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Salvatore Luciana, the son of Antonio and Rosalie Luciana, came with his family to New York from Lercara Friddi, Italy in 106. Meyer Lansky was a Jewish boy, born in Poland. Lansky and his family immigrated to New York in 111. Both of these young boys grew up to be infamous mobsters who were two of the top leaders of organized crime in New York.
There were two social causes in particular that helped to create Sicilian and Jewish mobsters in the early 100s. The first is the discrimination of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were extremely poor and many could not speak or write English. The mobsters (in this essay) were drawn into crime because of the poor conditions in which they lived, their desperation for acceptance from society and their exposure to crime. The second is the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Prohibition, a law that inadvertently financed criminals.
When Sicilian immigrants first came to America, they migrated to poor areas where there were many Italians. These Italians were at the bottom of society, lived in poverty and were victims of discrimination. Many of them were hard working citizens who ran their own businesses or worked as manual labourers in construction. The children of these immigrants spoke English but were still discriminated against by non-Italians. Of those children, those who might have been the brightest and most ambitious looked to where the money was. They were drawn into existing gangs. As stated in The Valachi Papers, "Italians did not invent organized crime…when the first wave of Italians arrived…they found a flourishing underworld then primarily in the hands of the Irish and Jews" (Maas 60). These Italian immigrants came into New York as a minority and saw that many people had become wealthy from crime and some decided that they would do what it takes to make money too. They formed a society within society with its own leaders.
Joseph Valachi, an Italian born in 104 in Manhattan, was so poverty stricken that his family's apartment had no heat and no bath. He remembers that his father had to pay a dollar a week to the mob for protection of his pushcart (Maas 6). America was a democracy, there were wealthy people as well as poor people and the "have nots" could see what the wealthy had. Seeing this was like a taste of wealth to the Italian youth, many of whom were drawn to the lifestyle they saw. It is a characteristic of many people to want money and power, and those who were ambitious enough became a part of organized crime.
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Luciana's family was very poor and lived in the Lower East Side of New York. He was socializing with Italian gangs and learning to steal from pushcarts before he was in his teens. (Nash 51) He was arrested at age 15 for selling drugs. Luciana was working for a member of the Five Points Gang as a messenger. After being offered a deal by police, Luciana refused to name the man for whom he worked and served a year in prison. When released, he was made a member of the Five Points Gang for maintaining the code of silence. Salvatore Luciana changed his name to Charles Luciano to avoid disgracing his family name.
Lansky's family was living in poverty and could rarely afford more than a few vegetables and potatoes for dinner. It was when his mother sent him to the bakery on Friday afternoons that Lansky saw other boys gambling on the sidewalks; gambling came to be Lansky's first love. Lansky became involved in gangs perhaps because he felt there was no other way to live; perhaps it was because there were gangs all around for him to see. He felt that he had to defend himself because of the extreme oppression he faced and continued to face. When he was a young boy, Irish gang members would tease him and his friends for being Jewish. The Irish boys would make them take down their pants on the street to see if the Jewish boys were circumcised. Many of the police officers who worked in Lansky's neighbourhood were Irish and often took the side of the Irish boys, despite the fact they were known hoodlums (Eisenberg 47). Police officers were discriminating against the Jewish. Lansky felt resentment and sought revenge through gaining power. He was small and often the older boys would pick on him. That could have been a large contributor to him being so brave and defiant.
Charles "Lucky" Luciano met Meyer Lansky when they were both in their teens, Lansky being about 5 years younger. At the time, Lucky was making his money by offering protection to the Jewish boys, promising that for five cents a week no one would beat them up or tear up their school books. When Lucky offered his services to Lansky, Luciano was turned down on "no uncertain terms" (Gribben). Luciano was impressed by Lansky's defiant behaviour and took an immediate liking to him.
On January 17, 10 Prohibition banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol from society. Criminal elements, such as Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein and Guiseppe "The Boss" Masseria, saw that prohibition was a gold mine. Rothstein and Masseria organized many distilleries in the homes of several inhabitants of New York. Prohibition attracted people who were inclined to compromise their values to the money. It was not long before gangs were bootlegging alcohol and speakeasies were formed. The mob made a substantial profit from illegal alcohol. Prohibition opened up a huge opportunity for money to be made and mobsters jumped at the chance for increased wealth and power. People wanted liquor and the mob had the means to make it available. Prohibition did not cause men to become mobsters; however, it funded the existing mobsters and made many of them wealthy men.
Rothstein never liked to get his hands dirty and was looking for partners who were tough enough to survive in the world of bootlegging. For this, he turned to Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, knowing that they were rising in the ranks of the mafia. Rothstein, Luciano and Lansky came up with a distribution method that made them all wealthy men. Lansky said, "I admit quite frankly that I made a fortune from bootlegging. Everybody I knew treated Prohibition with contempt. The most important people in the country respectable businessmen, politicians, senators, congressmen they all bought illegal booze from me or from other men in the business" (Eisenberg 7).
Before Prohibition, there had been approximately 15,000 saloons in New York, and after the law had passed the demand for liquor increased. Roughly ,000 unlicensed bars opened in New York after Prohibition. In the United States, the consumption of liquor increased by 600 percent (Taylor 11). In The Century, it was written that "Prohibition had made alcohol even more enticing, by adding a flavour of criminality to even the most casual cocktail" (Jennings 11). That law provided an opportunity for criminals to make vast amounts of money from bootlegging liquor. Mobsters were paying off law enforcements to turn a blind eye to the illegal transportation of liquor from Canada to the U.S. Prohibition made men of the law into criminals and real criminals into heroes (Jennings 11). This law gave existing criminals the financial means to expand their businesses into brothels, gambling dens and other such illegal practices.
Having grown up in poverty and as ambitious as they were, it is no wonder how Salvatore Luciana became the infamous mobster Charles "Lucky" Luciano, and Maier Suchowljansky became the infamous mobster Meyer Lansky, now known as the most sinister, cunning and dominant mobsters in the early twentieth century. There were many factors, such as poverty, discrimination and the desire for easy money and power, which pulled Luciano and Lansky into a life of crime.
Works Cited
Eisenberg, Dennis, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau. Meyer Lansky, Mogul of the Mob.
United States Paddington Press Ltd., 17
Gribben, Mark. "The Mythical Meyer". Meyer Lansky Mastermind of the Mob.
Online posting. Courtroom Television Network LLC, 00. www.crimelibrary.com
Jennings, Peter and Todd Brewster. The Century. New York Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc., 18
Maas, Peter. The Valachi Papers. Toronto Longmans Canada Limited, 168
Nash, Jay Robert. World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime. New York Da Capo
Press, 1
Taylor, A. J. P., J. M. Roberts, and Alan Bullock. 0th Century. United States Purnell
Reference Books, 17
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