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February 26 - March 8, 2024
President Roosevelt had declared that the country’s six hundred thousand nonnaturalized Italians be classified as “enemy aliens.”
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It mandated that all people of Japanese descent who lived in the western United States be interned at several designated camps.
The Black Tom explosion had been set off back in 1916 by German agents in conjunction with Communist activists who were also foreigners. The agents targeted a series of munitions warehouses on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor and ignited an explosion so big that it was heard in Maryland, hit 5.0 on the Richter scale, and created a crater that was over sixty-five thousand square feet.12 It took nearly a decade to figure it out, but it was Naval Intelligence that finally concluded that the United States had been attacked.
the navy was now using Long Island’s fishing fleet as the first line of defense against the enemy.
“I’ll talk to anybody,” Haffenden said at the time. “A priest, a bank manager, a gangster, the devil himself, if I can get the information I need. This is a war.”
Moses Polakoff, Luciano’s attorney of record. Not only was Polakoff Luciano’s attorney, but he was also a seaman second class, as a veteran of World War I, and a former member of the DA’s office.
But of all the rackets that Lansky ran, the most notorious was his murder-for-hire business that the press called “Murder Inc.”
relocating their family to America, and the eruption was the last straw,
Luciano paid dearly for not respecting, as prostitution was not one of those publicly accepted vices.
Pomonok Country Club in Queens, or other courses, with three men. The foursome was always the same: Costello, George Morton Levy, Frank Erickson, and a former tax revenue agent named Schoenbaum.
Fritz Kuhn, the American Führer.
Robert O. Jordan, who was the president of the Ethiopian Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, which held that Japan and the Japanese people were the liberators of all non-white people from the rule of Western governments. Jordan spoke out against the United States and embraced the Axis cause. In certain circles, Jordan was known by another name—“the Black Hitler.”
Smith Act passed in 1940, which held that it was illegal to “advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to organize or be a member of any group or society devoted to such advocacy.” Haffenden immediately called Lanza and McCabe and summoned them to his office at the Hotel Astor.
he made his own luck, and came out on top because he was smart, and not lucky. He couldn’t rely on luck with Dewey—that attitude had landed him in prison—so he would have to explore other ways to get himself out.
Japan’s largest concentration of spies against the US resided in Mexico.
To catch the fugitive, Hogan convinced a judge to let him install wiretaps on phone numbers—WOrth 2-7624 and WOrth 2-7625. The phones connected to these numbers were in Meyer’s Hotel.
Dukes was a restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and Moretti was there nearly all the time. “It’s Cliffside 6-1799.”
The Spanish Falange was a Fascist group that originated in Spain and was
After Luciano had Joe “the Boss” Masseria killed, the war ended, and Salvatore Maranzano declared himself the winner. To him, and him alone, went the spoils, which Luciano knew even then was a mistake.
“Five Families” of New York. Charlie Luciano would run the Luciano family in Manhattan; Vincent Mangano would run Brooklyn, and Tom Gagliano, Joe Bonanno, and Joe Profaci were also to run their own families.
Luciano and his board unleashed a countrywide purge of the underworld that became known as “the Night of the Sicilian Vespers.” Luciano had wooed key allies, but he also knew that some of the bosses would not go along with him. Killers like Vito Genovese, and his friend Michael Miranda, and another killer named Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, had a field day.6 After that, everyone fell into line, and peace reigned throughout the underworld—sort of.
Operation Torch—the Allied invasion of French West Africa in November 1942—was moving along, though at a snail’s pace. The Germans and Italians clung to Tunisia, while British forces from the east and American forces from the west closed in. Most of Vichy French West Africa had been taken by the US Army, and in a power move, on January 14, 1943,
In place of Capo di Tutti Capi, Luciano created El Unione Council—“the Commission.” An equal say in mutual business was given to the heads of seven crime families—the five heads in New York City, plus Al Capone (who was originally from Brooklyn) in Chicago and Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo. They were to clear all major decisions with each other before acting, to prevent any bad blood that might start a war.
Operation Husky’s American invasion force was led by the Seventh Army commander, General George S. Patton. His plan was to land over fifty thousand troops in the first wave of the attack.
