Ep 7: Disorganized Crime

Novel.

I read a lot of romance novels. People have a tendency to make fun of them, mostly because it's a genre largely targeted towards and written by women. Romance novels are full of hope, humor, and yes, sometimes there's really steamy sex. You like dragons and elves. You want to know what it looks like when a whole hockey team finds love. Maybe you'd like a fictionalized version of an amish courtship, or what would it look like for a rabbi to fall for a former sex worker. Romance has

Okay, a brief synopsis of America's fascination with the Italian mafia.

If I may.

In the nineteen thirties, when the Lucky Luciano trial first started to hit the local papers, life imitated art and aught imitated life.

In those days.

Until the trial of Lucky there may have been rising public panic about the seeping influence of crime and corruption on American life, but the gangsters themselves.

American people started to pick up sympathy for these guys. You've got this crazy dichotomy between people fascinated with the mob and people who hated and feared the mob. For very good reason.

We can thank Hollywood for that.

Those early gangster movies were based on real life crime figures.

In the early thirties, Hollywood is turning out film after film about anti hero gangsters. Whether it's Edward g Robinson playing Rico in the nineteen thirty one movie Little.

Caesar Allison Rico.

I'm gonna talk to you, but you're not gonna hear a word I say.

That would have been al Capone.

This is inside dope, and if it gets out, it'll be just too bad for somebody.

Or Humphrey Bogart as Duke Manty in The Petrified Forest, released in nineteen thirty six.

If you'll think I was kitten when I said I'd be glad to knock you up.

People all love The Petrified Forest because that's Dilinger. You know, Bogi really nailed it.

You're all right, Paly, I got good ideas. I'll try that picture soos that don't hurt.

By the early thirties, it di was kissed that people wanted to see the gangsters.

The government, unsurprisingly doesn't like this.

The gangster is being seen as the hero. We've got to stop that. We've got to stop that.

So the government starts promoting their own style of hero in films.

Now we're going to make movies about g men, you know, government men, the FBI agents.

I don't think the public ever really bought that. After all, having the law as Heroes doesn't exactly fit with most people's experiences.

The general attitude towards criminality come nineteen thirty three as well. The gangsters in fact that in many ways they're better than the police. At least they're not being paid by the state. They're not taking money and being paid by the state, so they're cleaner than that.

Then there's Dewey, with his investigation into the Mob. This mustachioled crusader works hard to frame Dutch Schultz and then Lucky Luciano as public enemy number one. Dewey does start to have some success here changing public attitudes. He begins using radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines, and the hype of Lucky's trial helps chase away any lingering doubts the public may have about how bad the Mob is. By the time of the guilty verdict, the legend of Lucky Luciano

Lucky Luciano, who is this guy? Who was he for real?

When it comes to unicon Dewey's prized mob conviction? Is it possible the whole story of Lucky is a fraud? From the teams at iHeartRadio and novel I'm Nicole Perkins and this is the Godmother, Episode seven Disorganized Crime. On June eighteenth, nineteen thirty six, twelve days after Lucky Luciano was found guilty on charges of compulsory prostitution, he returns to court for sentencing Dewey, Lucky, and the other co defendants pushed past the crowds and step into the Manhattan courtroom.

They were set on putting these guys away for as long as they could, particularly Luciano.

A few weeks ago, Lucky had been all arrogance and swagger as he took to the stand in that same courtroom. But if he'd been surprised by the jury's eventual guilty verdict, it was nothing compared to his slack jaw shock. As Judge McCook reads his sentence aloud to the courtroom.

Holy Toledo for prostitution, you're giving me a life sentence.

Lucky Luciano took the harshest term from Judge McCook.

Thirty to fifty years in prison. It was a life sentence.

Once all sentences have been handed out, Lucky and the other defendants are taken away for processing.

It was quickly determined they needed to be split up and sent to different prisons so that they couldn't reorganize this sex trafficking gang.

Lucky heads upstate to a prison on the Canadian border, up the river.

