Record
Case file
1974-10-02
FBI Records: The Vault, Charles (Lucky) Luciano / Salvatore Lucania Part 02 (viewer pages 142–144)
FBI memorandum of October 2, 1974, "The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano": the Bureau's statement that Luciano created the Commission "in 1931"
An FBI headquarters memorandum judged a 1974 book presented as Luciano's memoirs to be "a complete fraud." Among the errors it lists, it says Bureau information indicates Luciano dropped an old title "when he created the concept of the La Cosa Nostra ruling Commission in 1931." The Bureau's 1974 summary, not a record of a 1931 event.
- Date
- 1974-10-02
- Kind
- case-file
- Source
- FBI Records: The Vault, Charles (Lucky) Luciano / Salvatore Lucania Part 02 (viewer pages 142–144)
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. No page image is stored here; the scans are at the Vault URL.
Viewer pages 142 to 144 of Part 02 of the FBI Vault’s Luciano file are a memorandum dated October 2, 1974, captioned “The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano.” Its author and addressee are redacted (b6, b7C). It was read from the viewer’s OCR.
The memorandum concerns a book advertised in September 1974 as Luciano’s memoirs, then being serialized in a magazine. After what it calls “an exhaustive analysis” of the first two installments, the Bureau concluded “that the book is a complete fraud.” Under “Discrepancies Noted” it says the book has Luciano, after the death of Salvatore Maranzano, create a new “set-up” called the “Unione Siciliano,” and answers: “As a matter of fact, the Mafia had long been known in public by this name, and most of the information gathered to date by the Bureau indicates that the title was probably dropped by Luciano when he created the concept of the La Cosa Nostra ruling Commission in 1931.” It closes that the book is not believed to have “any value to the FBI, or to anyone else for that matter.”
The sentence about 1931 is the Bureau’s own summary of its information in 1974 (“most of the information gathered to date … indicates”). It is not a record made in 1931 and cites no source. The book is not a source for this archive and is not cited. Valachi’s 1963 account of the “commission” and of the “boss of bosses” being abolished is filed at pp. 236–239, and an older FBI overview also says Luciano “set up the ‘Commission.’” None of these is a court finding, and the Commission’s chart on this archive keeps its empty seats.
