Boardwalk Gangster by Tim Newark

Author:Tim Newark
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano has long been criticized as more invention than truth, and many of its stories, supposedly from the mouth of Luciano, do not fit in with the facts that we know. But sometimes contained within its pages are nuggets of information that make one wonder where the authors got them from, if not from the gangster chief. The book was first published in 1975, four years before the appearance of Meyer Lansky’s memoir and two years before the secret government report on the whole wartime affair was widely publicized in Rodney Campbell’s The Luciano Project.

The Last Testament claims that Luciano himself devised Operation Underworld in December 1941. He pitched the plan to Lansky and Frank Costello. Costello said they had contacts at the Third District headquarters of Naval Intelligence at 50 Church Street and would pursue it. Luciano waited more than a month but got no positive response. He had suggested to Costello that what they needed was a front-page act of sabotage to underline the need for his help. With this in mind, one of his top hit men, Albert Anastasia, came to him with own plan. He said he’d been watching the Naval Intelligence agents on the waterfront, worrying about security, and thought that if something big happened, it would tip them over the edge into doing a deal with anyone.

“Albert figures that if something could happen to the Normandie,” says Luciano in The Last Testament, “that would really make everyone crap in their pants. It was a great idea and I didn’t figure it was really gonna hurt the war effort because the ship was nowhere near ready and, besides, no American soldiers or sailors would be involved because they wasn’t sendin’ ’em no place yet. So I sent back word to Albert to handle it. A couple of days later, I hear on the radio where the Normandie was on fire and it didn’t look like they could save her. That goddamn Anastasia—he really done a job.”

It is an incredible claim and would invite derision but for the fact that Meyer Lansky later corroborated the story in his more respected memoirs. He says that after talking to Haffenden, who was still shaken by the Normandie incident, he guaranteed there would be more incidents of sabotage on the waterfront. He passed this on to Frank Costello.

“The message went to Albert Anastasia too,” recalls Lansky, “and I told him face to face that he mustn’t burn any more ships. He was sorry—not sorry he’d had the Normandie burned but sorry that he couldn’t get at the Navy again. Apparently he had learned in the army to hate the Navy. ‘Stuck-up bastards’ he called them.”

This certainly backs up Luciano’s story, and Lansky’s memoirs are generally regarded as coming from the mouth of the man himself. However, the reference to Anastasia’s hatred of the navy comes straight from The Last Testament and there is no other information in the Lansky book to elaborate on the tale first related by Luciano.

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