Original subtitles

Previously on 'The Making of the Mob: New York'...

Charles Luciano and his crew...

Meyer Lansky...

Bugsy Siegel...

You mind if I finish this off?

...Frank Costello...

and Vito Genovese...

have worked their way up in the New York underworld...

We're gonna try something out here.

I'll give you a shot. See that you don't screw it up.

...with the guidance of sophisticated gangster

Arnold Rothstein.

There's safety in no one knowing who you are.

Nobody targets a nobody.

After a citywide turf war breaks out

between rival kingpin Salvatore Maranzano

and Joe Masseria...

If you even suspect anybody's with Maranzano,

and I mean anybody,

kill him.

...Luciano was caught in the crossfire.

And Arnold Rothstein is gunned down in the streets.

Tomorrow, I want you to call up Masseria

and you set up a meeting in Coney Island.

To end the conflict,

Luciano orchestrates the assassinations of Masseria...

...and Maranzano...

...and can now take his place

at the top of the New York underworld.

♪ This ain't no time ♪

♪ To feel sorry for myself ♪

♪ I can't help it ♪

♪ 'Cause there's nobody else ♪

♪ And I'll walk these streets ♪

♪ With your name on my tongue ♪

♪ I dare not speak ♪

♪ Only there it belongs ♪

♪ There's got to be a better way... ♪

♪ Better way. ♪

After taking out the two most powerful Mob bosses in New York...

34-year-old Charles 'Lucky' Luciano

sets in motion the next phase of his plan...

to seize control of the New York Mafia.

Luciano and his crew...

Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello,

Bugsy Siegel, and Vito Genovese...

send an army of hit men to eliminate loyalists

of the New York underworld's old regimes.

Find someone.

But it's gotta be done.

You tell me what you want me to do.

I'll take care of him.

I think goodfellas rise in the groups

because they are ruthless.

They were killers.

I mean, that's a known fact.

It's a competitive game for them.

Over the next two days,

gangsters across the country are murdered

in the biggest purge the Mafia has ever seen.

Easy, Joe.

Easy.

Jesus, Vito.

Look, don't do anything stupid.

I ain't here to kill ya.

Then what is this?

Lucky wants to talk to you.

Luciano spares a select few

who he feels are more valuable as allies.

With his power secured, Luciano makes his next move...

calling a meeting with Maranzano's former underboss,

Joe Bonanno.

Killing Maranzano was necessary.

It was either gonna be him or me.

And it wasn't gonna be me.

The past is the past.

Luciano sees potential in Bonanno...

a man not tied to the old-school Sicilian ways...

and decides to offer Bonanno

the opportunity to head his own family.

Joe Bonanno,

he owned garment-centered operations on 34th Street.

He owned trucking businesses,

all kinds of businesses, so he was a man of wealth,

a man of influence,

a man of reason.

With Bonanno on board,

Luciano has eliminated his competition...

establishing order in his operation.

Maranzano's gone.

Masseria's gone.

And Luciano is at the top of the hill.

But Luciano decides

the most important thing to be done

is to create organizations

that won't war with each other.

They need a regimen, rules.

Otherwise, they'll be going through this all the time.

Luciano turns to his homeland for inspiration.

Unlike in America,

the Sicilian Mafia has always been strictly organized.

There are nearly a hundred gangs

referred to as 'crime families.'

Each family has a boss

and they all work under the capo di tutti capi...

the boss of bosses.

It's almost like the aristocracy of the underworld.

Men who were family heads

needed to establish some rules and boundaries and understanding

for the continuation of their way of life.

It's a system that has worked for over a hundred years

and is known as Cosa Nostra,

which translates to 'Our Thing.'

Luciano bases the structure of his new Mafia on the Cosa Nostra

with one big change.

You just gotta make sure that when you sell them something new,

you make it seem old.

You know Sicilians better than Sicilians, huh?

Huh?

To gain the support of the other Mob bosses,

Luciano keeps Mafia membership limited to Italians.

But Lansky will remain Luciano's most trusted advisor

from outside the Mafia's ranks.

