Mafia-controlled Ports, Nazi Submarines, and Backroom World War 2 deals with Brendan Sullivan
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It's May 1942 in New York State. World War II is fully in swing and the Atlantic Ocean off the coast Long Island has already been an under-the-radar battleground even before Pearl Harbor.

In fact, before December 1941, the US had already lost 243 mariners at sea. German U-boats come close enough to New York Harbor to sink US merchant ships just by looking for their dark silhouettes against the lights of the city. These ships are all taking part in FDR's profitable and depression-ending trade with our war-torn allies in Europe. But soon, American bodies start washing back to American shores as if they had just gotten stuck in the riptide. The lucky ones are dead on impact.

But some of the U-boats surface, collect the survivors, and bring them below decks for interrogation before being flung back to sea, shivering aboard a hopeless life raft. The few U.S. survivors describe something odd about the ships. They're loaded with American goods, stuffed to the rafters like the back room of, well, you know, a mafia hangout. And the strangest mystery of all that, that sets this whole story in motion and perplexes naval intelligence, the Nazi U-boats have freshly baked American sliced bread.

Meanwhile, top mob boss Lucky Luciano is six years into a 30-year sentence for running prostitution rings. And he's at the upstate New York Donnemore prison. And even if he's somehow freed early, he'll be deported back to Italy where Mussolini is busy executing his mobster buddy.

One day, though, Lucky finds himself transferred to a different prison, closer to New York City. And then, on May 15th, 1942, just before 9 a.m., two guards approach Luciano's cell and inform him that he has visitors. They lead him to a room, unshackle him, and lock the door. Then, from the warden's office, he sees two familiar faces. His lawyer and an old friend of his, Meyer Lansky, another top-ranking New York City mobster. They have a proposal they've been sent for him.

The Office of Naval Intelligence is looking to make an alliance in New York Harbor with the guys who control the ports. They have a problem related to that fresh bread, and they think that if they can get Luciano on board, he can take care of it. And if successful, they can likely get his sentence commuted. They wouldn't even have him sent back to Mussolini. He could start over in Cuba. Whatever I do, I want it kept quiet, Lucky says. Private. So if I get back to Italy, I'm not a marked man. This is the Underworld Podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast, the radio program where two journalists who have traveled all over the world on all sorts of stories take you through the international organized crime scene with a new episode every week. I am one of your hosts, Danny Golds.

Usually I'm joined by occasionally funny, occasionally charming British man, Sean Williams. He is not here this week. He is taking a break after his latest venture into the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Actually, his first venture there. Either way, I am happy

to be joined by Brendan J. Sullivan, who is a writer, producer, and DJ, best known for his work with Lady Gaga. You heard me, Lady Gaga. He's the writer of three books. His first memoir, Rivington Was Ours, about the Lower East Side, is awesome. Definitely get that.

He's written a bunch of stuff for other places, and his next book he's looking at submissions for right now. It is called The Secret Ingredient. Brendan, how you doing? How you doing there? I'm doing good, man. Thanks so much for joining us, especially on such late notice. As always... I'm excited. I'm a fan of the program. As always, we have bonus stuff up on patreon.com slash underworldpodcast.

Yeah, I think this is one of those stories where you may have heard some of it, like history channel wise, or it comes up, it came up in the Sopranos in one episode. Yeah.

with Agent Harris talking to Tony Soprano about World War II and his outfit protecting the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But I've never once seen anyone do the whole picture and connect it back to the real story of World War II. Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of psyched. You know, I love World War II stuff. I love Soprano's references.

And obviously, you know, I do this podcast, so I'm very interested in mafia and organized crime history. And this is one of those things where I think, you know, all kind of knew or not all, but I think a lot of us knew about the Lucky Luciano and the port stuff. But this goes a lot deeper than that. And it kind of starts with...

I think what you were telling me is the first act of World War II in the U.S., which is not Pearl Harbor, is it? No, no, it's not. Well, Pearl Harbor, it was not a state at the time. The first overt act by a foreign-born citizen during World War II was taken credit by a gangster named Anthony Anastasio, and it was a fire aboard a French ship.

passenger ship called the Normandy. And the Normandy, I mean, if you just want to have a visual, just imagine that the Titanic, but 25% bigger, just catches fire in the middle of New York Harbor. But the first act of the United States military in U.S. soil was they had the Coast Guard board the Normandy to protect it from any attacks. It's not clear why they thought that exact ship would make it.

But what is crucial to the Normandy is that it's bigger than the Titanic, but it has this crazy onboard electric power plant, which meant that it, like, you imagine that scene in Titanic where, you know, they're shoveling coal downstairs. Instead of the Normandy, they are, it's billowing out coal everywhere.

To create electricity on there, which means that it can basically go front, back. It can turn around really quickly. And more importantly, for U.S. interests at the time, it can outrun any German U-boat. So wait, why does this mafia guy attack the Normandy? This is a very interesting piece of history because while he claims credit for it, the official U.S. government understanding of this is that there was a fire and a bakery aboard the Normandy.

And the reason, though, he would claim credit for this, even if he didn't do it, is long understood to be leverage to get the famed gangster Lucky Luciano out of prison.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you're telling me, you know, the whole story about Lucky getting out that we talked about is he gets out to protect the ports. So it was like a, like a false flag situation. Like this, this sort of fire starts and this mobster is like, people are attacking the, the port. So we need Lucky Luciano to come here and protect the ports. Like, is that, is that basically what it is?