Herlands wrote a 101-page document with supporting appendices that became known as the Herlands Report. In essence, Herlands wrote that the answer to both questions was unequivocally yes—Luciano had indeed been sought out and cooperated with the navy to provide information regarding possible enemy attack that was beneficial to the United States’ war effort.
In 1957, Genovese finally made the move that Luciano had seen coming back in the early 1940s at Great Meadow prison. The first domino to fall was when Adonis managed to get himself deported to Italy. With one of Luciano’s key allies out of the picture, Genovese capitalized on the situation by ordering a hit on Frank Costello. A gunman named Vincent Gigante shot Costello in the head,
In 1946 he wrote a memoir called Surreptitious Entry, which explained, in theoretical terms, the events that transpired in Chapter 7.
Schindler Bureau of Investigation
upholding of the Washington Post’s right to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers. In his ruling, he wrote something that is highly relevant to Operation Underworld—“The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”
“Under our constitution, every person is entitled to their day in court.... When the day comes that a person is beyond the pale of justice, that means our liberty is gone. Minorities and undesirables and persons with bad reputations are more entitled to the protection of the law than the so-called honorable people. I don’t have to apologize to you . . . or anyone else for whom I represent.”1
Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld.
Emby Distribution Company.
Joe’s Elbow Room restaurant in Cliffside, New Jersey,
In 1977, an English journalist named Rodney Campbell, who had previously edited Thomas Dewey’s memoir, was entrusted with revealing the contents of the Herlands Report, and the nearly three thousand pages of testimony that came with it, to the public. Campbell used the information to write and publish the book The Luciano Project.
His friend and successor Harold MacDowell perhaps put it best when he said that he wanted nothing to do with underworld informants because “when you go to sleep with dogs you get up with fleas.” This is certainly true in Haffenden’s case.
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer, was how much Luciano obsessed about Thomas Dewey.
In Dead Wake, Erik Larson wrote in the “Sources and Acknowledgments” section that “no matter how deeply I immerse myself in a subject, I still like having actual, physical proof that the events I’m writing about really did occur.” That’s the mark of a true historian.
University of Rochester, where the investigation is archived among the Thomas Dewey papers.
Surreptitious Entry, published in 1946.
Thomas P. Hunt deserves a lot of credit for creating a fantastic collection of Mafia material (especially his timeline of Lucky Luciano in prison) on his website mafiahistory.us. Likewise for Julian Boilen, who created an incredible website (https://1940s.nyc/map) that uses thousands of old black-and-white photos from 1939–1941 to enable users to see what amounts to a Google street view of New York City in that era. It’s like looking through a window into the past. Thank you also to Tim Newark, who has written extensively about this subject and provided fantastic accounts of both Lucky
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“Don’t let your dreams be dreams,”
Shrapnel and debris even managed to damage the Statue of Liberty. Exploding fragments hit the arm and torch of Lady Liberty, and even over one hundred years later, this damage is part of the reason the public is not allowed to access the torch of the statue.
The Ultimate Spy Book (New York, NY: DK Publishing Inc., 1996), print, pages 124–125.
In 1978, the National Security Agency (NSA) declassified thirty thousand pages of documents that describe what was known as the “TO” spy ring. Oddly enough, the “TO” spy ring wasn’t spying for the Germans, but actually the Japanese, with Spanish diplomats in America passing information to them. There are several clues about information gathered in 1942 that match information shared by George in Surreptitious Entry. For example, George claimed that the chain involved spies in six major cities. It’s revealed by the NSA in the “TO” reports that there were six to eight operatives, each in a
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United States Senate, Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce: Part. 1-1A (Florida, 1951), digital. This commission—often referred to as the Kefauver Committee, named after Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver—took testimony from the country’s top gangsters,
Erickson Testimony, Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Frank Erickson had so much money that he was often approached to place “lay off” bets, which sports books used to hedge against bets that were considered to be a sure thing (like having to pay out bets against Seabiscuit). Frank Costello even got a cut of 5 percent if he brokered the deal for Erickson.
East Side-West Side: Organized Crime in New York, 1930–1950
It was a lesson the English had learned from their onetime enemy Napoleon Bonaparte, who said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
