Oddly enough, Reles was a good family man; and at the time of his arrest, his wife was expecting another baby. To the amazement of the District Attorney’s office, he suddenly offered to ‘sing’ -turn State’s evidence – in exchange for immunity. A bargain was struck. When Reles told them about Murder Inc., the D.A. and his staff could hardly believe their ears. Until that time, the police had had no suspicion of the existence of the Syndicate. Now Reles told them that he belonged to a ‘troop’ in Brownsville whose chief business was assassination, and that similar troops existed all over the country.
Reles continued to ‘sing’ for two years, and as a result of his testimony, Lepke went to the electric chair; so did his chief executioner Mendy Weiss, Louis Capone, Pittsburgh Phil (Harry Strauss), Happy Maione and Dasher Abbadando. The transcript of Kid Twist’s testimony makes some of the most horrifying reading in the history of gangsterism: how, for example, Pittsburgh Phil set fire to the body of a murdered mobster, purely for the pleasure of seeing him burn. These men were, in the most literal sense, human butchers. Reles also described how, when Lepke was hiding from the police in 1939, he ordered Reles to kill eleven witnesses who meant to testify against him; Reles succeeded in killing seven before Lepke went on trial.
As Reles continued to ‘sing’, an increasing number of gangsters became nervous. Then, on the morning of 12 November 1941, Kid Twist mysteriously fell from his sixth-floor window in the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. Six policemen were guarding him, but all alleged they were out of the room or looking the other way. The body was so far from the wall of the hotel that it seemed reasonably certain that Reles had been given a vigorous push. But no one was ever indicted, and the death remains a mystery.
During all this time, Luciano was making strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to get himself paroled. Then, on 9 November 1942, the French liner Nonnandie was burned down to the waterline at a Hudson River pier; it was about to be converted to a troopship, and it was obviously an act of sabotage. The waterfront was still controlled by the Syndicate – in fact, by Luciano, from his prison cell. Naval Intelligence decided to approach Luciano and ask for his co-operation; Meyer Lansky – now the Syndicate’s banker and chief accountant – agreed to act as intermediary. The full story has still not been told; Luciano himself later claimed that he and Dewey arrived at an agreement: he would contribute $90,000 to Dewey’s campaign fund (Dewey was intending to run for President), and would help Naval Intelligence keep the waterfront free of sabotage; in exchange, he would be paroled at the end of the war and sent back to Italy. Meanwhile, he would be transferred to the relative comfort of Great Meadow Prison, in Comstock, New York State. Luciano even suggested arranging for Hitler to be assassinated by the gangster Vito Genovese, who was at present in Italy. This ambitious plan came to nothing, but for the remainder of the war the New York waterfront remained free of sabotage. At the end of the war, Dewey kept his part of the bargain; Luciano was paroled and deported to Italy (although he was an American citizen). Dewey ran as Republican candidate twice (in 1944 and 1948) but lost both times. But he became governor of New York state.
Ironically, the American occupation of Italy had restored power to the Mafia, who had been crushed by Mussolini. As a result of a message from Luciano to the ‘godfather’ in Sicily – Don Calogero Vizzini – the Mafia had given American forces full co-operation when they landed. It was only natural that these ‘patriotic’ Italians should then be allowed a leading role in restoring the country to normality – for example, in nominating leading ‘anti-fascists’ for key posts in cities like Naples. The Americans handed Italy back to the godfathers.
Luciano was deported in February 1946. Precisely one year later he was in Havana, Cuba – a city whose crime was controlled by Meyer Lansky, ‘the Little Man’. There, in the best hotel, Luciano sent for his aides from all over America – Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, Bugsy Siegel – the man who had founded the gambling industry in Las Vegas – and the Fischetti brothers from Chicago. When Siegel was asked to repay some of the vast sum of money he had borrowed to build the Las Vegas gambling casino and the Flamingo Hotel, he lost his temper and stormed out of the room. His friend Meyer Lansky was deputed to talk sense into him, but failed. On 20 June 1947, Siegel was shot to death in the Beverly Hills apartment of his mistress, Virginia Hill. Lansky is reported as saying: ‘I had no choice.’ Lansky himself denied being behind the killing, and attributed it to Luciano.