That's exactly what it is. And the reason for that is because even before, like we Americans, we just envisioned World War II, you know, started at Pearl Harbor. It ends with an atomic bomb for us, you know, in our school books. And a lot of us millennials had a handsome granddad who was a, you know, World War II soldier who would come back and tell us these heroic tales of getting everything right and going directly after Adolf Hitler, you know, fist fighting Adolf Hitler and then coming home.

liberating Paris on the way home and then living the rest of their life as a hero. And the fact is that without the New York City Mafia specifically, none of this would ever have been possible. And it already was impossible before World War II started. There was a secret, very silent war going on in the Atlantic starting from New York Harbor. Before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had already lost 243 mariners.

mostly in the atlantic and this is a time before radar it's really a time even before like reliable radio at sea so when these ships go down they might have one distress signal that gets seen by one other boat but all those things you know oh you know loose lips sink ships and and

when you go at night, go dark, all those things that were printed on, you know, Navy bars are really true at the time. The German U-boats got so close to New York Harbor that if a ship sailed at night, completely dark to avoid detection, they could torpedo it just from the silhouette it left in the New York City skyline as a dark ship. And they were getting so close at the time

that the bodies of American soldiers, not even soldiers, but they're sort of pre-merchant Marines, the bodies of the American merchant Marines are washing up on U.S. shores. They're coming out in Delaware and Long Island and Montauk. And the story begins, though,

Because one of the ships along the way here was sunk by a German U-boat. And when they get out, the German U-boat surface. This is just off the coast of New York City in the Atlantic. The most harrowing story of this time is that a German U-boat did strike a U.S. merchant ship. And this is FDR's plan to trade our way out of the Great Depression by basically funding the Allies in World War II and the Lend-Lease Program. And mostly by sending them American goods on credit.

The ships, though, as they get just slightly off the coast, keep getting sunk, and they disappear at this time. Most of them don't get a distress signal. But the most harrowing story of all is that one of the German U-boats torpedoed a ship and then circled back to find the survivors clinging to her life rafts.

and kidnapped them and brought them below decks to interrogate them about what's going on in the shipping yards of New York City and especially the Navy yard. And when these guys, terrified, freezing in the Atlantic, when they looked around the German U-boats, they were just stacked to the rafters

with American goods and products. I always describe it as it looks like the back room of a mafia hangout where there's 10 VCRs and 16 canned hams and the most mysterious of them. The understanding then was that, okay, maybe they're torpedoing boats and then they have this, I don't know, they've got a life raft nearby or something and they go collecting the floaters around. And that theory was blown out of the water when one of the sailors returned to the U.S.,

And he noticed that while he was in the Nazi U-boat, he saw fresh-baked American sliced bread. So where does this bread come from? What's the background there? Because that sounds pretty insane. That's the thing.

The Germans don't have sliced bread, first of all. Sliced bread is like 1922 or 1939, 1940 at this point. And they certainly don't have fresh sliced bread. And they certainly, certainly aren't fishing, you know, wax paper bags of fresh sliced bread with American labels on it out of the water after they blow up a ship.

So the U.S. Naval Intelligence at the time, a lot of them are former Prohibition guys. And this seems to sound like something they have a lot of experience with back in the Boardwalk Empire gangster era. Because it never made sense that a German U-boat really looks a lot like a rum runner ship. Because the German U-boats can't get all the way back to Le Havre in France or Germany to refuel. They need some ship support to do it.

Which means they should have a very limited run just off the coast of Germany. However, they are living life, you know, just off of Montauk. And they not only have fresh, you know, sausage, sliced bread, somehow they're getting diesel fuel to them. And so the U.S. Naval Intelligence Officers, a lot of them are the old G-men, the old Prohibition kind of era people.

And what they realize is that these ships don't have enough power to get back to Germany, but they do have enough power to get resupplies from various fishermen, fishing units, and that is why they come directly to Lucky Luciano. The problem they hope that Lucky Luciano can solve starts at the Fulton Fish Market with a gangster named Socks Lonzo.

So who... I actually don't know who Socks Lonza is, but I knew the Luciano thing and I assumed it was because of spies and whatnot, but it seems like this is very different from that. So let me just back it up and say that this is a story that, as I mentioned earlier, was hidden from most of us. And the way it came about is actually...

New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey in 1971 passes away, and he had agreed to have a reporter go over his papers, and he had written this memoir about fighting the underworld crime in the 1930s. There was actually a hit on Thomas Dewey when he was a district attorney.

At the time. And the person who called off the hit, Vito Genovese really just wanted the hit to happen. But the person who called it off was Lucky Luciano. Keep those two in mind because they're going to be in battle throughout almost this entire story. Because one of them will always not be in prison when the other is. So while going through Thomas Dewey's papers, they find a report.

And it had been silenced at the time. It's known as the Herland's Report. It's 2,803 pages with 57 witnesses and a 101-page summary. And they had to have the Dewey estate and Chase Manhattan Bank sign off on releasing it. And it was until 1977 before this came out. And there was a warning in the report that I want to make note of because it's the point of our show today, which was the Herland's Report said...

that Rear Admiral Carl Espy wrote, "...study of the report raises apprehension that its publication might bring harm to the Navy. Publication of this report would inspire a rush of thriller stories based therein. Enterprising authors would waste no time in exploiting the persons it names."

including naval officers. So I am that enterprising author that they warned about then. And that is because the first explosive item in the report is that when Naval Intelligence found out about the sliced bread, they went straight to Joseph Sox Lonza, the racket's boss at the Fulton Fish Market, to enlist the fishermen on a submarine watch. Yeah, let me just chime in with people who don't know what the Fulton Fish Market is. It's still up and running in New York, and I think it's like one of the...

maybe the second biggest fish markets in America. And it's basically just, where is it? It's in the Bronx now, or is it still? It moved to the Bronx, but yeah, it used to be downtown in Fulton. And Anthony Bourdain back in the day would have to take a cab there all hung over at six in the morning, pick out all the fish. And it's everything from the best fish you're going to find in the best restaurant in La Bernardina, New York City. And it's also like where the cat food starts. Yeah.

