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Nor was it any sort of secret that Charlie Lucky, despite the mob’s runins with law enforcement, enjoyed this lucrative position. Clearly, he would not want that balance upset, that control lost. He had whacked many enemies—and more than a few former associates—to obtain it. And, if necessary, he could order hits from his jail cell.
ONI approached Murray Gurfein—the extremely bright thirty-year-old head of the Rackets Bureau of the New York County district attorney’s office—with an idea: They should get the mob to root out the subversive elements.
Gurfein agreed. He personally and professionally knew Moses Polakoff, the high-powered lawyer who counted among his deep-pocketed clients one Charlie Lucky. He arranged to meet him for drinks at the Oak Bar of the Plaza.
There, looking out the hotel’s enormous plateglass windows overlooking Central Park, Gurfein made his point: Luciano should cooperate, or he could wait for the Nazi Fascists to arrive.
With the glow from the flames of the torpedoed Liberty ships off Long Island clearly visible at night from New York City, the implications of this were not lost on the very intelligent Polakoff.
Before long, Luciano had agreed to help—some said for special considerations, such as a reduction in his sentence, which Gurfein vehemently denied.
The Mafia began keeping its own watch for Germany sympathizers. It also provided union cards to men from Naval Intelligence as cover, getting them jobs, for example, as dockhands (where they could monitor fuel sales), aboard fishing boats (to spy on waterway traffic), and in hotel cloakrooms (to dig through the pockets and briefcases of suspected fifth column types).
Wild Bill Donovan, who, of course, had made his fortune as a New York lawyer, and who was accustomed to acquiring the best and the brightest for the OSS, tapped Gurfein. And when Donovan prepared Canidy to go into Sicily, he had had Gurfein brief Canidy on the mob, and make arrangements for Canidy to begin his own relationship with them.
No matter how much Canidy could intellectually rationalize what Donovan had described as “dancing with the devil,” he was still unsettled—Maybe “disturbed” is a better word, he thought—by his dealings with the Mafia.
Canidy’s rationalization included the understanding that most people seemed satisfied with the simplistic mind-set of Them vs. Us that defined who fought on which side of the Allied–Axis struggle. He knew, however, that the reality of the situation was not that clear-cut.
You had to be able to use whatever resources you could in order to achieve the ultimate goal of winning the war.
And that means dancing with the devil.
Quoting Churchill, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Canidy’s first dance—his first meeting—had been with Joe “Socks” Lanza.
The forty-one-year-old street-tough wiseguy was the business agent of Local 124, United Seafood Workers Union. As such, he controlled the Fulton Fish Market—in lower Manhattan, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and across the East River from the Brooklyn Army Base and Terminal that loaded Liberty ships. This made him an important man in the mob—the enormous market moved fish from the entire eastern seaboard, Maine to Florida—and he took his orders from Luciano.
Charlie Lucky got word to Joe Socks that he considered Canidy’s request for help to be in line with what they already were doing, and almost immediately Canidy found himself aboard a fishing boat talking to a Sicilian named Francisco Nola.
Nola had made profound declarations of his dedication to fight Hitler and the Berlin-Rome Axis. His reasons, he said, were many.
For one, Nola’s wife was Jewish, and they had had to flee from Sicily to America for her safety. Then the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, fearful of the power of the Mafia, ordered his vicious secret police OVRA—the Organization for Vigilance Against Anti-Fascism—to sweep through Sicily and systematically arrest suspected mafiosos. Some of Nola’s relatives had wound up in the penal colonies on the small volcanic islands north of Sicily, in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Nola offered to aid Canidy in any way he could. And he more or less had been a man of his word, ultimately helping Canidy find Professor Rossi in Palermo, then shuttling them by fishing boat to the submarine that took them to Algiers.
That had been in just the last week. And in that time, Nola and Canidy had come to le
arn about the Nazis in Palermo having chemical and biological weapons.
And that the latter involved injecting yellow fever into the human hosts taken from the island prisons.
The men who had wheeled the pallet of fish into the warehouse were now coming out. The hand truck had another pallet on it, this one empty.
Canidy yawned again, then glanced at this watch.
Now one hour thirty minutes past due.
Aw, to hell with it, he thought, and was just about to head back up the hill to the OSS villa. He would try to arrange for some boat to take him out and look for the damn missing fishing boat, either tonight or at the crack of dawn tomorrow.
But then the longshoreman pulling the warehouse door closed pointed toward the dock.
“There,” he said to Canidy, his rough voice emotionless. “The Stefania.”
Canidy looked and, sure as hell, there he saw the silhouette of the fifty-footer sliding up to the top of the T-dock. There was a burst of diesel exhaust after the transmission had been bumped into reverse to slow the vessel, then the deck crew jumped down onto the pier, threw lines around the rusted iron mooring cleats, and secured the boat.
Canidy forced himself not to appear too anxious to reach the boat but still managed to nudge aside the longshoreman who had pointed out the boat’s arrival to him.
