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Charles “Lucky” Luciano was an ItalianAmerican gangster who was said by the FBI to be the man who “organized” organized crime in the United States. In many ways, he was the model for the character Don Corleone in the popular book and movie, The Godfather 1972. He evaded arrest and survived attempted gangland assassinations only to meet his downfall in 1936 while vacationing in Hot Springs Garland County.Luciano was born Salvatore Lucania on November 24, 1897, in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, the third of five children to Antonio Lucania and Rosalie Capporelli Lucania. His mother kept house, and his father worked in the sulfur mines as well as doing whatever work he could find in the poor hillside village near the town of Corleone.When Lucania was ten, the family moved to a tenement flat in the Lower East Side of New York City, New York. While a schoolboy, Lucania wanted money to escape poverty. After working lowpaying jobs such as being a delivery boy, he began demanding that younger children on their way to and from school pay him their lunch money as “protection.” He met a Jewish boy named Meyer Lansky who refused to be bullied, and they became lifelong friends.

 

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