Jesus. Okay. Um, so what happens? They come straight from Bourdain. They, uh, they show up to Lonza. They talk to him in the, in the, like what happens there? Well, it's important to note that like shipping is the most important, uh,

asset the u.s has at the time the u.s currently did not have enough ships to just jump into world war ii at the time it wasn't even until 1944 that they were building more ships than they were losing in the harbors at the time specifically to the u-boats um this is one of those things you know history is written by the winners you know oppenheimer summer just shows us that um

But FDR knew that a brisk supply line to England could help the U.S. trade their way out of the Great Depression. And that's where they lost the 243 mariners, just beyond the three-mile zone of the coastline, where the high seas begin. So how are they getting the fresh bread?

Did they ever solve that? So, the fishermen who are going back and forth are starting to form alliances with these German U-boats that can surface and be boarded like a regular ship. Traitors. And just as the, you know, these guys are not far from prohibition. So, a lot of these, you know, you imagine the Boardwalk Empire scenes. You know, they're not pulling up to a dock. They're going out to sea. They're picking up crate.

And so a lot of these Germans have been in the boat for long enough that when they see a fisherman there, and again, they're about to join the Axis together, the Germans and the Italians. So they were trading at sea with the fishermen to the point where

They were starting to make requests, you know, and they would start to have, because they had to be refueled with diesel and other things. So a lot of the, there was a lot of German money flowing directly to the mafia at this time. That's interesting because I kind of, you know, my thoughts are what I knew on the Italian-American sort of situation.

The way they viewed World War II is a lot of them hated Mussolini, right? Because he was cracking down on all the mafia stuff. He was imprisoning and killing their cousins and their brothers and all that. That was his whole big thing. Cracking down in Sicily, cracking down in Calabria and all that. So with these guys, was it ideological or was it on... Specifically in the South, I think it starts out monetarily. At this time, Mussolini has a booth at the New York World Series, the whole building.

And when he asked the World's Fair commissioner about how things are going in New York, and he said specifically, how did my people behave over there? And there had been a lot of unemployment riots at the time. And the commissioner said, you know, some good or some bad. And Mussolini said to his face, and the bad ones, they were Sicilian. Racist. Anti-Italian discrimination. Anti-Sicilian discrimination. Yeah.

coming right from Il Duce himself yeah

So what happens with the attention now? I mean, does Lanza start cracking down? Do they start stringing people up? Unfortunately, union boss Anthony Anastasio, he's a classic gangster, you know, double-breasted suits, white tie. He heard that the Navy itself was prowling around the docks looking to flip any Italian or German dock workers, meaning they know they're up to no good and they want to find out what their game is and get involved in it. But of course...

Anthony Anastasio, he wants to be in charge of that operation if he can be.

So I want to go back to Lucky Luciano in prison. He is upstate in Donnemora, the one that there was recently a show, Escape from Donnemora, with Benicio Del Toro and Christopher Montesanti plays Andrew Cuomo in the show. I didn't see it, but now I want to. I wasn't interested, but Montesanti is Cuomo. I'm in. Two criminals tunnel out of an upstate prison in the freezing cold and

by you know like by straight straight up tunneling out and andrew cuomo is the one who has to go down there yeah i remember when it was like actually like it was going real story i remember when it was happening i had friends that were i think i had a friend that wrote a book on it it might be the basis of that story but uh but yeah crazy story yes so luciano is in prison he's freezing his ass up upstate you know no one can visit him there's no there's no interstate highway it's it's hours and hours for anybody in new york to get to him

But while he's in there, Lucky Luciano becomes kind of a news junkie because World War II is broken out. This is after Pearl Harbor. Everything that was good news for the Allies was good news for him. So his goal was just to get out of there so he could restart his gambling operation. He had his eyes on Saratoga Springs. He wanted to get out of New York City. With enough cash, he could recover under any conditions because...

These are the markets that did survive the Great Depression. And he wants to build a casino empire from Bermuda to the Bahamas and Cuba. He does not want to go back to Italy because of Mussolini specifically and their crackdown on the mafiosi. Currently, Lucky Luciano is facing so much time in prison that he probably won't live long enough to serve his term. But if he goes back to Italy, he definitely won't live long enough to serve much longer because Mussolini has a hit out on him.

So, we've got Joseph Sox Lonza, and Lucky is still in prison. Now, instead of starting another war, the U.S. government launched what's called Operation Underworld to get the cooperation of the Jewish and Italian crime organizations, and that includes the Irish who ran the docks along Pier 88. The U.S. government officially stated that the Normandy was an accident, and after the war records, access records also didn't show any evidence of sabotage.

So they were probably correct in identifying it as mafia related.

So they meet with Lonza at the Astor Hotel, and I just want to say for our millennial viewers here, the Astor Hotel Grand Place, it's 1515 Broadway, which is now the home of Viacom, which we probably remember from high school as TRL Studios. This is where you probably saw Britney Spears. This is where I launched with Gaga in the 2000s, and it's now where The Lion King is playing. So they start an office out of this hotel, and

Luciano, who is Italian board, agreed to help out the federal government in their war effort against Italy in order to get a lighter sentence. So because the U.S. government had started an almost pointless war on alcohol and prohibition, they quite literally had a hostage and an ally in the fishing industry. So soon work stoppages and strikes on the docks came under control and the U-boats stopped getting resupplied. Okay, so what's going on at sea right now as all this is happening? You

You know what I'd wonder, and I found this surprising when I researched this, this is World War II, there's Normandy happening, so what do you think is the deadliest branch of the military? You can include the Coast Guard, you can include anyone you want. If you had to guess, Army, Navy, Marines, or the Air Force doesn't really exist at this point. I have no idea. I mean, because of the nature of this episode, I'm going to guess the Navy. Okay, it's actually the Merchant Marines. I was going to guess that too. Okay.

