In this true crime classic, out of print since 1981, Lucky Luciano remains a mythical underworld figure.

Charley "Lucky" Luciano was instrumental to the development of the American Mafia and supervised the attempt to dominate prostitution in New York City. Not surprisingly, he has been the subject of numerous biographies, exposes, and various works of urban folklore since his death in 1962. This book takes scholarship on Luciano to a new level, using fresh research on the investigation, arrest, and conviction of Lucky Luciano to delve deep into the sexual and criminal underworld of New York City. Topics include the complex structure of the New York City bordellos and the takeover that resulted in Luciano's 1936 arrest; his considerable role in the expansion of the international heroin trade; and the shocking attempt to sexually frame a member of prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey's staff in a desperate bid to overturn Luciano's conviction.

He was called the Father of Organized Crime. Lucky Luciano was born in Sicily and reared in poverty he arrived with his family on New York's Lower East Side. He was responsible for the infamous Atlantic City gathering of the nation's top mobsters that included Al Capone, and he structured the 'Cosa Nostra'. This book is written by a top investigative reporter who followed Luciano's trial from its inception to the jury verdict. It is also an incisive portrait of then prosecuting attorney Thomas E. Dewey whose tireless efforts resulted in conviction.

CHARLES “LUCKY” LUCIANO was an Organization Man with a difference. The organization he belonged to was The Mafia—a natural setup for a vicious thug with unlimited ambition and a heart of ice. Murder by murder, rape by rape, he established the biggest chair of brothels ever seen in New York. Everything—everyone—he touched turned rotten. He knew he had it made when he had more cops on his payroll prostitutes. Pal of Al Capone, Frank Costello Buggsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Lucky became the absolute ruler of a private empire built on vice, corruption and murder. This is the Lucky Luciano story—brutal, shocking, with nothing left out.

For the first twenty-five years of his career, Lucky Luciano was a vicious mobster who became the king of the New York underworld. For the next twenty-five, he was a fake, his reputation maintained by government agents. Boardwalk Gangster follows him from his early days as a hit man to his sex and narcotics empires, exposing the truth about what he did to help the Allies in World War II, and revealing how he really spent his twilight years. Drawing on secret government documents in the United States and Europe, this myth-busting biography tells a story that has never been told before—in which the American Mafia becomes entangled with foreign war and Cold War conspiracy.

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano was a vicious mobster who rose to become the king of the New York underworld. He was a legend - but also a fake master criminal manipulated by the federal agents who had put him behind bars. This myth-busting biography tells Luciano's real story, from his early days as a top hit man to his exploits running sex and narcotics empires and revelations about his trip to Nazi Germany to set up a drugs racket. Through painstaking research, Newark exposes the truth about what Luciano really did during the war and reveals the gangster's role as a Cold War agent, helping the US government fight Communism in Sicily. Lucky Luciano: Mafia Murderer and Secret Agentturns accepted Mafia history on its head with an extraordinary story that has never been told before.

The year is 1936. Charles "Lucky" Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor hired to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown--grifter, heroin addict, and sometimes prostitute--is the witness who claims she can do it. Only a wily defense attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, between Dewey and the New York governor's mansion. As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom, introducing America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organized crime and leaving our culture, laws, and politics forever changed. Based on a trove of newly discovered documents, Tom & Lucky (and George & Cokey Flo) tells the true story of a singular trial in American history: an epic clash between a crime-busting district attorney and an all-powerful mob boss who, in the crucible of a Manhattan courtroom, battle for the heart and soul of a dispirited nation. Blending elements of political thriller, courtroom drama, and hard-boiled pulp, author C. Joseph Greaves introduces readers to the likes of Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel while taking readers behind the scenes of a corrupt criminal justice system in which sinners may be saints and heroes may prove to be the biggest villains of all.

With information culled from rare news articles, government documents and numerous books written on the subject, this book will give readers a chance to discover Lucky Luciano in a way that engages the mystery of his pop culture status, while encouraging further debate over the facts that fallacies that exist about his true role in the history of the American mafia structure.

Lucky Luciano's posthumous memoirs may well have cost him his life. The partner of Meyer Lanksy and Bugsy Siegel, the man who created and controlled the "Commission" and the set down the rules, wanted to have his side of the story on record. It turns out that most of Luciano's criminal activity coincides with the history of the Mafia in America in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. In preparation for a film of his life story, the famous New York gangster living in a golden exile in Naples recounted the main incidents of his life to producer Martin A. Gosch. Back in the United States, the new leaders of the Mafia were not pleased about the project that had almost reached completion and was ready to be turned into a screenplay. It is almost certain that their displeasure was communicated to "Charlie Lucky" with a hint to forget about the idea altogether. But Luciano went ahead anyway, compelled by the need to tell all and in some way offer an explanation about a life of crime. After taking a sip of espresso coffee at Naples airport as he waited for Gosch to land, Luciano died of a massive heart attack. Or was it something else' The film was never made, so this book remains the only account of the life of the man known as the "Boss of Bosses." Martin A. Gosch is deceased, and Richard Hammer lives in New York City.

The bestselling author delves into his past and discovers the inspiring story of his grandmother’s extraordinary life She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s—and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male. Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s, her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who—together with his friend Dashiell Hammett—would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed. Moving, haunting, and as fast-paced as a novel, Invisible tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson’s remarkable book, her long forgotten story is once again visible.