City Boy

Charles ("Lucky") Luciano, supergangster and onetime vice lord of Manhattan, has been trying hard to look calm, quiet and respectable in Italy, but he makes no secret of his yearning for New York. "I'm a city boy," Lucky once said to a reporter. "Italy's dead--nice, but dead. I like movement. Business opportunities here are no good. All small-time stuff."

Lucky has told U.S. friends that, somehow or other, he would get back to New York by next New Year's Eve. If they wanted to know where to meet him, let them look in the classified ads of the New York Times for Dec. 31. Meanwhile, last week, the frustrated city boy found it impossible to stay in even stodgy old Rome.

In 1946, after serving 9 1/2 years in prison, Lucky was deported to Italy. There, except for one abortive attempt.to reenter the U.S. by way of Cuba, he lived according to his idea of a model citizen. In one of Rome's fashionable quarters, he shared a penthouse with his blonde, toothsome, 28-year-old mistress, Igea Lissoni, a former dancer and nightclub worker. Igea attributes her good fortune to the prophecy of a Milan fortuneteller, who two years ago told her she would meet the man of her dreams in Capri. Igea hastened forthwith to Capri, and there met Lucky Luciano, whose vast suite took up half of a floor in the island's best hotel.

"Pure Inventions." Lucky wore expensive clothes, changed them often. Headwaiters in the very best places welcomed him with deference. Italy's police estimated he was spending $50,000 a year, wondered where he got it. He had a small bakery and one or two other visible enterprises, but they brought in only a tiny fraction of what Lucky was spending.

Occasionally the police questioned Lucky. Said he: "If somebody slips on a banana peel, the cops call me in to find out if I'm selling bananas." Three months ago a police bigwig admitted that press charges against Luciano were "pure inventions." Lucky returned the compliment. "Italy has one of the best police forces in the world," said he, "and if they had anything on me, they'd arrest me."

"So Gentle & Kind." At Rome's Ciampino airport last month the police arrested a "businessman" from New York named Charles Vincent Trupia, who had on him 20 Ibs. of cocaine, worth a half million dollars at peddlers' prices. The police, reflecting that the drug traffic was one of Lucky's oldest loves, hauled him out of his penthouse. Day after day, they questioned him. They wanted to know about another jail suspect who claimed to have been a Luciano lieutenant. Said Lucky: "The way they talk about my 'lieutenants,' I got more than the army." He was allowed to have changes of clothes and tasty meals (sent in from restaurants), but the police would not admit Igea, who wanted to bring him some "little cakes." She complained bitterly: "I'm lonely in this big apartment. Charley was always so gentle and kind. Why, oh, why don't they stop this persecution?"

"Deadest Dump." After nine days, the police let Lucky go. They were unable to pin anything on him, but last week they handed him a foglio di via obbligatorio--a document compelling him to report within four days to the police at Lercara Friddi, the humble Sicilian town where he began life, 52 years ago, as Salvatore Lucania, and which he once described as "the deadest dump in the world." The police hinted that Lucky might eventually be permitted on the mainland again, but that never again could he live in Rome.

The prospect of even a short sojourn in Lercara Friddi was enough to make an active man short-tempered. Lucky roughed up photographers at the entrance to his apartment building. Said he: "In the States I know what I can do and what I can't. Over here it's different. They got laws I don't know anything about."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.