The Lucchese's Go Hollywood

With Lepke, put away due to his role in Murder Inc., Lucchese assumed total control of the garment industry. In particular due to the nature of the industry as related to a constant need for an influx of cash. Lucchese was able to take the art of loan-sharking to new heights. He would be willing to lend money to garment factory owners, who may have difficulty getting it from a bank. Needless to say, his rates of interest on the loan were much higher than what any bank would ever charge. In many cases he also requested that some of his people be put on the payroll of the factory. No problem with laying any one of off because of this new hire, since his people only showed up to pick up pay checks. But after a while these absentee-workers would begin to show up more often and start to give suggestions as to how the business should be run. Over night the factory owner came to the realization that he had new partners. And these were partners who begin to bleed so much out of the business that they squeeze it dry. But not to worry, if the business became that bad there was insurance to fall back on for needed cash. If perhaps a fire would break out and destroy the factory, which was going under at any rate, the insurance could be collected squeezing the last couple of pennies out of the original business.

Lucchese had amassed enough power to move up in the ranks of organized crime and began to make use of the relationships he had built up with other Dons over the years. In particular he became very close to the man that had taken over the major crime family in New York. Lucchese and Carlo Gambino were close friends going back into the Castellammarese War period. They were men with many things in common. Both had been born in Palermo. And both were filled with an ambition to rise to the top of organization. His daughter Frances, an attractive woman educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Manhattan, married Thomas, elder son of Carlo Gambino. Here was an alliance between two great American crime Families.

When Lucchese died, much of his power in the Garment Center, particularly the control of the Teamsters locals and the haulage industry, transferred to Thomas Gambino and the crime family he had become part of. By the early 1980's, the four companies he owned and operated (direct descents of the business Lucchese had bequeathed him) were handling ninety percent of the trucking of finished goods picked up and shipped to retailers and showrooms. He was also charging forty to seventy percent more on his freight costs than independent haulers. Thomas Gambino was being groomed at this time in 1984, for leadership of the family, to succeed his uncle Paul Castellano, the current boss, who inevitably would go off to prison on impending charges. Although he had married well, helping to cement the power of two of the major Mafia families in America, and although he was a successful and very rich man, due in no small part to his relationship into the Lucchese family, he had never succeeded in becoming his own man.

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