The United States Merchant Marine provided the greatest sea lift in history at this point. 55,000 experienced mariners swelled over 215,000 throughout the war.

Of the 243 were killed at sea. Over the course of war, 8,300 mariners were killed at sea, 12,000 wounded, 1,000 died of their wounds. 663 men and women were taken prisoner. 66 died at prison camps. For comparison, like morbidly so, the Pearl Harbor attack that got the U.S. into the war had 2,403 U.S. personnel, 68 civilians. Altogether, American lives lost in the war just for transporting goods.

civilian and merchant marine 9,300 damn so one in 26 mariners serving aboard a merchant ship in world war ii died in line of duty and that's a greater percentage of war-related deaths than any other branch so the deadliest branch is the marines one in 48 and they were six times more likely to die than the coast guard casualties were kept secret during the war but in 1942 33 allied ships sunk each week

That's the equivalent of another Pearl Harbor every three days.

Damn. And that's where you get these, the campaigns like When in Doubt Lights Out, Smoking Stacks Attract Attacks. So these ships are going like through the deadliest waters ever and they can't even hit the gas because the smokestack attracts attacks. It's so big that the Seagram's Distillers Corporation starts just printing these ads to be put on the walls in bars that are along the docks. You know, imagine like the ear end back in the day. That's where you get the Loose Lips Might Sink Ships.

So the availability, the U.S. government knows this. They're not telling this. This is not being spoken to. But this is why they need the alliance with the mafia, because the availability or not availability of shipping vessels determines what allies could do in the military.

Operation Overlord, the codename for the Normandy Beach, it had to be put off from 1942 to 1944 for many reasons. But the biggest was insufficient shipping. I'm going to just say that the delay from 1942 to 1944 during the Holocaust, not to be too crass, but we can just put a number on that, which is that was the delay of 1.7 million.

million Polish Jews died between March 1942 and November 1943. That's a bigger...

Casualty toll than anything in the war whatsoever. That's 15,000 a day. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things, you know, most of my background was before this was war reporting. And I think one of the things that people who aren't in the military or who don't sort of spend time in these places or read about it a lot realizes like how important just simple logistics are to a war effort and how...

Just like that's make or break. I guess the casual observer would be aware of some of that stuff, but it's really something that I think people don't put a lot of thought into when it comes to military conflicts and whatnot. Just how important the simple logistics, whether it's fuel, food, like you said, shipping, goods, anything like that is so... I mean, it is make or break. It is probably...

one of the most important things. It absolutely is. It absolutely is. And I think the genius of, of Naval Intelligence at the time, this is kind of pre-CIA when intelligence was per branch of military, um,

is they had a great way of sharing with both Lucky Luciano and Vina Genovese that it's in their interest to get their docs and their workers working on the war effort. In 1942, they lost twice as many ships as they could build in a year, meaning they were losing their own war before even getting to the battlefield. And it took until 1943 before the U.S. could even build more ships than the Allies lost.

Damn. And I think if the replacement hadn't built, I don't think they could have done the Normandy invasion. You know, you can't just pull a Detroit, you can't pull it like a Dunkirk with Detroit automobiles and US tanks. It took an average of seven to 15 tons of supplies to support one soldier for one year. So think of how many shipping containers that would be. So, but what I want to come back to is,

is a question, which is, did Mussolini's own war with the mafia create the situation that started his downfall? And for that, we're going to get back to our friends. It's not just Mussolini, and it's not just Vino Genovese, but it's the fact that Vino Genovese is Mussolini's son's Coke dealer. Okay, so Danny, I want to address something you asked earlier because I just found the actual document for it.

You had asked me earlier, like, why would the Navy or the U.S. government in general go directly to Luciano, who's been in prison for 10 years, when they could just make contacts with the underbosses around there at the time? So I found the actual document, and this was part of the Herland's report. This was commissioned to get both Luciano out of prison, but to clear the name of the governor of New York, who signed his clemency at the time.

People were saying that, you know, you guys go way back to the mafia days. Obviously, this is a payoff. You're getting this guy off easy. So they commissioned this huge report, and it put it really succinctly in this one under a section titled The Grave National Emergency. And this is the official government report. It says, "...early in 1942, this country was suffering severe losses to its merchant marine as a result of submarine attacks off the Atlantic coast, particularly in the area under jurisdiction of the 3rd Naval District."

As a result, the authorities feared that enemy agents might be operating in the waterfront. They suspected that elements in the commercial fishing fleet or ex-rum runners or other criminal elements in the waterfront, for a price, might be contacting enemy submarines and supplying them with fuel and provisions. The fear of sabotage in the piers and docks throughout the port was great. In February, the burning of the Normandy, which was later converted to a warship, the Lafayette, was the final straw.

So at this time, they come down to Socks Lonza, who's the boss that they can talk to. But we come to the old, you know, the mafia movie trope, the Omerta. You know, we have...

All of these people are recent immigrants from Sicily and Italy. All of them know that the mafia is their, you know, the bosses are their real boss. It's not even, we're not even calling it the mafia at this time. And the government doesn't even call it the mafia. They consider it the underworld. And I want to get to that in a minute because we talk about this like it's because we are talking about the, you know, being at war with fascism at the time in Mussolini's Italy. But the mafia was very diverse at this moment. So I want to touch on that here because so

So first of all, in April 16th, 1942, Socks Lonza meets with the U.S. Naval Department, and they're very open about this. And there's a wiretap on his offices at the time. And that's when Lonza says, quote, Luciano could be of great assistance to break the logjam on the docks in New York. So on the 26th of April, 1942, Lonza gets Lucky Luciano transferred to Comstock near Lake George. So now he's only about four hours away.

