Prologue II

[don't have to read it all]

It's 1912 I'm Matteo Luciano. I'm 14 years old right now. I just dropped out of school and started delivering hats for 7$ dollars a week. I would do this every day for months after saying my money I attempted to gamble and guess what won big 244$ after that I quit my job and started earning money on the streets but not too long after that my parents send me to Brooklyn Truant School.

 After some time I started my gang called the Five Points Gang.

Unlike other street gangs who did the petty crime, we offered protection to Jewish youngsters from Italian and Irish gangs for 10 cents a week. One day on my walk home I met a boy called Meyer Lansky I tried to extort him for money, but he said no to all my threats taking a liking to him we became friends which would last a long time.

From 1916 to 1919 I was arrested 15 times for assault, illegal gambling, blackmail, and robbery thank God I didn't spend time in prison.

January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect and Prohibition lasted until the amendment was repealed in 1933. The amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. The demand for alcohol was at an all-time high black market started to pop up giving gangs more sources of income.

During this time I met many future mafia gang leaders two of them were Vito Genovese and Frank Costello they would become long-time friends and business partners. That same year Joe Masseria a gang boss in Manhattan recruited me to be one of his gunmen. A couple of months later and my close friend started working for gambler Arnold Rothstein, who immediately saw the potential of prohibition and educated me on running bootleg alcohol as a business. Frank, Vito, and I started ower own bootlegging operation with the help of Arnold.

Arnold served as a mentor he taught me how to move in high-class society. Dress, act, etiquette, and speak properly. In 1923 I got caught selling heroin by an undercover cop I served no jail time. This situation damaged my reputation among my high-class customers. To salvage my reputation I  bought 200 expensive seats to the Jack Dempsey–Luis Firpo boxing match in the Bronx and distributed them to top gangsters and politicians. The strategy worked, and my reputation was saved.

By 1925, I  was grossing over $12 million per year and made $4 million per year from running illegal gambling and bootlegging operations in New York that also extended into Philadelphia.

I soon became a top aide in Joe Masseria's criminal organization. In contrast to Rothstein, Masseria was uneducated, with poor manners and limited managerial skills. 

Masseria and Maranzano, we're mafia bosses that started their carer in Italy. They believed in upholding the supposed "Old World Mafia" principles of "honor," "tradition," "respect," and "dignity." This was a shock to me. They would not do business with any non-Italian person. We're I didn't care I would be willing to do business with anyone as long as there was money. I got lectured for doing business with Frank which they called "the dirty Calabrian".

I soon began making ties with other mobsters that were born in Italy and started the business in the U.S.A, but my goal was to make our gang activity into a criminal empire.

As the war progressed, this group came to include future mob leaders such as Costello, Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis, Joe Bonanno, Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, Tommy Gagliano, and Tommy Lucchese. They believed that their bosses' greed and conservatism were keeping them poor while the Irish and Jewish gangs got rich. My vision was to form a national crime syndicate in which the Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs could pool their resources and turn organized crime into a lucrative business for all – an organization he founded after a conference was hosted in Atlantic City by Luciano, Johnny Torrio, Lansky and Costello in May 1929.

In 1929 in October I was forced into a limousine at gunpoint by three men, I was beaten and stabbed, and strung up by my hands from a beam in a warehouse in Staten Island. Luckily I survived the ordeal, but was scared and had a droopy eye. Which I found out later to be Maranzano's man.

In early 1931, I decided to eliminate Masseria. The war had been going poorly for Masseria, and I saw the opportunity to switch sides. In a deal with Maranzano, I agreed to arranged Masseria's death in return for receiving Masseria's rackets and becoming Maranzano's second-in-command.

Joe Adonis had joined the Masseria faction and when Masseria heard about my betrayal, he approached Adonis about killing me. However, Adonis instead warned me about the murder plan. On April 15, 1931, Masseria was killed at Nuova Villa Tammaro, a Coney Island restaurant in Brooklyn. While they played cards, I excused himself to go to the bathroom. And that's when my gunman killed him.

