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How Lies Surrounding the Alamo took Root and Other Historic Myths

Khalid Elhassan February 28, 2022 38 min

10. The Myth That the Mob Didn’t Deal Drugs

Myth vs Fact - Lucky Luciano — Lucky Luciano. The Mob Museum

Italian-born gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano (1897 – 1962) was a visionary criminal and mafia boss who revolutionized organized crime in the United States. Among other things, he founded today’s Genovese crime family – one of New York City’s five mafia families. He is also credited with establishing The Commission – a committee that ran the Italian-American mafia and arbitrated its internal disputes to avert bloody struggles disruptive to business. Lucky Luciano is considered the founding father of the modern Italian-American mafia.

Contra the widespread myth that the mafia stayed away from narcotics, Lucky Luciano and the mob were America’s biggest drug traffickers. A criminal since childhood, Luciano had emigrated to America when he was nine years old. By age ten he was a shoplifter, a mugger, and an extortionist. When he was nineteen, Luciano was sentenced to six months for selling heroin. In 1920, he joined Joe “The Boss” Masseria’s crime family. He became his chief lieutenant and ran his bootlegging, prostitution, and narcotics operations.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.