Boardwalk Gangster by Tim Newark

sister, called Fanny, had married a plumber and moved to White Plains. Bart Lucania lived in Brooklyn and was the secretary and treasurer of the Associated Master Barber’s Chapter 629. In early 1935, Luciano’s mother became seriously ill and left the building, dying in the hospital. His father then quit the building in September of that year, owing two months’ rent, to live with his daughter in White Plains.
    Generally, Luciano lived the life of a man about town, calling on a variety of girlfriends, some coming from the brothels he was connected with. He never got married and never seems to have yearned for that kind of intimacy or long-term friendship with a woman—certainly not when he was young. He never expressed the wish for a family and acknowledged no children. He loved straight sex with young women, but sometimes he was slowed down by venereal disease that reoccurred throughout his life.
    For such a wealthy and powerful man, rubbing shoulders with politicians, businessmen, and show business stars, Luciano sometimes chased after high-profile women, but, generally, he didn’t like to be outshone by his girlfriends. One woman closely associated with Luciano was Gay Orlova—the stage name of a twenty-year-old chorus girl in a Broadway show. Luciano, reputedly, fell head over heels for her. Born in Russia, she had left with her family during the revolution. Luciano met her in 1934 after she performed in a show at the Palm Island Casino in
Florida. He was staying with Al Capone’s brother, Ralph, in his mansion. After that first meeting, they were smitten with each other and seen around town together. Lee Mortimer, a gossip columnist, asked her what she saw in Luciano.
    “How can you go for that gorilla?” he said.
    “I love Charlie because he is so sinister,” she replied.
     
     
    For Charles Luciano, being a gangster was all about business and making money. The raw adrenaline of robbing, fighting, and killing had energized him in his teens and twenties, but by the time he hit thirty he had a more sober approach to criminality. With his like-minded associates, Lansky and Costello, he adopted the persona of a businessman. A businessman who used the ultimate persuasion of personal injury and murder to get what he wanted, but a businessman nevertheless, more interested in managing his commercial interests than in running around the streets shooting people. As Joe Profaci, head of one of the five Mafia families, was heard to say one day: “We were just interested in business, and going legit someday so our kids wouldn’t have the gangster curse. We didn’t really care who was boss.”
    Luciano was always happy to take tips on management techniques from those with more experience. Johnny Torrio, who had retired from the underworld in Chicago, handing it over to Al Capone, was living in New York and gave advice to Luciano over games of cards at the Barbizon-Plaza. It was his idea of a national convention to settle points of conflict between the leading gangs. Luciano had attended such a gathering in May 1929 in Atlantic City—one of the first of several sit-downs where criminal bosses tried to bring a more businesslike tone to their activities.
    All the leading gangsters agreed to work together to ensure they didn’t compete with each other and thus lower the price of illicit booze. Most important, Al Capone attended the meeting.
Calling it a “peace conference,” he accepted the need to reduce his incessant killings in Chicago after his headlining St. Valentine’s Day Massacre three months earlier. As a result of the meeting, Capone handed himself over to a friendly policeman so he could serve a brief ten-month period in jail for possession of a gun in order to allow other cooler heads to run his business empire more efficiently. Typically, neither Maranzano nor Masseria attended this conference because they would not sit down with Jewish gangsters on an equal footing.
    With the killings of Masseria and