Usually, you know, with the... especially the Sicilian Mafia,

that was it.

Actually, you had to be a Sicilian to be made.

You got to be Italian, but Lucky was like,

'Hey, these guys got great business.

I'm gonna deal with them.'

Luciano was ready to present the one big change

he's made to the Cosa Nostra

that he knows will revolutionize the American Mafia forever.

Luciano calls for a major meeting

of the crime bosses in New York and major gangsters elsewhere.

Until this time, there really is no Mafia in America.

There's individual gangs operating in some kind of ad hoc manner.

Luciano saw that this had to be changed.

Lucky, good to see you. - It's good to see you.

Vincenzo.

Al.

The blood on the streets must stop

and the cycles of revenge must end.

We may be criminals,

but that doesn't mean we're savages.

We have to run our business like a business.

To begin, we'll start organizing our families like we did in Sicily,

with the capos, the crews, the consiglieres

all reporting to the head of the family.

But there will be no more boss of bosses.

The days of the capo di tutti capi, they're over.

Instead, we'll have a board of directors,

a Commission run by the heads of the five New York families.

They will have the final say in all matters,

even life and death.

The heads of the five New York families,

the members of the Commission, are...

Giuseppe Profaci...

Vincent Mangano...

Tommy Gagliano...

Joseph Bonanno...

and Lucky Luciano.

Luciano creates the Commission...

a board made up of the heads of the five New York families

who will run the Mafia instead of a boss of bosses.

Luciano's motivation was power.

He would give a role

to all these other guys

because he was smart,

he knew how to play people.

And if you share power the right way, you have the power.

In effect,

Lucky is writing a constitution for the Mafia.

There will be a boss of each family,

there will be a second-in-command... an underboss...

and there will be a consigliere... the counselor.

To peace and profits.

Luciano creates the modern Mafia.

He is the main architect of what will be the American Mafia

for the rest of the century.

To peace and profits.

In a matter of months,

Lucky Luciano has taken out the two criminal kingpins of New York

and brought together the most powerful and violent gangsters in America

under a board of directors known as the Commission.

One thing we never wanna do

is make problems for ourselves, you understand?

The Commission has final say on all matters...

from dividing territory to ordering hits.

They sort of said, 'We're not gonna have

these random killings where one guy gets pissed off at another guy

and he goes off and he just kills them.

So we're gonna do it like they do it in the real world,

which is if somebody has a problem with somebody else,

he will go to an underworld court and he will plead his case.'

They were like the Security Council of the U.N.

And I know that's laughable in many ways,

but they actually tried to resolve as many of their problems

peacefully as possible to stay away from the law.

Disputes would get reported to the Commission

and most of them would get settled.

Of course, when it didn't get settled, then a murder might have to take place.

To carry out the Mafia's approved hit list,

Luciano knows he will need an enforcement arm

with no ties to the Italian Commission.

So he looks outside the Five Families to a group of Jewish gangsters.

In 1931, Luciano orders his most trusted business partner

to assemble the lethal team.

Lansky was like a recruiter, you know?

At a board meeting for a college.

'Hey, I know who could play free safety.'

You know, he knew who they were and he recommended them

as the guys that could fill this new role

that was suddenly created by this underworld court.

Lansky quickly enlists an elite group of Jewish hit men.

Violent killers who will come to be known

as Murder, Inc.

All right, this is how it's gonna work.

The Commission will confirm all hits.

You guys get your orders, you do your job.

Be precise.

You guys will be like ghosts.

Nothing gets left behind. Nothing.

It was kind of a subcompany of the new modern Mafia

that Luciano designed.

But you have to realize

most of the hit men were Jewish.

The reason being,

the law enforcement didn't expect Jewish guys to be hit men.

They integrated, so that threw them off.

Each hit man has his own signature style.

Bugsy Siegel is a loyal member of Luciano's crew

who takes pleasure in making his victims suffer.

Albert Anastasia is a feared killer

with a short fuse and deadly aim

who becomes known as...

the Lord High Executioner.