With Masseria gone, Maranzano reorganized the Italian American gangs in New York City into Five Families headed by me, Profaci, Gagliano, Vincent Mangano, and himself. Maranzano called a meeting of crime bosses in Wappingers Falls, New York, where he declared himself capo di tutti capi ("boss of all bosses"). Maranzano also whittled down the rival families' rackets in favor of his own. I appeared to accept these changes but was merely biding my time before removing Maranzano. Although Maranzano was slightly more forward-thinking than Masseria, I had come to believe that Maranzano was even more greedy and hidebound than Masseria had been.

By September 1931, Maranzano realized I was a threat, and hired Vincent Coll, an Irish gangster, to kill him. However, Lucchese alerted me that they were planning to kill me. On September 10, Maranzano ordered me, Vito, and Fank to come to his office in Manhattan. Convinced that Maranzano planned to murder me and my friends, I decided to act first. I sent to Maranzano's office four Jewish gangsters whose faces were unknown to Maranzano's people. They had been secured with the aid of Lansky and Siegel. Disguised as government agents, two of the gangsters disarmed Maranzano's bodyguards. The other two, helped by Lucchese who was there to point Maranzano out, stabbed the boss multiple times before shooting him. This killing was the first of what would later be called the "Night of the Sicilian Vespers."

Several days later, the bodies of two other Maranzano partners, Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo, were retrieved from Newark Bay, showing signs of torture. Meanwhile, Joseph Siragusa, leader of the Pittsburgh crime family, was shot to death in his home. The October 15 we killed Joe Ardizonne, head of the Los Angeles family. We were going after every old Italian mob boss.

With now the death of Maranzano, I became the dominant crime boss in the United States. I had reached the pinnacle of the underworld of the United States, setting policies and directing activities along with the other Mafia bosses. My own crime family controlled lucrative criminal rackets in New York City such as illegal gambling, extortion, bookmaking, loansharking, and drug trafficking. I became very influential in labor union activities and controlled the Manhattan Waterfront, garbage hauling, construction, Garment District businesses, and trucking.

Although there would have been few objections had I declared myself capo di tutti capi, so I abolished the title, thinking the position created trouble between the families and made myself a target for other people trying to take my spot. I chose to quietly maintain control through the Commission by forging unofficial alliances with other bosses. I did not discard all of Maranzano's changes. He believed that the ceremony of becoming a "made man" in a crime family was a Sicilian anachronism. Vito persuaded me to keep this title, arguing that young people needed rituals to promote obedience to my family. I remained committed to omertà, the oath of silence, to protect the families from legal prosecution. In addition, I kept the structure of the five crime families in New York City.

I promoted my most trusted Italian allies to high-level positions in what was now the Luciano crime family it was named after my last name. Vito became underboss and Frank consigliere. Adonis, Michael Coppola, Anthony Strollo, Willie Moretti, and Anthony Carfano all served as caporegimes. Because Lansky and Siegel were non-Italians, neither man could hold official positions within any Mafia family. However, Lansky was my top advisor and Siegel a trusted friend. 

Later in 1931, I called a meeting in Chicago with various bosses, where I proposed a Commission to serve as the governing body for organized crime. Designed to settle all disputes and decide which families controlled which territories. My goals with the Commission were to quietly maintain my power over all the families and to prevent future gang wars the bosses approved the idea of the Commission.

The Commission was composed of representatives of the Five Families of New York City, the Buffalo crime family, and the Chicago Outfit later, the crime families of Philadelphia and Detroit were added, with smaller families being formally represented by a Commission family. The Commission also provided representation for Jewish criminal organizations in New York.

