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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

34. The Modern Mob’s Founder Was a Narcotics Kingpin

Carmine Galante, a powerful, ruthless, and unhinged American Mafiosi was deeply involved in the drug trade. Pinterest

A criminal since childhood, Charles Lucky Luciano emigrated to America at age 9. By age 10, he was involved in shoplifting, mugging, and extortion. At age 19, Luciano was sentenced to six months for selling heroin. In 1920, he joined Joe Masseria’s crime family, and became his chief lieutenant, running his bootlegging, prostitution, and narcotics operations.

Indeed, Lucky Luciano became America’s biggest narcotics trafficker and distributor. Contra the notion popularized by movies and works of fiction that the mob traditionally avoided narcotics, dealing drugs was one of the mafia’s biggest moneymakers since the earliest days of the American mafia.

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.