Abe Reles believes in a hands-on approach,

earning the nickname 'Kid Twist'

for his preferred method of killing...

...strangling his victims with wire.

Louis Lepke is a disciplined assassin,

isolating his targets to avoid witnesses.

As a little kid,

I remember hearing the stories about

these Jewish killers mobsters had.

And the Italians, how they worked with them

and how they respected these murderers.

These were guys that were the baddest of bad.

They were cold-blooded murderers that worked for the Mob.

They formed the deadliest team of hit men in American history

and transformed the art of killing into a science.

Once a contract is handed down,

the assassin spends weeks preparing the execution...

assembling weapons,

stealing a getaway car,

and trailing his target.

When the moment is right, he makes a clean hit...

and begins covering his tracks.

Fingerprints are often burned beyond recognition

and the body is dumped in a river

or buried with chemicals to eliminate the smell.

In just 10 years, Murder, Inc. will kill more than 1,000 people,

averaging one murder every three days.

And because no ties to the assassins are left behind,

hundreds of murders remained unsolved for years.

The newspapers did know dead bodies killed in a similar way

started turning up all over the country.

And they knew that it was probably one group of guys,

and that's really the story of Murder, Incorporated.

With the Commission in place and Murder, Inc. on call,

Lucky Luciano has created an underground government

and an invisible army.

Lucky Luciano delegated the violence.

And he said, 'If we all band together,

you know, we could do this thing as an organization.'

So there'd be order.

When you don't have order, then it's chaos.

You get destroyed.

Luciano believes his national organization is built to last.

But what he doesn't realize

is that the Mob is about to face its biggest threat

from within.

Lucky Luciano's Commission is organizing the criminal world...

into an efficient moneymaking machine.

But one of Luciano's biggest earners

is a Jewish gangster who isn't part of the Five Families.

Dutch Schultz ran a very powerful gang

in New York, in the Bronx.

In fact, some people used to go around saying

in New York there was a Big Six, not just a Big Five,

because Schultz was so important.

Dutch Schultz is known as the Beer Baron of the Bronx.

He muscles his way into the restaurant unions

and Harlem's number rackets.

His numbers operation alone

brings in $20 million a year.

Schultz is also a vicious gangster with a hair-trigger temper.

Schultz has been building relationships with politicians for years

by fixing their elections.

Come on, boys. All right, let's go.

Right to the front. Come on.

Schultz pays off voters and brings them to the polls...

so they can vote for his candidates.

There was no doubt that the American Mafia

took advantage of all their connections with corrupt politicians,

and when they saw the opportunity to make money,

certainly taking it from the federal government,

this is what we did.

Can I ask your business here?

Tampering with elections is illegal.

Ah...

I'll keep that in mind.

Schultz is unaware that he's just caught the eye...

of the one man in New York he can't pay off...

a 32-year-old lawyer from Michigan named Thomas E. Dewey.

Thomas Dewey is an Assistant US Attorney

with political aspirations.

In New York City,

people are voting multiple times.

Tom Dewey had been a poll-watcher at one point

and had seen this, and it probably inspired some of his later prosecutions.

He'll go on to become the governor of New York

and run for president...

We are a united party.

Our nation stands tragically in need of that same unity.

...losing one of the most famous elections in American history.

I learned a lot of lessons about being a lawyer

from reading about great lawyers,

and Tom Dewey was an inspiration.

I mean, I learned many lessons of leadership from Dewey.

Dewey firmly believes in the rule of law.

He also wants to make a name for himself in New York.

When Tom Dewey went after Lucky Luciano,

he went after him because he was a major organized crime figure

in the United States.

He saw this as a stepping-stone,

a way that he could burnish his resume

so that he would be able to run for political office

and ultimately run for the presidency of the United States.

With a New York kingpin protected by corruption...

Dewey knows he'll have to start by going after Luciano's known associates,

including the man helping to fix local elections,

Dutch Schultz.

This is the guy. - What guy?

The guy from the polls, Dutch Schultz.

You don't give up, do you? - This isn't personal.

