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

and have some real money, and another to be able to use it. Lucania and his friends still lived at home, under stern and watchful eyes. Their fathers worked long hours, came home exhausted with only a few dollars each week, hardly enough to keep the family in food and shelter. They knew what things cost and what it took to earn money. To flaunt new clothes, new possessions on a delivery boy’s pay, part of which was going to help the family, would do more than create suspicion; it would earn a beating or worse from fathers whose word was law in their own homes and whose morality was unbending.
    To circumvent such parental suspicion and punishment, young Lucania developed a plan, using what he had learned from his teachers at school, whenever he was at school, about union. Unity meant sharing the work and the profits. So all the money they gained from their forays was put into a common pool to be sharedequally by all members of the gang, with the money hidden away, buried in vacant lots or other caches. Everyone wanted new clothes, for they were the outward signs of success. But new clothes meant trouble at home. Lucania decreed that new wardrobes would have to be acquired gradually, in such a way that suspicions at home and suspicions of patrolling police would not be aroused. When someone felt he needed a new pair of shoes, a new shirt, anything new, there would be a meeting of the gang at which the expenditure was put to a vote.
    “I had a rule that every member hadda have a job, as a kind of front so he could explain how come he could buy new things. I let two Irish kids join because they had jobs and besides, they was nice fellows. One of them was a redheaded guy by the name of Willie Mulvaney, whose old man was a cop up in the Bronx. One time, Willie wanted a new pair of pants; he was still wearin’ knickers because he was so little. So we had a regular meet and his request got turned down flat. Well, this dumbhead Willie Mulvaney takes the money anyway and buys himself the long pants and wears them home. His old man, Mulvaney the cop, kept a book on every penny Willie earned. When he found out that Willie didn’t steal the pants from a store but actually paid for them, the shit hit the fan. There was about fifteen kids in my gang by that time, and we all got hauled to the police station on Fourteenth Street. It was like a circus. Our mothers and fathers, all our relatives was tryin’ to talk at the same time, tryin’ to explain to the sergeant that we was good boys who wouldn’t do nothin’ wrong. Everybody, that is, but my old man. He beat the crap outa me right there in the police station.”
    It was not long before the neighborhood became too small to contain Lucania and his friends. It was too poor; even the most successful job earned only a few dollars. And there was competition for those few loose dollars. There was the multitude of other young gangs. And there were the neighborhood branches of the old secret societies, the Mafia and the Camorra and the rest, brought over from the old country and terrorizing the immigrants who could not escape them, bleeding the neighborhood of everything beyond mere subsistence.
    So, Salvatore Lucania began to look outside, uptown. To thenorth, in Manhattan, was East Harlem, and there, in another Italian-Sicilian ghetto, other youths had their own monopoly. That territory was unfamiliar and the spoils there no greater than at home. But in between was the rest of the island of Manhattan where, they thought, were limitless riches. As Lucania looked north of Fourteenth Street into this realm of wealth, he began to perceive how its residents lived, what possessions they had. He dreamed that someday it would all be his, that he would control and own it, would walk its streets like a king in his own domain.
    He was, of course, not alone with such ideas. Other gangs from the Lower East Side and from East Harlem had similar visions. They hit the middle of Manhattan from both ends,