BOOK REVIEW Published March 2, 2010 by Robert Miller Enigma Books |
Ted Morgan |
The Real and the Fake Gangster
Lucky Luciano By Tim Newark St. Martin’s Press 2010 978-0-312-60182-9 $26.99 |
The Mafia once again, but this time with some solid research and many corrective insights that neither glorify and glamorize the violence that is an integral part of its existence nor the harm it imparts on the societies it comes to dominate. Tim Newark gives us an excellent Lucky Luciano. with a wide-angle view of the gangster’s life and misdeeds based upon solid research and a critical examination of what has been written about him so far. From the rough beginnings in what is now Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan, similar to those of millions of Italian immigrants to the United States at the turn of the preceding century, Salvatore Lucania becomes Charles “Lucky” Luciano after the First World War. We learn from Newark that ‘Charley Lucky’ would suffer from venereal disease all his life while in his memoir he states that he contracted it on purpose to avoid the draft. The exact nature of the disease remains unclear but we may assume it was gonorrhea. Just one of many examples of embellishing the truth that Luciano slipped into his memoir. On the purely criminal side Luciano’s great ability was to understand early on that crime had be organized in order for it to thrive and break the tight mold of the Sicilian and Italian immigrant community. He therefore associated with many non-Italian mainly Jewish associates such as Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel as well as the traditional Sicilian and Neapolitan mobsters like Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasia. But there are startling revelations as well: Luciano’s secret trip to Germany with Jack “Legs” Diamond in the early 1930s to set up a drug smuggling operation tend to prove that he was indeed deeply involved in narcotics long before it became so pervasive among the Mafia. |
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