And he explains that they're having a problem with another group called the Kermada Brothers from the Brooklyn Waterfront. And then he also has difficulty with the Irish Mafia, which would eventually become the Westies all the way on the west side on Pier 88 where the Normandy was. Oh, yeah, the Westies. I mean, I know a lot about TJ. What's his name? We've used a lot of his books. There's a book about them, but they were like a pretty...

I know about them from the 70s and 80s when they were just extremely violent in Hell's Kitchen. God, what's that movie? Is it Sleepers? It's basically based off the Westies. But yeah, I didn't realize that they went back all the way to the 1940s in that era.

Yeah, it's funny how the docks in New York had ethnicities at the time. You know, Little Italy is because the Italian ships would dock just off the west, west of where Little Italy is now in Soho, you know, on Spring Street.

There was a little France on 48th Street where the Intrepid is now. And from there up, though, there was really no French mafia. So the Irish really controlled the French ports at the time with the luxury goods coming in. That's really interesting. Yeah. So at this point, it's...

more of a theory that maybe the mafia could help, maybe we need to control the ports. But then something ratchets this up. And again, we said in the beginning that this is like a forgotten World War II story. And what we really mean there is that it was kept really quiet because I think some people would be unnerved

If they knew that your average sailing trip off the coast of Montauk at the time, you'd be slaloming around various German U-boats. And this all comes to a head on June 12th, 1942. A four-man Nazi submarine lands in Amagansett. They come ashore in their German Navy uniforms just in case they're captured so they would be POWs and not just executed.

A Coast Guard official who's just watching in Amagant, sleepy, 1940s Amagant's it. He's approached by the group who give him a $260 bribe. And that was nothing to them, by the way. They had over $86,000 in American cash on them at the time. Damn.

And they landed to go. What's crazy to me is just like these are places we know, like you could you think of World War Two as battlefields or something like this. But these guys land in Amagansa and they hop the Long Island Railroad and go straight to New York City.

I mean, their plan is to carry out this huge sabotage mission. There's another group that landed in Jacksonville, Florida, and they're just riding public transit. They took the train to Cincinnati and they meet there on July 4th to plan their sabotage mission. So meanwhile, Lonza is making several visits and the, the other visitors who go to see Lucky Luchon at this time, they have this like central casting gangster movie names. One of them is Frank Costella and,

One is Mike Lascari, William Moretti, Mikey Morandi, and then other persons as Johnny Cock-Eyed Dunn,

Willie McCabe, Jimmy Blue Eyes Aloe, Jerry Sullivan, and Whitey Carney. Yeah, and Costello, of course, was one of the top guys, if not the top, I think, while Luciano was locked up. Yeah, and he was very important to the operation at the time because he's overseeing the Navy Yard and the ports at the time. One of them I didn't know about was Naval Intelligence just really, really wanted to get in with cockeyed done because he ran the West Side Waterfront and

The gem in there, if you imagine the West Side as it is now, is there would be saloons all along there where your ship's late, you're allowed to clock out and go have a good time over there. That's what the Irin started as. The Irin on Spring Street started as a longshoreman sign-in hall.

So, what he really wanted was to keep tabs on everyone. And they had naval intelligence officers getting their union cards so that they could go to these places. And what they wanted to keep an eye on was to make sure no one was going to do anything subversive because, honestly, the U.S. war effort at that time, as we were talking about, was just hanging on by a thread. You know, any...

Anyone who set fire to a ship, anyone who started diesel barrels on fire could have really, really just changed the volume of the war there. So meanwhile, and this wouldn't be a mafia story if there wasn't a Fredo in our midst, if there wasn't someone who's an underboss who thinks they should be the boss. So while all of this is going on, and really, it's a great moment for

Certainly for New York, certainly for the Five Families and the other various organizations around there. So meanwhile, at this great moment of unity where there's a common objective and people really are helping the war effort as a group there, and it's to everyone's benefit. No one's getting sabotaged, no one's getting clapped for anything. And the money is flowing in and the jobs are flowing in, which is kind of most important to the underlings or the workers, really.

But meanwhile, Vito Genovese, he gets his U.S. citizenship and the first thing he does is go back to Italy.

And he starts bribing the local fascists. He becomes best friends with Mussolini's son-in-law. Forgive me, Italians. Galeazzo Ciano. And mostly because he supplied a lot of them with some serious cocaine. It's so much. He's dealing with so much money that Genovese just donates $4 million to the fascist party. And he is opening supply lanes that haven't been opened in years.

uh since the beginning you know since 1940 at this point we're in we're in 43 so there are supply lines there are products that have been you know there's if you think of you know you think of the godfather movies and they talk all about you know getting this canned olive oil so there's there's things in warehouses in italy that are finally freeing up supply lines and genovese is the one running all of that to the tune of having just four million to donate to the fascist party

It's so bad that while Lucky Luciano is cooperating, in January of 1943, Vito Genovese puts a hit out on one of Mussolini's enemies in New York. He's a journalist for an Italian anarchist newspaper.

