Charles "Lucky" Luciano

Salvatore Lucania was born in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, in 1897 and brought to Manhattan's Lower East Side at nine. He was arrested for the first time at eighteen, for selling heroin, and served six months. By his late twenties he was running one of the largest bootlegging operations in New York under Joe Masseria.

Ending the war

The Castellammarese War of 1930 and 1931 set Masseria against Salvatore Maranzano and cost several dozen lives. Luciano's contribution to ending it was to arrange the removal of both men — Masseria in April 1931, Maranzano in September of the same year.

Maranzano had spent his brief victory declaring himself boss of bosses. Luciano declined the title and proposed something more durable in its place: a commission of the family heads, meeting as equals, to settle disputes and approve killings. It is the single most consequential structural change in the history of American organised crime, and it outlasted everyone who agreed to it.

Conviction and exile

In 1936 the special prosecutor Thomas Dewey convicted Luciano on sixty-two counts of compulsory prostitution. He received thirty to fifty years. The evidence rested heavily on the testimony of women working in the brothels, and the conviction has been argued over since.

During the war the navy sought his help in securing the New York waterfront against sabotage, and his cooperation was later cited when his sentence was commuted in 1946 on condition of deportation. He spent his remaining years in Italy, largely in Naples, and died there of a heart attack in January 1962.