As they say, he wasn't taken down by taxes like al Capone or Waxi Garden. He wasn't shot in the head by arrival like Dutch Schalt. He was brought down by a bunch of two bit hores. Most men in the underworld insisted it could not be true.

In the end, it's the women who bring Lucky low. Lucky might be down, but he and his team of expensive lawyers are far from done because, let's face it, the prosecution's case hadn't exactly been watertight.

At best, questionable, if not don't right illegal.

So as that summer of nineteen thirty six passes, Lucky's team starts to work on their appeal in an attempt to swiftly free Lucky from his new home up the river. And while they're working on that, what is Eunice Carter doing what she does?

After Luciano's trial, Thomas Dewey's team continues to investigate organized crime.

She and Dewey are back in their office on the Woolworth Building's fourteenth floor. She was a relative rookie when she joined Dewey's investigation, But Eunice Harbor's ambitions of becoming a judge one day It's a lofty goal on any scale, let alone for a black woman in the footheels of a vast mountain of systemic racism and sexism in America. But I wouldn't be surprised if Eunice thought why not? Her career as a prosecutor was off to the best

The witnesses the Underworld had a strong self interest in pressing the narrative that these women were unreliable witnesses.

It wasn't just what the witnesses had said on the stand, it's the way Eunice and Dewey had coaxed that testimony out of them in the first place.

So they were effectively held against their will in communicado unlesson until they cooperate.

Lucky and his team are well aware of just how shady the coercion of testimonies had been from the witnesses. In fact, most of America is becoming aware. The public has been reading a slow trickle of allegations that had found their way into the newspapers. Some of the witnesses who had cooperated with the prosecution are now talking to reporters about their experiences. I wonder if Dewey's composure cracks away from the courthouse as he reads the newspaper over

It is certainly true that the ones who were willing to talk were given special treatment. They didn't have to stay necessarily in the jails. In some cases, they were put into secret apartments.

Dewey's assistant prosecutors was taking the girls out the bar and getting drunk with them.

I'm pretty sure Unis wasn't the assistant prosecutor taking the girls out, but who knows.

The idea of whining and dining the ones who were released from jail was fairly outrageous.

And the newspaper reports are now alleging that this coaxing of the witnesses didn't stop with simple nights out on the town. Apparently, certain promises were made to the witnesses about rewards After a positive conviction, several.

Of them received emoluments that were highly unusual. Two of the women were sent on a cruise around the world, paid for by doing as prosecutors.

When the trial began, Judge McCook reminded the jurors of the sex workers humanity, But maybe he should have delivered that message to the prosecution as well. These witnesses had been exploited at every turn by their customers, the mob, the prosecution, the defense, and now the press. Yes, everyone wants these little birdies to sing for their supper, with promises of gilded cages for protection, but there's no real

His press releases afterwards were more of a justification of what had been done during the trial. He was very mute on what steps were being taken to protect the women.

After the trial, when Lucky is convicted, Cokey and Millie Harris, one of the other trial witnesses, understandably decide to get the hell out of Dodge. They flee upstate to Rochester, New York, and whole up in a cheap hotel. Breathing fresh air and looking over their shoulders.

They began writing these stories that they were hired to write for Liberty Magazine.

They were offered the magazine deal in exchange for their life stories.

A series of stories was called Underworld Nights.

Liberty Magazine is a popular magazine that features stories from people of all walks of life, including celebrities, politicians, and former sex workers turned prosecution witnesses. The series of articles is published.

Once they finished that and they were paid for that, they couldn't go back to New York to their old lives, so they decided to go on a road trip and they bought a car. They took the southern route out to California, California.

Because Flow and Millie aren't just magazine writers now, in the aftermath of the trial, they'd also been offered a movie deal.

They were under the impression that this film deal was imminent and they wanted to be in LA when the film deal went down.

The ladies don't end up in Tinseltown right away. Maybe they want to make their money stretch a little longer, or try their hand at living straight. Because before long they're living in Pomona, just outside of LA and they're getting short of cash because they've spent their remaining money on a kind of a strange new business.