And the US had been at war with Italy for over a year now, and now the mafia is putting out a hit on, quote, our enemy's enemy. Yeah, we talked about that sort of Genovese, his role with the fascists, and I think his abrupt turnaround as soon as they were out in our episode on Naples, I believe, and

the Camara and their sort of origins, but it also was like, you know, he wasn't ideal. Yeah. I love that episode. He wasn't ideological, right? He was just doing, he was just in it for the money. I think he, yeah, I think he's just a businessman and he's your typical, in a lot of these stories, you see the guy who's right behind the boss who second guests the boss and just sees all the missed opportunities where the boss is usually keeping.

the organization afloat. I think these under guys are thinking, oh, there's, you know, you're leaving money on the table. Yeah. And if you know, if you want to get in good with, with politicians, it's an important lesson. Sell them cocaine. It just, uh, fast, fascist, communist, liberal, uh, conservative. Like that's,

That's really the way to go. It really unites all of us. Yeah, yeah. Truly. But I would say that that brings up a good point because in the final report, they said that the temperature among the docks was that the Navy wasn't going to flip anybody. But it was felt that, quote, since Mussolini had been responsible for the expulsion of many Sicilians, persons of Sicilian origin might be willing to aid naval intelligence.

So after another visit from Luciano, they get the top bosses to scour their crews for any Sicilians in the New York harbors. They are the fresher off the boat, the better they, they want people who were honestly expelled from Sicily last week and hopefully working the docks, the waters, hopefully they're specifically looking for Sicilian fishermen. And so they have these maps, typical just us army maps. And what they would do is in the office on church street, the office of naval affairs, they,

They overlaid a map, a cellophane map, and in there, they had a coded system to look up a card for any intelligence they gained from the workers on the docks. And what they did is they collected a group of Sicilians who missed home, who wanted to go back home.

And they had them all interviewed together to discuss like, okay, so, you know, U.S. Navy would land a ship here. But do you have another idea of where, you know, Mussolini's people could be hiding out? Where could they ambush us if we had a very obvious military objective? They're very forthcoming with this.

And at this time, it's only by February 1943, Luciano hasn't even actually helped anyone at this point, just organized it. He's already petitioning for his release. We are weeks into World War II at this point. So Luciano relays his plans to Meyer Lansky immediately.

who would memorize them and bring them to the navy. And it was Luciano's idea to invade Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. The town's name translates as Sea Fortress on the Gulf. By July 1943, this had become so successful that Luciano directed his associate, Carlo Gero Vincenzi,

to join the amphibious invasion of Sicily. So they provide all the maps and everything. Vincenzi spends six days in an American tank, and I always describe him like this. He leaves Sicily being forced out by Mussolini,

He returns in an American tank as if he's like Hannibal crossing the Alps and the war elephants. Meanwhile, they have personal introductions to the various Kingpins, Mafiosi, just the loyal ones around town to get the snipers out of the mountains, to trade with them when they can, to get to sort of improve the economy of the area. So they have personal introductions to all of Sicily there. So by September 1943,

I really like this story because it tells you a little bit more about what's going on in their minds at this time. We have, of course, the American World War II official story here. But in September 1943, Lucky Luciano is pacing his cell. He reads his one newspaper a day. He reads every single article because he's just become such a news junkie by then. And he is talking with Meyer Lansky, and he just looks up from his paper, and he goes, "'Something's got to be done with this guy, Hitler.'"

And everyone's like, yeah, you're right, boss. That's the plan here. And he's like, no, if someone could knock off this... The quote is here because Lansky would have to wear a wire for security reasons. So all of this is on...

recorded tape and he says if somebody could knock off this son of a bitch the war would be over in five minutes Lansky and Scarry like kind of just looked at each other and laughed and he's like but what do you and Luciano looks up and he's like what are you laughing at we got the best hit man in the world over there Vito Genovese it seems to me right then that like Luciano doesn't really know what Vito Genovese has been up to Luciano's been in prison for 10 years at this point but that is where Genovese does

Pick up with your good episode. What do you call that episode? Invasion of Naples? No, it was about the origins of the Camorra. The origins of the Camorra is... Oh, it's from this? Okay, that's great. Wow. Wait, there's another really fun tie-in here because... Oh, yes. By the time the Allies get to the port of Naples, they have a lot of Red Cross packages and a Goodwill mission. So, Vito Genovese shows up in a 1939 Packard sedan and he gives it to...

the US Allied forces by then, the head of it, who actually used to be the governor of New York at the time. So this is his goodwill mission, but of course all he does is hijack the trucks and start selling the supplies to the starved populace of Naples. Yeah, we went deep, I think, into how the... Was it Naples? Naples 44? I don't know if you ever read that book about just the rackets that were being run in Italy. In not...

you know, in, in the area where the allies had taken over. And I, I assume it was like that in the areas where the allies weren't as well. But, um, you know, one thing about that hit though, you know, isn't the old story that Bugsy Siegel was almost going to kill Hitler. Cause he was like at, with some Italian counters, a countess or something like that. But, uh, it's exactly it. Uh, that Luciano reminded Lansky of that. And this is kind of a,

kind of a fun moment for the, the Jewish and Italian mobs to, of unity here. Uh, Benjamin Bug Siegel had the opportunity to kill two of Hitler's top guys. Uh, and one of them was propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. And, uh,

The Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goring. Like, two of the topest top guys of the operation. Siegel happened to be in Rome when he was staying at the same hotel as both of them. And their anti-Semitism was well known. And Siegel came at them, guns blazing. His girlfriend at the time dissuaded him, but he was regretted not going after the two war criminals for pretty much the rest of his life. Yeah, wait. Not guns blazing, because he didn't... Like, metaphorically. Sorry. You mean that metaphorically. He didn't go... Yeah. He was...

he was, he was a big hothead and he was ready to go. I mean, he was armed. It wasn't like he was looking for a gun. Yeah. And his girlfriend talked him out of it. The story I think, uh, goes that he was talked out of it because if he did it, then his girlfriend and her entire family would have been killed. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Ah,

plenty of episodes. We're going to have like hyperlinks crazy here. So yeah, so Luciano gets busted. Here's, this is a great moment in like, you know, this, this should be that its own mafia movie. So Luciano is, is way out of his britches at this point. And, uh, he's, he's a traitor to the U S at this point after getting his citizenship and to his, his own, uh,

family there. Of the five families, his group. I guess they're still called the commission at that point. However, Vito Genovese gets busted for selling Red Cross supplies. And when they pull his file, they realize that he's on the run for a murder charge in the US. So Vito Genovese just falls on his own sword. When Luciano gets out, Vito Genovese would be his biggest problem. And now Vito Genovese is going in the can totally separately from where Luciano is.

