In the course of the Kefauver committee investigations, the U.S. public became well acquainted with the modern racket boss, a suave fellow who invests his money in the most respectable enterprises, patronizes a fashionable psychiatrist, and takes pains to meet all the best people. The first well-publicized specimen of this new breed of gangsters was New York's Frank Costello. Last week, with Costello safely tucked away in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on a contempt rap, New York's four-man State Crime Commission opened public hearings in Manhattan, and soon flushed the man billed as Costello's heir, another sample of the new breed named Thomas Luchese (rhymes with "too lazy").
"An Agreeable Little Man." Until last week many New Yorkers had never heard of Tommy Luchese, a stocky, 52-year-old immigrant from Palermo, Sicily. Others knew him only as a prosperous, well-tailored manufacturer of ladies' coats and dresses, who lived in a ranch-type home on Long Island, had a daughter at Vassar and a son who had gone into the Air Force from West Point. He could always be counted on for a fat block of tickets to such eminently respectable affairs as the dinner for the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Fund. Socially he had impressed one federal judge as "an agreeable little man who rarely said anything."
Behind Luchese, however, lay an eventful career. His acquaintances included Costello, ex-Vice Lord Charles ("Lucky") Luciano (see INTERNATIONAL), and a host of real, gun-toting hoods, among them "Trigger Mike" Coppola, Joe Stracci alias Joe Stretch, and Costello's man Friday, "Big Jim" O'Connell. Luchese was convicted of possession of a stolen automobile in 1922, but he managed to beat two arrests for murder, one for vagrancy and one for receiving stolen goods. It was while being fingerprinted during one of these brushes with the law that he got his alias. As a young man, Luchese had lost the index finger on his right hand in an accident. Noticing this, a detective suddenly remembered the Chicago Cubs' famed three-fingered pitcher, Mordecai Brown, and pinned on the new name: "Look who's in now—Three-Finger Brown."
Throughout the crime commission's first sessions, Luchese remained a shadowy figure, little more than a name, as the commission flailed away at an old but far from dead horse: underworld influence in Tammany Hall, the nerve center of Manhattan's ailing Democratic organization. Some of its findings:
Alfred L. Toplitz, onetime chief clerk of the New York City Board of Elections, admitted that he knew Luchese and was also acquainted with Costello, Coppola and "Little Augie" Pisano, but "never socialized with them." Asked how a $7,500 salary could stretch to cover his expensive tastes (one pair of blue suede oxfords cost him $100), Toplitz dabbed nervously at his palms with a paper handkerchief and replied that he occasionally won some money on the horses.