They decided to open a gas station and Pomona, of all things, and the two of them opened a gas station and they ran it for a while, and Koki Flow is okay.

With that, But for Millie Harris. It's not so simple. Hollywood tends to take its time, and the film about their lives still hasn't come about yet. And the gas station Pomona life isn't quite what she'd anticipated. I'm sure it lacked all the glitz and glam of New York City, and she's a city girl. Plus she's carrying an emotional weight.

She wanted to get back to New York.

She missed her husband, a husband she had helped put away alongside.

Lucky who was in jail and sing sing.

Maybe the guilt is eating away at her.

Because Millie Harris, without Kochie Flow's knowledge, started communicating with the lawyers for Luciana who were handling his appeal, and an investigator wanted to get her to recant her testimony, which she did.

Eventually, both women returned to New York together, back to their old lives. Cochie goes back on heroin, she became.

An addict again. They both went into a sanitarium to try to take the cure to get off of heroin, and it was during that time that they signed these affidavits recanting their testimony.

Sometimes the fear of something new is as much of a prison as anything else. By March nineteen thirty seven, all the prosecution's key witnesses have officially turned. Eunice and Dewey have lost the very foundation of their case against Lucky, and Lucky's defense is picking up steam. All they have to do now is get these recanted statements in front of an appeals court, get the conviction overturned, and then Lucky will be a free man. Dewey is clearly worried

McCook did something that was highly unusual.

You see, back in June of nineteen thirty six, when the Blue Ribbon jury had dropped the bombshell of Lucky Luciano's conviction, When Dewey was striding triumphantly from the courtroom and Eunice was well not there as the drama played out, another scene was also taking place, this one behind closed doors. Judge McCook, instead of taking a well earned break after ruling over the trial of the Century, is in his office surrounded by sex workers.

After the verdict, and while the motion for new trial was pending, he called all seventy some women who were still in jail into his chambers.

These seventy women are the sex workers and madams who have been witnesses in the trial. And this isn't some post trial party.

And without any notice to the defense or without any defense lawyer being present, on the record, with a prosecutor present, he made them reassert their testimony.

All seventy women are told to swear again that their testimony was accurate.

Highly unusual to do that, outrageous. Actually, the case really reeks a prosgatorial misconduct, at least by today's standards.

These women don't have a cushy life at the start of Lucky's trial, and we know it took a lot to persuade them to testify in the first place. Their lives leading up to the trial had been severely uprooted, and it probably didn't get any easier after their names had been dragged through the press. Plus, I imagine the mob and their defense attorneys probably weren't very sweet when

The conviction was analyzed by the appellate and was denied for an appeal. They denied a retrial, and they denied a mistrial.

Thanks in part to Judge McCook's early intervention.

Judge McCook, I'm not saying it was a crooked trial. I'm just saying, in nineteen thirty six, don't be a high profile criminal. They put him away in a manner that today standards I would hope wouldn't hold water.

It was not fair, but it was considered fair for its time.

Dewey and Unice's triumph is now set in stone. It looks like Charles Lucky Luciano is stuck in jail for the foreseeable future, and as he languishes there while his lawyers try and fail to win an appeal, Eunice and Dewey are already busy again. They both continue their fight against organized crime, although with very different results. Unice is now diligently prosecuting Numbers runners in Harlem.

She winds up taking down some numbers racket leaders in Harlem, which is sort of met with mixed feelings within the Harlem community.

Unice's success on this front isn't met with blanket approval.

There's definitely a lot of people who are very happy because they do not want there to be criminal activity in their community. But then also when you look at the newspapers, not only black owned papers in carl but across the city, there's editorials that are like, why is this woman targeting her own community?

In order to get ahead in the predominantly white world of law and justice, Unice has to prosecute people who walk the same streets as she does. It's a fine line. I imagine she has to prove to her white colleagues she won't be biased in her work, while also trying to prove her self trustworthy to her Harlem community.