And when Luciano finds out about this, he says to Lansky, I have a feeling in my bones that someday Vito is going to be bad news for everybody. I do want to point out this other one. Okay, this would be our Thanksgiving episode here in 1944. Because in this, you'll hear a reference to this in lots of mafia movies, mafia stories, and stuff like that. But his next visit

Luciano's next visit in Thanksgiving 1944 is none other than Bugsy Siegel and the underboss Moretti. The allies have taken the port of Antwerp. He's in a good mood. He's thinking he might get out. And it's in this conversation that Moretti says he signed this new kid, Frank Sinatra.

And the reason we know so much about this one event is because it's while he's under surveillance in prison. So he said the manager got mouthy and he gave the kid a terrible deal.

Yeah, I mean, that feeds into...

the start of everything and talks about our, I mean, our cube episode too, but that I guess is later on in the, uh, in the fifties and everything like that. But yeah, it's, it's interesting to see how all this stuff is interconnected. Yeah. And I think we'd know a little bit more about it. Um, except the next act on Naval intelligence is August 29th, 1945. Um, they went through the Naval office and physically destroyed everything that wasn't a value anymore. Meaning like, uh, uh, uh,

Intelligence they had collected, but that could not help them with the objective of landing in Italy. They do write up a final report, and the official word is that, in the section labeled Findings, is the evidence demonstrates that Luciano's assistance and cooperation were secured by naval intelligence in the course of evolving and expanding requirements of...

national security. No practical purpose would be served by debating the technical scope of Luciano's aid to the war effort. Over and beyond any precise rating of his contribution is the crystal clear fact that Luciano and his associates and contacts during a period when, quote, the outcome of the war appeared extremely grave, were responsible for a wide range of services which were considered useful to the Navy.

In the conclusion for this, William Herlands, who was the head of the investigation, and his name is on the report, it's the Herlands report, he finally decides that the securing and use of Luciano aid and that of his associates and contacts were a project that Naval Intelligence originated and operated in light of national emergency then existing. At first, Joseph Sox Lanza and then Charles Luciano.

became pivotal figures in the project, which operated from the spring of 1942 until sometime in 1944. The details of that operation have been described in this report. There could be no question about the value of the project. The facts set forth in this report demonstrate that Governor's statement in his commutation message with respect to Luciano's war aid was conservative. Meaning, the point of this report was to tell you that when the...

When the governor of New York says Luciano was helpful in the war effort and his sentences commuted, his war aid, that sentence in itself was a conservative estimate. Yeah, so what does that leave us? There's a couple of really forgotten moments in here. I want to go over two of them, and then let's give a little after the fact, a little where are they now kind of thing. Yeah, that sounds good. One of which that I would like to make sure I point out is

While this is all happening, while Luciano is securing the ports and everything, let's imagine for a second a world where we just can't do anything about the goddamn German U-boat sinking ships left and right. I do want to highlight two things that were smuggled back through the supply line at the time that absolutely changed the world, modern society, modern medicine at the time. And both of them, because they were wartime acts, I think don't get the time, the credit they receive. Like,

Danny, if I asked you, like, how did we discover penicillin, what would you say? Wasn't it fungus? Yeah, dude, I have no idea. Yeah, so they'll say, like, 1928.

Dr. Fleming comes back from vacation at St. Mary's Hospital, London. There's a fungus on his petri dish and he discovers penicillin. But as of the bombing of London, there was not enough penicillin in all of the Allied forces to take care of one police officer in London, scratched his eye, trimming his rose bushes, and was going to die of the infection of it.

Smuggled across the supply line in 1941 was a taste of this fungus, which then went into Minnesota.

And it was collected by a bacteriologist named Dr. Mary, not Dr. Mary, she was a lab assistant, Mary Hunt. And she later went to her own local grocery store, found a similar fungus on a cantaloupe, brought it back to the office. Because she was the woman in the office, they also made her cut up the cantaloupe and serve it to everyone. They studied this fungus, and that exact fungus is where all of the penicillin that the Allied forces used during World War II came from. It was...

through this supply line that was secured by the American mafia at the time. The second one of which is that they also had a sample of German mustard gas, and they wanted to study its effects. And the doctor who tried it out said, wow, this could really do something because it can just completely delete the white blood cells of the people. And when the supply line was cleared, it cleared all the way to Bari in Italy, where a U.S. stock of this mustard gas equivalent was bombed

by the German Air Force, which accidentally gave Dr. Alexander the perfect test run of what would become chemotherapy. And the only two people who read his final report on it after it was silenced were the guys who were Drs. Sloan and Kettering, who were in their civilian jobs. They worked at General Electric, and they...

had been talked into it by General Dusty Rhodes at the time. And these are like always forgotten little bits in the Italian war effort here. And so I made an effort last time I was in Italy to go down to Bari to see where that part of it at least happened for the supply line that was freed up by our man here, Lucky Luciano. So let's catch up with him in February of 1946.

