of six to a dozen Sicilian friends, marauded through the Lower East Side. There was hardly a store or a lone pedestrian walking home at dusk safe from him or from scores of other gangs like his. But it was one thing to rob and steal