We talk frequently today about the constraints on black womanhood in the public eye. Right we know that black women are subjected to more critique, to more hate, to a different set of standards than other people. These pressure from within the black community to be a representative of the race would also presumably have made Unice Carter fuel pressure even when she wasn't in white spaces.

During this time. Whenever Unice Carter opens the paper and sees her name, it's not with professional accolades or recognition. In the society pages, she reads judgments of her loyalty, her character, and her image. The newspapers that used to praise Unice now judge her as harshly as any jury. Meanwhile, Dewey is receiving a much more positive reception in the media. By the end of nineteen thirty seven, Thomas Dewey is

Not in cooperation with police and federal law enforcement departments throughout.

The United States.

The only national program that brings you authentic police case history gain in Muster.

In the immediate aftermath of Lucky's trial. Dewey is not shy about trumpeting his performance.

He gave his reports on WNYC radio. He also regularly gave interviews. Dewey, by thirty seven thirty eight was in the news. He was the guy who put Lucciano away. He was the gangbuster.

Gangbusters is a law versus gangster fact based radio drama. It first aired in nineteen thirty five. It's a program that Dewey becomes associated with by nineteen thirty six. In nineteen thirty nine, a book called ninety Times Guilty is published. It tells a now familiar story of Lucky Luciano as a shadowy mafia figure pulling the strings of the underworld,

Ninety Times Guilty came out with the idea that Luciano had centralized, organized modernized the American mafia.

It's a great pr strategy for Dewey to lean into.

He knows that victory of a kingping boss is going to be incredibly good publicity for him.

The only problem is this book was largely fiction. It combines some of the hype about Lucky that Dewey has been feeding to the press with some new tar tales.

The idea that Luciano organized crime in America because he'd killed sixty to eighty Greeces as they were called old style mafia gangsters. It gives credence to the idea that he was a dominant figure in organized crime in America nationally.

It was just a.

Completely made up story that true crime writers ran with.

And it isn't just these scenes of vicious mob murders this book has fictionalized. It's also cementing a bigger lie about Lucky too.

I'm not trying to be the cheerleader for Lucky Luciano. But I realized the opposition had a self righteous, zealous campaign going and they needed a poster boy.

If you want to make your name, there's no point in putting some small time hoodlum from downtown Manhattan in prison. That's not going to make you famous. But you get the boss of all bosses of the mafia, and suddenly you were all over the papers.

Dewey needed to position Lucky as the one true face of crime in America. It was vital for people to think it had been Lucky pulling all the strings. And now that he's been taken down, the war on crime has been won.

By the end of nineteen thirties, with Dewey's success as well as Whover's success, American newspapers are saying, well, we've beaten organized crime.

Of course they hadn't.

The book is part of a winning career political strategy.

For doing There's something to be said of criminal poster boys. Your El Choppels, your John Gotties, your Frank Lucas, your Lucky Luciano. Who makes them that? Are they really the face of the problem poster boy for whom.

Dewey's plan of using an anti organized crime crusade to get to power has been used many times since. Remember Giuliani versus the Mob in the nineties. Dewey and his subsequent imitators are able to gain traction because they're tapping into an already existing rich current in America.

White supremacy is absolutely central to organized crime. I don't think you can discuss one without the other.

Lucky arriving into the squalor poverty and xenophobia of the Lower East Side of New York is an ideal candidate.

Now, a lot of the mafia stuff is a reworking of nativist idea as bad in America has to come from somewhere else. It's foreign, it's the other.

We still see this today, right, If.

It is organized crime within America, it's by so called immigrant groups, it's Mexican nacos, it's Russian mafia, it's the mafia. You don't tend to think of organized crime as being American. I think what happened in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties was this drive to demonize people in a way that really hadn't been attempted before.

Organized crime is totally and only to do with Italians who've got the braun and Jews who've got the brain using those ethnic stereotypes, which is essentially the analysis that the US government followed, and certainly true crime writers.

So you get this fertile ground for Dewey's projection of Lucky as the mafia boogeyman, an evil puppet master responsible for all of society's ills.

