Legal Attache, Rome, to the FBI Director, December 7, 1965: a confidential source on Charles Luciano, including the Masseria and Maranzano killings as the source recounted them

Viewer pages 128 to 130 of Part 02 of the FBI Vault’s file “Charles (Lucky) Luciano / Salvatore Lucania” are a letter dated December 7, 1965 from the Legal Attache in Rome to the Director, FBI (OCR “Director, FBI (39-2141)”). It reports an interview on December 2, 1965 of a source whose name is withheld under exemption b7D, who had known Luciano in Italy. This archive has no page for Part 02 as a whole; Parts 01 and 03 are filed. The pages were read from the viewer’s OCR, which is broken by redactions.

The Legal Attache’s covering paragraph judges the source: “his knowledge of these matters is very limited, general in nature and much of the [information] has been received by the Bureau from other sources” (the OCR garbles the bracketed word), and he “was hazy in his recollection of dates and names.” It adds that the source appears to be “exaggerating his importance.”

Under “Luciano’s Background” the letter records the source as saying that Luciano “and VITO GENOVESE engineered the murder of JOE MASSERIA and later of SALVATORE MARANZANO,” that Maranzano “was lured to a rather large office building where he was murdered by two killers” in “policeman uniforms,” and that five groups were then formed in New York. It says the source had never heard the phrase “La Cosa Nostra” until he read of Valachi’s testimony, and that Luciano spoke instead of the “organization.”

This is a third-hand account given to the Bureau decades later. Its “two killers” differs from the 1931 police record read into the 1963 hearing, which says four men (pp. 227–233), and from the FBI’s history page, which says five. It is filed as a record of what the Bureau was told, and nothing in it is used as a fact on a person page or a chart.