FBI memorandum on "Charles Luciana, with aliases" (August 28, 1935)

Pages 2 to 6 of Part 01 of the Vault’s file “Charles (Lucky) Luciano / Salvatore Lucania” are a typed copy of a memorandum dated August 28, 1935, headed “Re: Charles Luciana, with aliases.” The same copy opens Part 03. It was read from the viewer’s OCR, which is clear for most of this typed copy; the page images could not be fetched. “Luciana” is the Bureau’s spelling in this memorandum.

The memorandum gathers what the Bureau’s files held. It says the New York office, investigating the Kansas City Massacre case in September 1933, had found that Benjamin Siegel “was an associate of” Louis Buchalter, Charles “Lucky” Luciana and others, and that the Kansas City file contained nothing more on him. It quotes notations from a New York report on the associates of Arthur Flegenheimer and from the Identification Division’s files. Those notations are the Bureau’s characterizations and are not repeated here.

Most of the memorandum is an account, received through the New York Special Agent in Charge, R. Whitley, from a New York Post reporter. The reporter said that in July 1935 Luciano asked to meet him at the Aqueduct race track, said he had heard that the fugitive Karpis was coming to New York, and, “indirectly and more by innuendo than direct statements,” suggested word be passed to the United States Attorney that he and others would try to “turn up” Karpis “in the event Schultz was not prosecuted too vigorously” at “the second trial of “Dutch” Schultz.” The reporter said he told Luciano “such a proposition was out of the question.” A meeting with Whitley at the Empire race track at Yonkers on July 20, 1935 did not take place. These are the reporter’s statements as the Bureau recorded them, not findings.

The memorandum ends with the Identification Division’s arrest record for “Charles Lucania” from 1921 to 1931: in Jersey City in 1921 for carrying a concealed weapon, in New York in 1928 for assault and robbery (discharged) and in 1929 for grand larceny (discharged), in Miami in 1930, in New York in February 1931 for felonious assault, and in Cleveland in July 1931 for investigation, with earlier notations from 1916 to 1927. An arrest is not a conviction, and the record gives few dispositions.