History and Myths of Organized Crime

In or around 1935, Salvatore Lucania, alias Charlie Luciano, was considered as “the head of the underworld in New York City.”1 He held court at the Waldorf Towers Hotel and, together with his associates from Chicago and other big cities, he monitored his empire, invested his earnings, and raked in considerable wealth from his bootlegging activities. He was very well connected politically thanks to Albert C. Marinelli, a Tammany boss. His name was touted by the New York Times’s Meyer Berger, who included him among the six top “modern racketeers” in the city—here modernity corresponds to the post-Prohibition era. Berger did not view the six bosses as ethnics, though most of them were Jewish and some were Italian. According to him, they had all withdrawn from the firing line and had become businessmen, or at least were “anxious to have the world think of them not as racketeers but as real business men”; as such, they could only be considered American.