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Lot 130
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"Lucky" Luciano TLS to New York Post's Leonard Lyons, re: organized crime and criminal trial
"Lucky" Luciano TLS to New York Post's Leonard Lyons, re: organized crime and criminal trial
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Description:

Luciano Charles "Lucky"

Single page TLS, 8.5" x 11" on tissue stock. Dated "Naples, Italy 22/11/55", and signed by Luciano in blue ink as "C. Luciano". Accompanied by the international blue mailing envelope postmarked from Italy, to "Mr Leonard Lyons / New York Post / New York City, N.Y. / United States /America". Light toning with trivial nicks to the very outer edges, else fine. Envelope neatly opened and beautifully intact. Accompanied by a signed letter from Douglas Lyons, the son of Leonard Lyons, recipient of the letter, noting Luciano's letter remained in his family's possession.

This revealing letter by Luciano, who at the time of his letter had been released from prison and deported to Italy, shows him lamenting on his incarceration. The conviction of which lay on the delicate balance of the "Bendix" story during his trial in 1936. The complexity of Lucky's fall from grace was as convoluted as his rise to mob king. Lucky Luciano's strategic rise in the mob world ultimately gave him the nick name of “the man who organized crime in America.” He first coldly calculated the extinction of the two crime lords Masseria and Maranzano. (His colorful execution of Masseria became infamous as he had invited Masseria and two other associates to lunch in a Coney Island restaurant, upon which after lunch the mobsters decided to play cards - while Luciano conveniently leaves for the bathroom. In this well executed moment four gunman walked in and proceeded to shoot and kill Masseria and his two gunman in a bloody shootout.)

With his competition gone, Lucky now stood to assume leadership of New York’s Five Families. Except that Lucky, who’d chafed under the imperious rule of the old-world “Mustache Petes,” had a better idea. He proposed creating a national crime commission - a governing board of top mobsters that would vote on matters of mutual interest and concern. Yes, it was Luciano that turned THE Mob into a modern democracy, an organization based on a cooperative, democratic and multi-ethnic model of underworld governance that would cement the mob’s social and political influence. Now, still in his mid-30s, Lucky lived like the successful executive he was, presiding over the commission’s affairs from his suite at the Waldorf Towers or his private box at Saratoga Race Course. Even the end of Prohibition failed to cramp Lucky’s style because he and his Broadway Mob had already diversified into gambling, drugs, industrial racketeering and dozens of other illicit ventures - all operating under the protection of New York’s Tammany Hall political machine. Despite his new wealth and status, Lucky was careful to maintain a low public profile while letting gangsters such as Al Capone and Dutch Schultz grab the headlines and attract the unwanted attention of law enforcement. Some events, however, proved beyond even Lucky’s control, and one of them - the Great Depression - wrought a sea change in New York politics, leading eventually to Dewey’s appointment as special prosecutor.

The Bendix story ends with Luciano's incarceration, but it began with the trial of People v. Luciano on May 11, 1936, and lasted nearly a month. The circus like trial had Policemen with machine guns and tear gas canisters guarding the corridors of the Centre Street courthouse, while snipers perched on the adjoining rooftops. In all, 68 witnesses testified for the prosecution: a Runyonesque cast of pimps and hookers, cops and hoodlums whose lurid tales of vandalized houses and beaten madams left little doubt as to the guilt of Luciano’s 12 co-defendants. By the trial’s midpoint, however, only one witness, Joe Bendix, had been willing to take the stand against Luciano, and that witness had blown up in Dewey’s face. Bendix was a serial hotel thief who, after his eighth burglary conviction, was about to begin a prison sentence of 15 years to life. Bendix claimed to have known Luciano for more than seven years, having first been introduced to him by a man named Captain Dutton, and to have been personally hired by Lucky as a collector for the bonding combination - a job he admits he never performed. But Bendix was shredded by Levy on cross-examination, then impeached in myriad ways by subsequent witnesses and events.