The group's first test came in 1935 when it ordered Dutch Schultz to drop his plans to murder Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. I argued that a Dewey assassination would precipitate a massive law enforcement crackdown my national crime syndicate had enacted a hard and fast rule stating that law enforcement and prosecutors were not to be harmed. An enraged Schultz said he would kill Dewey anyway and walked out of the meeting. Murder, Inc leader Albert Anastasia approached me with information that Schultz had asked him to stake out Dewey's apartment building on Fifth Avenue. Upon hearing the news, the Commission held a discreet meeting to discuss the matter. After six hours of deliberations, the Commission ordered Lepke Buchalter to eliminate Schultz. On October 23, 1935, before he could kill Dewey, Schultz was shot in a tavern in Newark, New Jersey, and died to his injuries the next day.

My crime family started taking over small-scale prostitution operations in New York City. In June 1935, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman appointed Dewey, a U.S. Attorney, as a special prosecutor to combat organized crime in the city. Dewey's assistant district attorney Eunice Carter led an investigation into prostitution racketeering that connected me, the most powerful gangster in New York, to this prostitution network.

In late March 1936, I received a tip that I  was going to be arrested and fled to Hot Springs, Arkansas. A New York detective in Hot Springs on a different assignment spotted me and notified Dewey. On April 3, I  was arrested in Hot Springs on a criminal warrant from New York. The next day in New York, Dewey indicted me and his accomplices on 60 counts of compulsory prostitution. My lawyers in Arkansas began a fierce legal battle against extradition. On April 6, Owney Madden, one-time owner of the Cotton Club offered a $50,000 bribe to Arkansas Attorney General Carl E. Bailey to facilitate my case. However, Bailey refused the bribe and immediately reported it.

On April 17, after all of my legal options had been exhausted, Arkansas authorities handed me to three New York City Police Department detectives for transport by train back to New York for trial. When the train reached St. Louis, Missouri, the detectives and I changed trains. During this switchover, they were guarded by 20 local policemen to prevent a mob rescue attempt. The men arrived in New York on April 18, and I was sent to jail without bail.

On May 13, 1936, my pandering trial began. Dewey prosecuted the case that Carter built against me. He accused me of being part of a massive prostitution ring known as "the Combination". During the trial, Dewey exposed me for lying on the witness stand through direct quizzing and records of telephone calls; I also had no explanation for why my federal income tax records claimed I made only $22,000 a year, while I was a wealthy man. Dewey ruthlessly pressed me on my long arrest record and my relationships with well-known gangsters such as Masseria, Terranova, and Buchalter. On June 7, I was convicted on 62 counts of compulsory prostitution. On June 18, I was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in state prison, along with Betillo and others.

I continued to run my crime family from prison, relaying my orders through my acting boss Vito. After a year Vito fled to avoid an impending murder indictment in New York. After that, I appointed consigliere, fank, as the new acting boss and the overseer of my interests. I used my influence to help get the materials to build a church at the prison.

During World War II, the US government struck a secret deal with me. In 1942, the Office of Naval Intelligence was concerned about German and Italian agents entering the US through the New York waterfront. They also worried about sabotage in these facilities. Knowing that the Mafia controlled the waterfront, the US Navy contacted Lansky about a deal with me. To facilitate negotiations, I  was transferred to Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York.

The Navy, the State of New York, and I  reached a deal in exchange for a commutation of my sentence, I promised the complete assistance of his organization in providing intelligence to the Navy. Anastasia, my ally who controlled the docks, allegedly promised no dockworker strikes during the war. In preparation for the 1943 allied invasion of Sicily, I provided the US military with Sicilian Mafia contacts. This collaboration between the Navy and the Mafia became known as Operation Underworld.

To be honest I didn't contribute to the war that much. In 1947, the naval officer in charge of Operation Underworld discounted the value of my wartime help. 

I was deported back to Italy. On February 10, my ship sailed from Brooklyn Harbor for Italy. On February 28, after a 17-day voyage, my ship arrived in Naples. On arrival, I  told reporters I would be residing in Sicily.

After that, I did lots of stuff for the government.

On January 26, 1962, I was meeting up with a producer to make a move about my life. 

Currently, right now I'm having my life flash before my life after being hit by a truck.

"Where the hell am I," I said as I floated in pure darkness.