Over the years Luciano told several stories about how he got his nickname and the cut on his right cheek that caused his eye to droop. According to one such tale, kidnappers had tied him up and held him hostage, demanding inside information about a large drug shipment that was coming into New York City. In another version the scar was a present from a policeman who believed Lucky had acted inappropriately with one of his daughters. Either of these might be true, but the story that makes the most sense given Luciano's career in crime claims that in 1929 a gang of thugs sent by Mafia boss Salvatore Maranzano captured Luciano, tied him up, hung him by his arms from the rafters, and tortured him. Maranzano certainly had motive. From Maranzano's point of view, Luciano didn't know his place. He was smart and ambitious, and unlike the small-minded "Moustache Petes" who ran the Mafia in America in the early part of the 20th century, Luciano had vision. Maranzano felt threatened.
Petty rackets were for suckers, Luciano believed, and the Sicilian immigrants' suspicion and distrust of all non-Sicilians was counterproductive to the real goal of organized crime: making money. Maranzano and his chief "moustache Pete" rival, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria wanted to keep their organizations exclusively for Sicilians. Luciano by contrast saw a role for all the ethnic crime groups in America, particularly the Jewish gangs. Why have dozens of squabbling local gangs when a nationwide syndicate with central authority could pool resources and turn criminal enterprise into big business? Putting together a national syndicate was Luciano's dream.
Luciano's positive feelings about the worth of non-Sicilians stemmed from his childhood. Born Salvatore Lucania outside of Palermo, Sicily, Luciano came to New York City as a boy. He started his first racket when he was still in elementary school. "For a penny or two a day," Carl Sifakis writes in The Mafia Encyclopedia, "Luciano offered younger and smaller Jewish kids his personal protection against beatings on the way to school; if they didn't pay, he beat them up." But one scrawny, little Jewish boy from Poland defied him, and when Luciano tried to carry out his threat of violence, the kid put up a fight and showed that he was a lot tougher than he looked. Luciano was impressed. He asked the boy what his name was. Maier Suchowljansky, the boy said. Years later he would shorten his name to Meyer Lansky, and he and Luciano would form a partnership that would revolutionize crime in America.
To realize his dream for a national crime syndicate, Luciano first had to gain control of New York. The old bosses, who cared less for their men's well-being than their own personal enrichment, had to go. Luciano orchestrated a plot to kill "Joe the Boss" Masseria, luring him to a Coney Island restaurant and engaging him in a game of cards after a big meal. When Luciano excused himself to go to the men's room, four gunmen�including the notoriously violent Bugsy Siegel�walked into the restaurant and shot Masseria to death.
Masseria's passing gave rival boss Salvatore Maranzano unchallenged authority over the New York rackets. Luciano made peace with Maranzano and was made his second-in-command, put in charge of Masseria's men. Maranzano was a bit more forward-thinking than Joe the Boss in that he sought to organize the Sicilian gangsters in America into five borghati or family villages. This was a step in the direction Luciano favored, but it wasn't enough to satisfy the ambitious young gangster. Sensing that Luciano would be trouble, Maranzano paid the notorious Irish hitman Vince "Mad Dog" Coll a down payment of $25,000 with a promise of $25,000 more for the rubout of Luciano and his top associate Vito Genovese. But Luciano had a spy within Maranzano's organization, Tommy Lucchese, and when Luciano learned of the contract on his life, he decided to strike first.
On September 10, 1931, Maranzano ordered Luciano and Genovese to come to his office. Fearing that they were being set up for the kill, Luciano dispatched his own team of hand-picked killers: four Jewish gangsters whose faces were unknown to Maranzano's people. The hit team went to Maranzano's office before Luciano's scheduled arrival and told the secretary that they were government agents sent to do a spot-check of the books. Tommy Lucchese made sure he was there to point out Maranzano to the hit men. After disarming Maranzano's bodyguards, two of the hitmen held the guards at bay in the outer office while the other two went into Maranzano's inner office where they shot and stabbed him. Their mission accomplished, the four assassins and Lucchese fled down the staircase. On their way down, they ran into "Mad Dog" Coll who was just arriving to get set up for the murders of Luciano and Genovese. Informed of Maranzano's bloody demise, Coll turned around and left a happy man, $25,000 richer with no "work" to be performed.
(For decades, journalists and mob scholars have cited September 10, 1931, as "The Night of the Sicilian Vespers" when scores of mobsters�as many as 90 by some accounts�were assassinated allegedly on orders from Luciano and Meyer Lansky in a mass purge to clear the decks for their takeover. Jerry Capeci in The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia credibly debunks this myth, proving that at most five gangsters tied to Maranzano died that day.)