If you create a super demon, you're more likely to get funding, you're more likely to get political power, you're more likely to remain in political power. And also if you screw up, you can say, well, how on earth do you expect us to be able to deal with this? They're all over the place. They're far too big for us.

There's a career opportunity for prosecutors in America that do tend to use their trials and convictions to advance their political prospects. And I'd argue the prosecution of Lucky Luciana was, to use London terms, a fit up.

In other words, Lucky's trial was rigged. So what is the truth about Lucky Luciano? Was he truly the godfather of the mafia?

Categorically no, not at all.

An important career criminal who now other career criminals became rich enough during prohibition to be able to afford hotel rooms in the ward Off historia. But the mythology stems from Dewey calling the greatest gangster in America. He was a career criminal, an extortionist in a city full of extortionists.

It's not that doing in units had the wrong man. It was that there never really was just one mafia puppet master controlling all vice and organized crime. One thing Lucky is guilty of, though, with his scarred face, sharp clothes and ritzy address, is standing out.

If you dressed better and had nicer cars than the governor, people notice, And if you have a wow factor that makes enemies ears perk up, you're going to become that de facto face of everything those people are out to get.

Government liked to make the battle against organized crime good versus evil. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. But there's so many different shades of great.

This framing of Lucky as the boss of organized crime is still the way we understand the mafia today. It doesn't just come from Hollywood's portrayal of the mob. It also comes from a deliberate manipulation of the public and the law. It's a falsehood that originates as much from our criminal justice system as it does from those la writers' rooms Millie and Kokie Flow wanted to get into.

I mean, The Godfather was a great film, but for me, a great misrepresentation of the issue of organized crime in America, based partly on the Luciana legend.

Why is it that Luchana has this reputation that he doesn't deserve. Well, the answer lies really with Thomas Dewey. Dewey manipulated the press very successfully, and that mythology has never really been challenged sufficiently, I don't think to this day.

But what about Eunice Carter? How much is she on the hook for this?

Too?

A team player, which is a good thing, but not necessarily if you're in a team that is involved in manipulating justice for political advancement, which it was in Dewey's case.

Eunice Carter was probably a good fit for Thomas Dewey's office because she too was career motivated. She had bigger barriers and hurdles to jump just because of who she was. I believe she was probably as determined, if not more than Dewey to carry out their vision of justice.

But for Unice Carter, Thomas Dewey would not have been able to convict Lucky Luciano. I don't know that Luciano would ever have been convicted of anything.

I guess you could say Eunice Carter is the godmother of the Godfather. But while this undercurrent of American life is giving Dewey's career a seemingly unstoppable upwards trajectory, unsurprisingly, it isn't having the same impact on Unice. And as America enters the forties and Dewey's career continues to take off, Eunice's professional life seems to languish. In nineteen thirty eight, Eunice is named to Dewey's staff to lead something called

My name is Ellen Paulson. I research and I write books about women who were involved with notorious gangsters in desperadoes.

My name is Christopher Alfhelps and I worked for the University of Exeter. I've published two books and several articles on the organized crime in the United States. I tend to specialize in a periage from eighteen sixty five to nineteen forty one.

My name is Christian SIBERLINI and I am an organized crime historian and author.

My name is Robert Whalen, and I'm an Emerathus Professor of history at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte, North Carolina.

My name is Chuck Greeves. Before becoming a writer, I spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer. My fourth novel was basically fictionalization of the famous nineteen thirty six vice trial.

I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon of the Jazz Age.

I am Claire White, and I am the director of Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.

I'm Sarah J. Jackson.

I am an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliate with the Africana and African American Studies Program Here.

I'm Mike woodowis author of Organized Crime in American Power and a teacher at the University of West of England. And I think, with Christopher we are professionally story in to look at the issue of organized crime in particular.

The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is host and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid. Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zaiana Yusuf. Our editor is Ajua Jima Broompong. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien and Mith Lee Raw, and our researcher is Zaiana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is