How Prosecutors Brought Down Lucky Luciano
| Publication year | 2016 |
| Author | By C. Joseph Greaves |
By C. Joseph Greaves**
Photo Illustration by Brenan Sharp and Stephen Webster
The telephone rang at midnight, jolting Samuel Kornbluth from an already-troubled sleep. Maurice Cantor began by apologizing for the unseemly hour. A lawyer best known for his representation of the late Arnold Rothstein, Cantor wanted to know whether Kornbluth was still acting as counsel for Dorothy Russell Calvit, the daughter of stage legend Lillian Russell. Yes, Kornbluth replied—was there something the matter with Dorothy? Nothing of the sort, Cantor assured him. But he had with him a colleague who would very much like to speak with Calvit's lawyer. May he put George Morton Levy on the line?
Now Kornbluth was wide awake. Levy, he knew, was in the midst of defending alleged mob boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano in that sensational vice case brought by the crime-busting special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey. But what could Levy possibly want from him and, more importantly, from Dorothy Calvit?
Criminal defense attorney George Morton Levy. Getty Images.
"'Cokey Flo' Brown," Levy explained, although the name meant nothing to Kornbluth. She was a heroin addict and a former madam and an inmate in the Women's House of Detention awaiting sentence on a prostitution charge. She was also a Dewey witness who'd earlier that day taken the stand and given damaging testimony about a series of supposed meetings between Luciano and his co-defendants David Betillo, Thomas "the Bull" Pennochio and James Frederico—the alleged purveyors of a citywide prostitution racket. Cokey Flo, Levy told Kornbluth, had worked for and lived with Calvit until her arrest two weeks earlier, on May 8, 1936.
Luciano insisted Cokey Flo was a liar. Would Kornbluth be willing to meet with Cantor at the Waldorf-Astoria and then, once briefed on the particulars, pay a visit to Calvit? Tonight, before court reconvened on Saturday morning? Of course, Levy assured him, he'd be compensated for his time.
They agreed on a fee of $100.
Thomas E. Dewey had himself received, just one year earlier, an equally portentous telephone call, from New York Gov. Herbert H. Lehman.
Since the heyday of Prohibition, labor and industrial racketeers had been siphoning an estimated half-billion dollars annually from a New York economy now crippled by the Great Depression. Corrupt or ineffectual Tammany Hall leaders like Mayor Jimmy Walker and District Attorney Thomas Crain had become targets for good-government reformers like Samuel Seabury and Fiorello La Guardia, and Lehman had bent to the reformist tailwinds by calling an extraordinary term of the New York Supreme Court to tackle the twin scourges of organized crime and public corruption in New York County.
Herbert H. Lehman. Getty Images.
To head off accusations of a whitewash, Democrat Lehman had appointed Philip J. McCook, a crusty Republican jurist and close confidant of La Guardia's, to preside over the special session. Now Lehman needed a vigorous courtroom advocate—and preferably a Republican—to act as his special prosecutor.
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Would Dewey, age 34, the mustachioed "baby prosecutor" who'd once garnered headlines by convicting bootlegger Irving "Waxey Gordon" Wexler of income tax fraud, answer the call?
The only child of a fiercely partisan Michigan newspaper editor who'd announced his son's birth by reporting that a "10-pound Republican voter was born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Dewey," Tom Dewey attended both the University of Michigan and Columbia Law School, graduating from the latter in 1925. He became an assistant U.S. attorney in 1931 and, upon his mentor George Z. Medalie's resignation in November of 1933, the youngest acting United States attorney in the history of the Southern District of New York.
Judge Philip McCook swears Dewey in as special prosecutor in 1935. AP Photo.
Dewey's appointment by Gov. Lehman as special prosecutor in June of 1935 represented a welcome return to the public eye for a restless Wall Street lawyer intent on fulfilling his father's ambition by launching a career in Republican politics. But for Dewey and his hand-picked score of assistant district attorneys, the pressure to deliver results was immediate, and the veil of secrecy that seemed to enshroud Lucky Luciano was doubly frustrating. So when rumors swirled that a new "downtown bonding combination," spearheaded by Betillo and Pennochio, was seeking to organize the previously freelance world of New York prostitution, Dewey sprang into action.
On Feb. 1, 1936, at precisely 9 o'clock on a Saturday evening, 160 uniformed officers descended on 80 known disorderly houses in New York City, arresting 87 prostitutes and madams. Then on April 1, New York detectives were dispatched to the mob playground of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and arrested a vacationing Luciano, igniting a pitched extradition battle that culminated in a raid on the Hot Springs jailhouse by 20 Arkansas state troopers. By the time the smoke cleared on April 19, Luciano was back in Manhattan, where his bail was set by McCook at a whopping $350,000—$6 million in today's dollars—the highest in New York history.
All that remained now was for Dewey to prove his extraordinary claim that Luciano, the richest and most powerful gangster in America, was skimming nickels off of two-dollar prostitutes.
Dewey, the youngest U.S. attorney in the Southern District, was once dubbed the "baby prosecutor." AP Photo.
George Morton Levy had also received a telephone call—this on a Friday afternoon in May of 1936 from Moses Polakoff, Luciano's longtime attorney. Would Levy be willing to defend the alleged mob kingpin known as Charlie Lucky against 90 counts of compulsory prostitution?
"How much time would I have to prepare?" Levy asked, to which...
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