After three impeachments of the witness the prosecution's case began to flounder 1)The first impeachment came from Captain George Paul Dutton, who testified that he’d never met Bendix in his life, but that he did know Bendix’s third wife, a showgirl named Joy Dixon, which might explain why Bendix had invoked his name. 2)The second impeachment came from Dixon herself, whom Bendix claimed had been present at the Villanova Restaurant for his job interview with Luciano. Dixon not only denied having attended any such meeting but proved by her own passport that she’d been out of the country at the time. 3)The final nail in the testimonial coffin of Joe Bendix came when a letter he’d written to Dixon from the Tombs prison was mistakenly delivered to the office of Morris Panger, the assistant district attorney with whom Bendix was also negotiating for clemency. In that letter, Bendix stressed the importance of gaining Dewey’s cooperation and urged his wife to “think up some real clever story” to tell the prosecution. Worse yet for Dewey, it was shown that he’d had the Bendix letter in his possession for over a week before Panger brought it to the attention of the defense.

Now the prosecutor desperately needed an eyewitness willing to place Lucky in the company of his alleged co-conspirators. He found that witness during the trial’s second week when Cokey Flo Brown, the former grifter who’d jumped bail on a previous drug arrest and was awaiting sentence on her solicitation conviction, penned a letter to the prosecution from her cell in the Women’s House of Detention.

Cokey Flo took the stand on May 21, a week after completing her five-day heroin reduction cure. So frail was her condition that McCook allowed her sips of brandy during breaks in her testimony, in which she described five different meetings she claimed to have attended with Luciano. After nine grueling hours of cross-examination failed to shake her story, Dewey at last had the testimony he’d so badly needed. Two additional prostitutes, Nancy Presser and Mildred Harris, both also heroin addicts, would ultimately testify against Luciano. Presser claimed to have visited Lucky professionally at both the Barbizon-Plaza and the Waldorf, but she was eviscerated by Levy on cross-examination when she was unable to describe Lucky’s hotel rooms - even, for example, whether they had twin or double beds. Harris was impeached by a former boyfriend to whom she’d allegedly admitted that she “didn’t know Lucky from beans” and when an immunity letter she’d denied receiving from the special prosecutor later turned up in evidence.

The nail in the coffin was unintentionally hammered in by Luciano himself, when Lucky fearing there was enough testimony in the record to support a conviction, ignored his own attorney's advice and insisted on taking the stand in his own defense! The dramatic head-to-head clash between special prosecutor, Dewy, and Mafia overlord occurred on June 2, 1936, and before it was over Dewey established, over Levy's strenuous objections (Luciano's attorney), that Lucky had been a gunman, a dope peddler, a perjurer and a tax cheat whose telephone records evidenced friendships with multiple notorious gangsters. What Dewey failed to demonstrate, however, was any direct connection between Lucky and the prostitution bonding combination that was the actual subject of the prosecution.

The jury returned its verdict in the wee hours of Sunday morning, June 7, to a courtroom packed with reporters as more than a thousand Luciano supporters held a candlelight vigil in nearby Columbus Park. A straw poll of newsmen who’d covered the trial came out 13 to 1 for acquittal. The jury, however, felt otherwise; and by the time the entire verdict was read, the word guilty had been pronounced 558 times. Eleven days later, McCook sentenced Luciano to serve 30 to 50 years in state prison, ending - or so he thought - the criminal reign of the man newspapers were now calling Charlie Not-So-Lucky.

It was no wonder that 20 years later, in this TLS, Luciano was still ruminating about his unorthodox demise as shown in part below:

"The present Bendix story after twenty years silence may in some way recompense the serious injustice done me all these years…What concerns me at present if the continuous persecution … by way of dubious testimony before the Senate and House of Representatives investigation committees … The ironical view of these hearings, is that they are all one sided. The accused being thousands of miles from the United States … I hope it will not take another twenty years to find out the true reasons behind the present accusations and persecutions …"

As for Lucky Luciano, the final chapter of his life remained to be written. America’s entry into World War II made the safety and efficiency of the Atlantic waterfront a national priority, and inmate "Lucky" No. 24806 of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora still controlled the New York docks. For Luciano's role in assisting the U.S. war effort, Lucky received a pardon from then-Gov. Dewey after serving only 10 years of his sentence. Deported to Italy as part of the deal, he would briefly reside in Havana, Cuba, from which he - along with boyhood chums Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky - would finance construction of the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

Charlie Luciano died of natural causes in Naples, Italy, on Jan. 26, 1962. Only in death was he finally allowed to return to New York, where his body is interred at St. John Cemetery in Queens, in a family vault labeled Lucania.

A phenomenally scarce and revealing letter, the best ever offered, by this Mob legend, who shows yet 20 years later he still reflects on his fall from his "untouchable" status.

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