No Guy to Owe
Money to
Although he was small and slight in stature, Thomas Lucchese had a
well-earned reputation as a man of violence. It was estimated by the police that
he was personally involved in at least thirty murders; the number could have
been significantly higher. There is an apocryphal story recounted by Charlie “Lucky”
Luciano, illustrating the violence that may have been inherent in Lucchese’s
makeup.
Charlie Luciano was a major player in the war between Masseria and Maranzano,
and is generally considered to have been the main architect in the creation of
what became the “modernising” of the American Mafia. He and Lucchese had
been friends since boyhood and worked closely together, until Luciano was
imprisoned for offences connected to prostitution in 1936. At one time, Lucchese
had acted as bodyguard and chauffeur to Luciano.
One night in 1934, he was having a late dinner with Lucchese at a restaurant
in New York called Dave’s Blue Room. Into the room walked a well-known
orchestra leader named Dave Rubinoff. He was famous across the country, playing
with his orchestra in nightclubs and theatres, and he also played a violin on
the Eddie Cantor radio show. At some stage earlier, he had apparently borrowed
$10,000 from Lucchese to help purchase a Stradivarius violin, and he still owed
half of this amount. As Luciano commented, “Tommy was no guy to owe money to.”
Although the restaurant was dimly lit, Luciano claimed that when Rubinoff saw
Lucchese, his face turned white with fear. Calling him over to the table,
Lucchese started to heckle and belittle the man, demanding to know when the
outstanding amount was to be paid off. Rubinoff, his heavily Russian accented
voice quavering with fright, begged for more time, claiming to be short of money
at that time.
Lucchese reached out and took hold of Rubinoff’s left hand and began to
massage the knuckles gently. “You got a nice hand there, Ruby,” he said. “It
makes beautiful music. And it makes you a lot of money. Now you don’t what
nothin’ to happen to that hand, do you, Ruby?”
Luciano realised that Lucchese was seriously upset with the musician and
tried to calm things down. “Do you really owe Mr. Lucchese money?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr Luciano, I do.”
“Well ain’t you gonna pay him?”
“I will. I will. The first thing in the morning. Believe me.”
Lucchese insisted that Rubinoff go outside into a back alley behind the
restaurant with him. Luciano then realised that Lucchese was deadly serious and
was going to do some earnest damage to the musician. Not kill him, but perhaps
bust his knuckles on his right hand, not the one that picked the notes on the
violin. Somehow, Luciano cooled things down, insisting that the debt be paid off
by noon the next day.
Lucchese was paid off accordingly with money that was borrowed from Eddie
Cantor. As Luciano explained it, “borrowing money from Eddie Cantor was about
the hardest thing to do around Broadway.”
Less mythical in origin was the information that came from the famous De
Cavalcante tapes. Simone Rizzo (Sam the Plumber) De Cavalcante ran a small but
very effective Mob family in New Jersey. The FBI “bugged” his business
office in Princeton, New Jersey between 1961 and 1965, and hundreds of hours of
tape-recorded conversations revealed a huge amount of information on the
workings of the underworld, over 2,300 pages of evidence.
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Simone De Cavalcante
Credit: NY Daily News.
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In among this huge bonanza of Mafia minutia and hard evidence was information
that gave a chilling picture of the things that went on behind the great stone
walls of an estate in Livingstone, New Jersey. Described, perhaps uncharitably
as Transylvanian Traditional in style, it was the home of Ruggiero Boiardo, a
capo or crew chief in the Genovese crime family. The estate boasted life
size statues of the family patriarch and his children, but more significantly,
the tapes disclosed and described in graphic detail an incinerator for human
bodies situated to the rear of the estate, behind the greenhouse.
One conversation that occurred between Ray De Carlo and Anthony (Little
Pussy) Russo, soldiers in the De Cavalcante family went:
Russo: “Ray I seen too many. You know how many guys we hit that way up
there?”
De Carlo: “What about the big furnace he’s got back there?”
Russo: “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Before you go up there….”
De Carlo: “The big iron grate.”
Russo: “He used to put them on there and burn them.”
They talked about the men they knew who had been disposed of there, and
admitted to dragging one corpse up to the incinerator by a chain looped around
the corpse’s neck. Russo also claimed that not only Boiardo’s own victims
finished up in the oven, but he also sub contracted the furnace to other Mafia
chiefs in the area, including Lucchese.
“He’d give them to me,” said Russo “ and we’d take them up.”
During the Maranzano-Masseria war, Lucchese undoubtedly killed people. In
1925, for example, he shot dead a victim and was indicted for the murder. The
case looked a forgone conclusion, since he had committed the killing in front of
the victim’s mother and wife. But before he was to appear on trial, the two
eyewitnesses recanted their testimony, claiming they could not remember what the
murderer looked like.
In 1928, Lucchese shot Al Cerasula, aided by Scupette Gaudio and Joe
Palisades. Although the victim on his deathbed identified his killers to his
wife, nothing came of it. In 1930, the same scenario played out, with an
eyewitness suddenly developing myopia and memory retrogression.
Again, in 1932, Lucchese was implicated in the murder of one “Philly Rags,”
whose dead body was found floating in the Harlem River. He had been a collector
working slot machines owned by Lucchese and Frank Costello, and had been found
dipping into the pot. Not surprisingly, although questioned about this death,
Lucchese walked away again. There was no real mystery to this. Lucchese had
developed a reputation as a stone killer, and in a period when there was no
Witness Protection Program in place to protect them, people were not willing to
risk their own lives to testify against him.