Um, Lucky Luciano's in a prison cell in Ellis Island, and he's gazing at the Manhattan skyline. He's waiting for his personal effects to be delivered by his dear friend of over 20 years at the time, Meyer Lansky. Lansky took a cab to the Ellis Island ferry and lugged three bags of clothes that Luciano hadn't worn in 10 years. At this point, Vito Genovese has beaten the murder charge, and when I say beaten the murder charge, I mean

Beaten the witnesses who could testify against him, who both turned up dead. Physically beaten, you mean? Yeah. So because of this, Vito Genovese is free.

And now Luciano is getting deported to Italy. Mussolini is already dead at this point. A couple of years later, February 23rd, 1947, Luciano turns up in Cuba on using his birth name, Salvatore Luciano. His trip ended that day when the U.S. government threatened Cuba that they would stop shipping medical supplies if the Cuban government permitted Luciano to stay. Damn, they really wanted him. Yeah.

Yeah, so he was deported back to Italy. Vito Genovese put a hit on Costello and our friend Albert Anastasia, who took credit for the Normandy at the time. Albert Anastasia got whacked in like the most, you know,

1940s gangster movie, Possible Way. Yeah, the barber, right? He lived in a hotel. Yeah, well, he lived in a hotel and every day he got a daily shave, haircut, manicure. Every single day. Meanwhile, his job is the Fulton Fish Market and he walks in there looking like he's a runway model. And at this point, Genovese announced that he himself is now Capo di Tutti Capi and he renames the Luciano family the Genovese.

He dies of a heart attack in prison, Valentine's Day, 1969. Romantic. However, Luciano goes back to Italy. He also dies of a heart attack, but at the time of that, he's been a free man longer than he would ever have been in prison, meaning he was sentenced to 30 years that he never would have seen on the outside, and instead he lives 29 years a free man at that point. Not bad if you can pull it off. Yeah.

So how would you kind of summarize the, uh, like the main points here of this story, uh, besides just the insanity of the shipping lines that were happening and the mafia involvement and both, I guess, uh,

some of those U-boats afloat, but also shutting them down after a while. Yeah, you know what's interesting? At the end of Prohibition, all you could think is, what a completely pointless exercise. We took 20% of the US government's tax receipts and gave them to the mafia. Made alcohol cheaper. Made criminals of people...

made criminals into modest men. It seemed like the dumbest thing, the stupidest idea ever. And it really, I don't think it helped a single person other than a lot of people got rich. And yet, the very pointless Prohibition War and the way the rum runners organized at the time turned out to be the single way that we defeated both the German U-boats and Hitler and Mussolini and the fascists. Just because they were so advanced in terms of like

You know, learning how to avoid the tag, like basically water-based smuggling? I don't know. Yeah. Water-based smuggling. I think if the mafia hadn't, you know, not even the mafia, but if the, I mean, I would say, yeah, if the bootleggers and the importers hadn't gotten so good at the rum-running game, I don't think that naval intelligence would have any idea how to handle what was going on.

This is before radio. This is before radar. These are periscopes on a dark sea. You're getting nothing out of this. And it's just kind of funny because sometimes you see this on Sopranos when Agent Harris goes to visit Tony Soprano. There's a certain point where these people on the...

on the underworld watch where they they really start to have i don't even think it's an honor among thieves it's just a respect for the organization and the operation on the other end and i i don't think that i think this could have taken years and years if it hadn't been for that relationship and it's a very new york relationship a lot of times we talk about the pacific or

The stormy beaches of Normandy and Dunkirk. This is just a very New York story. These are people who knew each other, rubbed shoulders with each other, ride the same train, underworld, overworld, Nazis riding the LARR to come from him against it. And without that street smarts, without the gumshoe know-how, without understanding how these things work and can...

And get gummed up really easily. Yeah. Without all of that, I think the World War II takes two to six more years. Jesus, that is quite the... Quite not the prediction, I guess, but quite the analysis. Yeah, just knowing that without... If they hadn't been able to figure out the rum-running game of refueling the German U-boats and supplying them with food and bread...

if they, I mean, that being behind in that alone put D-Day off from 1942 to 1944. So we're already two years behind. And we're two years behind in Amagansett. So, I mean, how are we ever going to make it all the way to, you know,

She's storming the beaches of the Normandy and it's coincidentally the one ship we had that could have helped us to leap aboard was in New York Harbor. It's also called the Normandy. And, you know, the ship gets a mafia hit put out on it.

Yeah, it's a wild story. But this is part of a book that you're currently writing, right? Or pitching around? Yeah, this was churned up in a book I was writing about other things that were happening around this time. And I was just realizing how many people get left out of the story of World War II. And that includes, you know, Mafiosi. That includes New Yorkers. That includes Union longshoremen working the docks at the time.

And it's just amazing how close we came to not getting it. Where can people see or find your other work or follow you or anything like that? Oh, yeah. My first book, Ravington and Bazaars, is out now. It actually has a second life online after I started cooking on TikTok, coincidentally.

And I run TikTok forward slash pizzas where you can watch me cook and I talk about food and stuff like that. Very cool, man. Thank you. I'm developing this book. I'm in the middle of developing this book right now. I'm in the end part of working with my agent on this book now. I'm hoping to have it out soon. And I really enjoy telling the story of...

the Jewish, Italian, and Irish mafia is getting together to kick Hitler's ass. Yeah, it is a good story. But yeah, thanks for joining us. As always, bonus stuff at patreon.com slash new world podcast or on iTunes. And until next week, I just want to thank my guest, Brendan Sullivan, for joining me here and telling us this story. Thanks for having me, Danny. ... ...

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