When an enterprising newsman revealed Luciano’s presence in Havana, the Batista government felt obliged to order him out of Cuba. Luciano returned to Italy. Banned by the government from Rome – where he had established various rackets – he settled in Naples. He gave many interviews, insisting that he had been much maligned, and that he was not a gangster. In 1961, when he was sixty-four years old, Luciano decided to set the record straight by allowing a film producer to make a film of his life. Then orders arrived from America: ‘The Little Man wouldn’t like it.’ Luciano summoned the producer, Martin Gosch, and told him regretfully that they would have to drop the idea; when Gosch pointed out that everyone knew that Luciano’s word was his bond, Luciano replied that if he kept his word they would both end up dead. By way of compensation, he talked at length to Gosch about his life, and these conversations formed the basis of The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer, published in 1975. In January 1962, Luciano died suddenly of a heart attack; he was sixty-four.
Luciano’s close associate Vito Genovese had fled from America in 1937, when the ‘heat was on’, and spent the war in Italy. If Mussolini was embarrassed to learn that his millionaire friend was a wanted gangster, he decided it was worth a little embarrassment when Genovese spent a quarter of a million dollars on a new fascist headquarters in Nola. When the Americans landed, Genovese persuaded them to take him on as an interpreter for army Intelligence. When a CIA agent discovered that he was a wanted killer, Genovese was escorted back to New York. Then one of the chief witnesses against him, Peter La Tempa, died of poison in his jail cell; in June 1946, Genovese was acquitted. He lost no time in reasserting his authority over the New York mobs. In October 1951, the New Jersey Mafia boss Willie Moretti was murdered. He was a close associate of Genovese’s chief rival, Frank Costello, who had taken over Bugsy Siegel’s gambling empire in Las Vegas; and Genovese was determined to ‘cut himself in’. In June 1953, another Costello ally, Steven Franse, was murdered. In February 1955, it was the turn of Longy Zwillman, who was found hanged in the basement of his home in Orange, New Jersey, in a wire noose; the verdict was suicide. And on 2 May 1957, Costello was entering his apartment building when someone yelled ‘This is yours, Frank,’ and shot him in the head. The shout probably saved Costello’s life; he lost a great deal of blood, but survived. In his pockets, police found gambling receipts from a Las Vegas casino, and when Costello declined to answer questions about them, or to name his would-be killer, he was jailed for contempt of court. The doorman picked out the gunman from a police photograph; it was Vincent (‘The Chin’) Gigante, a Genovese lieutenant.
Two months later, Frank Scalise, a Mafia underboss (second-in-command) was shot down at midday on a Bronx street. He was killed, according to underworld gossip, because he had been selling Mafia membership to non-Italians; but it seems altogether more likely that he was another victim in the gang war.
With Costello out of the running, Albert Anastasia, the Syndicate’s chief executioner, stood in the way of Genovese’s bid for power. Anastasia was known as the ‘Mad Hatter’ of crime because he became insanely homicidal when angry. It was Anastasia who had ordered the murder of a public-spirited citizen named Arnold Schuster who had recognised a famous bank robber, Willy Sutton (Willy the Actor) and informed the police. Schuster’s murder – in March 1952 – was intended to warn all other public spirited citizens to mind their own business. Anastasia subsequently had Schuster’s executioners killed, to cover his tracks.
Genovese heard that Costello had been conferring with Anastasia, and that the subject was almost certainly himself. He decided to strike first. His own gunmen were too well known to Anastasia, so Gcnovese approached the underboss of Anastasia’s ‘family’, Carlo Gambino, and made him a proposition. Anastasia was one of the most wanted men in New York – Burton Turkus said he had been getting away with murder for thirty years – and his notoriety was bad for the Mafia. On 25 October 1957, Anastasia was lying in a barber’s chair in the basement of the Sheraton Hotel, his eyes closed, when two men walked in and shot him at close range; Anastasia jumped up and fell into a mirror, which shattered as more shots hit him in the back of the head. The men ran out, threw away their pistols, and vanished.