Charles "Lucky" Luciano

"Behind every great fortune, there is a crime."
He practically founded organised crime and earned his 'lucky' nickname through gambling and evading the authorities. Brutality was his trademark but he also aided the US in WWII.
The names, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, people refer tom me as the "BOSS OF BOSSES" although i would disagree, I was without a doubt the most important Italian-American gangster this country ever produced, left a far greater impact on the underworld than any other cosa nostra boss before and after my regin.
But by the old way of doin' things... If I became boss now, I'd have to hit you in case you knew. And all of you shrug, except some of you are friends of Joe's. And one day I might do something that upsets you, so then you'll hit me. And then YOU'LL become boss. My friends, they'll hate you for that. Then somebody else becomes boss, and so on, and on... You know what I call that? Stupid. Very stupid... We're all bosses here. Now, I have friends. They're not from Palermo, they're not from Sicily... They're not even Italians. They're Jewish. But they're still my friends. And I trust 'em. I've learned. Every organization needs somebody standin' out front. Call it a figurehead, a leader, a headman, a kingpin, a president, whatever. It doesn't much matter to me who does it.
"I'll bet in the days when me and my guys got our whiskey business together, we had a bigger company than Henry Ford...We had exporters and importers, all kinds of help that any corporation needs, only we had more. And we had lawyers by the carload, and they was on call twenty-four hours a day. Guys always told me later that I should've put my brains to runnin' a legit business and I'd have been a tremendous success. But I wouldn't've enjoyed it like what I was doin'."
"Costello got in touch with me right away. Albert had worked this idea out with his brother, Tough Tony. Albert said that the guys from Navy Intelligence had been all over the docks talkin' to 'em about security; they was scared to death that all the stuff along the Hudson, the docks and boats and the rest, was in very great danger. It took a guy like Albert to figure out somethin' really crazy; his idea was to give the Navy a real big hunk of sabotage, somethin' so big that it would scare the shit out of the whole fuckin' Navy."