One prediction I made after 9-11 was that open warfare would break out in United States prisons between Muslims on the one hand and White Supremacist, Mexican criminal organizations and the Mafia as the overall shot caller. It has not happened.Minnesota-man-sentenced-in-mall-stabbings.
SS NormandieI thought that pseudo patriotism would be the excuse to establish overall control o the prison population. A savvy player could manipulate the situation to his advantage. It has happened before. In case you haven’t heard it, here is the story of the SS Normandie. The Normandie was modern French passenger liner, currently in port in New York City. It was being converted to a troop transport when it caught fire one night and capsized at its pier.
Soon six different investigations were trying to determine the cause and origin of the fire and destruction of the Normandie. Sabotage by German agents was the runaway favorite. As it turns out, the Normandie fire was an accident. But it led to an unlikely alliance.
And it was relentless. As newspaper columnists and radio broadcasters kept talk of sabotage very much alive, six different investigations were under way. Even President Roosevelt was not ruling out sabotage, asking his Secretary of the Navy immediately after the fire if any enemy aliens had been permitted to work on the ship. Just three days after the fire, the FBI restaged Clement Derrick’s lethal accident, bringing the welder and the crew that was with him to an area where they had erected a stanchion similar to the one he was working on at the time of the fire. They surrounded it with bales of burlap and watched as the repeated ballet produced the same terrible result.
Although the FBI’s investigation put the possibility of sabotage to rest, the sight of the destroyed ship’s carcass in the Hudson River made New Yorkers question the U.S. Navy’s ability to protect the coastline or even the city’s waterfront. Ever since the United States had entered the war, German U-boats had been making deadly mischief off the Long Island and New Jersey beaches; in the month of January alone, they had sent 13 Allied ships filled with precious cargo (not to mention the lives lost) to the bottom of the sea. When the British tanker Coimbra was torpedoed, the resulting fire was so intense that Long Islanders could see its deathly glow from their homes. And still the lights of Asbury Park and Atlantic City were shining out toward the sea like welcoming beacons for the enemy.
In March, Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan decided it was time to fight fire with fire. After a meeting with Lt. Cmdr. Charles R. Haffenden of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, Hogan set in motion a plan that would rely on the services of one of the country’s most notorious criminals, who was then serving time in upstate New York’s Dannemora prison.
Charles “Lucky” Luciano had been sitting in his jail cell in 1939 when the Normandie was moved from France to New York Harbor to keep it safe, hatching a plan with his visitors, mobsters Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Moe Polakoff, to get him released from jail. Part of that plan involved the Normandie; it wasn’t until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, that Luciano’s scheme began to take form. Calling his three pals together again, he showed them a newspaper article in which the Navy expressed concern about the possibility of Germans sabotaging ships in the harbor. It was Luciano’s idea to create a “sabotage incident” and then fix it, so the U.S. Navy would come to him for help. Luciano would provide that help in exchange for a pardon from the man who sent him up the river, former prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who would be elected governor in 1942.
A month later, Frank Costello paid Luciano another visit, this time letting him know that fellow mobster Albert Anastasia had worked out a scheme with his brother “Tough” Tony, a major figure in the International Longshoremen’s Association, to do something big that might involve the Normandie.
Now, in March 1942, with the famous ship destroyed and with Luciano still in jail, believing that Albert Anastasia had carried out his sabotage scheme, the Navy arranged a meeting in Haffenden’s private office off the mezzanine of the Hotel Astor between the lieutenant commander and Joe “Socks” Lanza. The labor racketeer reigned over the Fulton Fish Market and in a burst of patriotism agreed to use his mackerel fishing fleet to help ferret out the U-boats plaguing the New York coastal waters. With this handshake agreement, a strange marriage was sanctioned between the U.S. Navy and key players in the New York Mafia.
But helpful as Lanza’s fishing fleet might be in spotting U-boats, it was not enough. The New York waterfront—especially the West Side docks, with their constant gridlock of merchant and troopships—was vital to the country’s war effort, and needed protection.
The man who controlled it all was Luciano. On May 12, 1942, the mobster was removed from Dannemora prison and brought south to Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, a kinder, gentler place by prison standards. In return for a one-way ticket to Sicily after Luciano’s sentence was served—a deal made good on after the war, when he was paroled in 1946—Luciano agreed to become the silent arm of U.S. Naval Intelligence.
As he put out the word to cooperate from his jail cell, that arm reached beyond the docks into the heart of the city. The heavily German neighborhood of Yorkville—with its vestiges of an American Nazi organization called the German American Bund—was still a gravitating spot for German agents who might pick up some vital bits of information in its popular bars. Bartenders became Luciano’s eavesdroppers. Harlem numbers runners and guys who serviced the city’s vending machines were turned into informants. That cigarette girl in the nightclub, the hatcheck girl in the restaurant, or the attendant in the powder room might be listening.
It did not last forever, but for a brief period of time when patriotism was the country’s unifying glue, the U.S. Navy and the Mafia were partners. Damon Runyon couldn’t have written a better script.
That is the problem with criminals, you just can’t depend on them to to the right thing.
Excerpted from Over Here! New York City During World War II by Lorraine B. Diehl (Smithsonian Books, 2010). © Lorraine B. Diehl.