Free Boardwalk Gangster by Tim Newark

around his security.
    When Lansky visited the battered Luciano, it was the opportunity to dub him with his famous nickname. “From now on we’re going to call you ‘Lucky,’” said Lansky, “because you ought to be dead.”
    In the light of seeing the actual court transcript of Luciano’s statement just two weeks after the ride, this all now seems nonsense. Luciano was already known as Lucky and was happy to use the name, unlike other accounts, which claimed that no one dared used it in his presence. In fact, a New York Times article described him as “Charles (Lucky) Luciania” in their report just the day after the event.
    The more fanciful story of torture by Maranzano also unravels as other mobsters who knew Luciano closely told a different tale in later years. First, there is the obvious flaw that a beating delivered by Maranzano’s men to a mobster with a reputation like Luciano would achieve the very opposite of what they wanted—it would turn Luciano into Maranzano’s undying enemy. In which case, once the humiliation had been inflicted, it would have been better to finish him off, as the Sicilian would get his revenge one way or another—and Maranzano, being of the old school, would have known that very well.
    It was Luciano’s longtime associate Frank Costello who gave the most convincing inside account of that night to his attorney. He said that Luciano was picked up by several men in the back of a car and driven to Staten Island. They were not
mobsters but cops. Costello said they wanted Luciano to tell them where Jack “Legs” Diamond was because he had disappeared after committing a murder in his Hotsy Totsy Club.
    Luciano wouldn’t tell the police and he was punished with a beating that consisted of his head being stomped on and boots ground into his face. According to Costello, there was no knife slashing or use of ice picks or hanging from rafters. It was a police interrogation with force. The irony of the situation was not lost on Costello, who said that Luciano “almost got himself killed on Staten Island just to protect a jerk he didn’t even like.” That isn’t exactly true, as Luciano liked Diamond enough to let him stay at his house in the country, often when he was on the run.
    Costello’s version is backed up by Sal Vizzini, an undercover narcotics agent who talked to Luciano about the incident in 1960. Fifteen years before Luciano’s so-called memoirs appeared, Vizzini said that Luciano told him that he was picked up outside his house by plainclothes police. He was pushed down on the backseat of the car and tape was stuck over his eyes and mouth. Luciano believed he was on a car ferry to New Jersey and kicked out the side windows of the car to attract attention, but no one responded, except one of the cops in the car who worked him over.
    “One of them was pounding me in the face,” recalled Luciano. “He must have had on a big ring or something because he busted my lip under the tape and cut my chin open and ripped my throat. I could feel blood all over me and I kinda passed out.”
    That was how he got his scars. After the ferry trip, the car stopped and Luciano was pushed out onto some rough ground. The police ripped the tape off his mouth and one of them held a gun against his head.
    “The guy who did all the talkin’ says I better tell now where they can find Legs [Diamond] or they’re gonna blow my damned
brains out. I tell him he’d better get to it then because I got no goddamned idea where he is.”
    Knowing the men weren’t mobsters, Luciano gambled they weren’t going to kill him. He said nothing and the police tired of the beating, leaving him in the muddy field. As he staggered away from the field, he was picked up by the local police and ended up in hospital surrounded by reporters. “The upshot is that the papers had all the garbage about how lucky I was to get away,” Luciano told Vizzini. “I guess that’s how it got to be Lucky Luciano. I still