Charles "Lucky" Luciano — the 1936 prostitution trial

The most powerful gangster in America was convicted in 1936 not of murder but of compulsory prostitution, on the testimony of the women.

In 1935 New York's governor appointed Thomas E. Dewey special prosecutor for racketeering in Manhattan. One of his assistants, Eunice Carter, the first Black woman to serve as an assistant district attorney in the state, noticed that women arrested for prostitution in her cases kept arriving with the same bondsmen and the same lawyers and telling the same story. She argued that the trade had been organized from above. Dewey's investigators confirmed that a "combination" of bookers and enforcers took roughly half of the women's earnings, and traced its protection upward to Charles "Lucky" Luciano, born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily in 1897 and by then the dominant figure in the American Mafia. A new state joinder statute, passed at Dewey's urging, allowed dozens of related crimes and defendants to be tried in a single indictment for the first time.

On February 1, 1936, about 160 officers raided some 80 brothels and took roughly 87 women and madams into custody. Under the material-witness law many were held for months and, the ABA Journal's 2015 account notes, were pressured with the threat of prosecution; several cooperating witnesses later received favors. Luciano was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas on April 1, 1936, returned to New York on April 18 under a $350,000 bail, and indicted with nine co-defendants on 90 counts, later reduced to 62. The trial before Justice Philip J. McCook opened in May 1936. Some 68 witnesses testified, about 40 of them prostitutes and madams. Florence "Cokey Flo" Brown, a former madam and heroin user, testified to meetings at which Luciano said he wanted to run the houses like a chain store, "the same as the A&P." Nancy Presser and Mildred Harris testified to knowing him personally; Harris was impeached by a boyfriend who said she "didn't know Lucky from beans." Luciano took the stand and was cross-examined by Dewey on his unexplained income.

The jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts in the early hours of June 7, 1936. On June 18 McCook sentenced Luciano to 30 to 50 years, at the time the longest sentence ever imposed for compulsory prostitution, and he was sent to Clinton Prison at Dannemora. Appeals continued until October 10, 1938, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined review. Brown, Presser and Harris all later signed affidavits recanting their testimony; the courts rejected the recantations. The NYC Municipal Archives holds the District Attorney's case file, No. 211537, with the mugshots and investigative material.

In 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence, working through Meyer Lansky, sought Luciano's help in securing the New York waterfront, and later credited him with contacts useful to the 1943 invasion of Sicily. On January 3, 1946 Governor Dewey, acting on a unanimous parole board recommendation, commuted the sentence on condition of permanent deportation. Luciano sailed from Brooklyn aboard the freighter Laura Keene on February 10, 1946 and landed at Naples on February 28. He died at Naples airport on January 26, 1962.

The case matters to this archive for a simple reason. The prosecution of pimping in America did not begin with Black men in the 1970s. In 1936 the state of New York took down the head of organized crime on the testimony of the women who worked in his houses, and the women, not the murders, put him away. The trade, its organization, its coercion and its prosecution belong to American history as a whole.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Salvatore Lucania

BORN
Lercara Friddi, Sicily, November 24, 1897

STATUS
Died January 26, 1962, Naples, Italy, aged 64

ERA
1936–1946

ASSOCIATED WITH
New York; Thomas E. Dewey; Eunice Carter; Clinton Prison, Dannemora; Operation Underworld

STANDING
Documented