Schultz is all over the number rackets,

restaurants, the Jersey waterfront.

Schultz works with Lucky Luciano.

Schultz is nothing but a crack.

He's our way in.

We can't get to Luciano, but we can get to Schultz.

How much time do you need?

Give me a month.

Get busy.

With approval from US Attorney William Dodge,

Thomas Dewey is about to declare war on the Mob.

Thomas Dewey is now a special prosecutor

who's determined to make a name for himself

by going after organized crime.

With Mob boss Lucky Luciano insulated by crooked politicians

and an army of thugs...

Dewey's first target is Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz.

But Schultz has been paying off judges and politicians for years.

It's very difficult for people in our time,

really, to understand how widespread

the corruption in New York City at that time was.

My grandfather was very offended by what he saw

and he felt that someone should do something about it.

To bring down Schultz,

Dewey is going to have to find a way to prosecute him.

And a trial from a year earlier may give him the answer.

Al Capone has ruled the violent Chicago underworld

for a decade.

If you go all the way back to the time of Al Capone

and you read about it,

he hung around with politicians and judges and police.

He was right in the midst of society at its highest level.

He's beaten witnesses,

bribed judges, intimidated juries...

and has ties to over 100 murders,

including the savage St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

When Capone was finally brought to trial,

it wasn't for murder.

It was for not paying his taxes.

I hereby find Mr. Alphonse Capone

guilty of tax evasion on all counts - Guilty?!

and hereby remand him to the custody - I'll show you guilty!

of the state for the next 11 years.

Thanks to an ambitious law enforcement agent named Eliot Ness,

Al Capone will become one of Alcatraz's

most notorious inmates.

Tom Dewey followed the lead of the people in Chicago

who went after Al Capone for tax offenses.

If you can't get them for one thing, you get them for something else.

Thomas Dewey sees his opportunity

and goes after Dutch Schultz on tax evasion charges.

Get him in here.

But even though he's a wanted man,

Schultz is seen partying at Manhattan bars and nightclubs.

Schultz liked to be a big shot around town.

What's the deal, huh? Hey, let's fill it up, huh?

He was one of the original owners of the famous Cotton Club in Harlem,

so he was a man-about-town

as well as a man... a man-about-gangsterdom.

Get another bottle of vino over here for the ladies.

That's all. Cheers, huh? We're all here.

We're all here together.

Schultz's exploits start making headlines.

But he manages to stay one step ahead of Thomas Dewey

and his investigators.

Months pass without an arrest.

...how much overtime it costs.

I don't care if any of you get a day off.

I don't care if you eat or sleep.

Nobody rests!

Dewey.

Yeah... yes, sir, I hear you loud and clear.

Dewey's inability to bring Schultz into custody

soon turns from a local tabloid story

into a national embarrassment...

...landing on the desk of the director of the FBI,

J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover has made his reputation

by taking down some of the most notorious criminals in the country.

But he's refused to let the FBI investigate organized crime in New York.

For most of his reign,

Hoover totally ignored the Mafia and claimed it didn't exist.

But he had reasons for not tackling the Mafia.

In the 1930s, nearly all of Hoover's agents

are clean-cut men from small towns in Middle America.

They had no idea about the Mafia culture.

There was no way they could infiltrate the Mafia.

Hoover may also have another more personal reason

for not going after the New York Mob.

J. Edgar Hoover never wanted to take on the Mafia

because the Mob had a file of him

with pictures of him wearing dresses and garter belts.

That's a theory.

He could've been extorted.

They could've said, 'Look, we're gonna reveal you as a homosexual,'

something which obviously is very different than it is today.

Despite the risks,

Hoover decides that his reputation as a crime fighter is at stake.

He can no longer let Dutch Schultz

make a mockery of law enforcement.

For the first time in history,

Hoover names a New York gangster

public enemy number one.

Dutch Schultz was violating the dictum of,

'Don't put a spotlight on the Mob.'

Lucky Luciano has spent years

building the perfect criminal organization.

By drawing the attention of the FBI...

Dutch Schultz is threatening to tear it all down.

Sure you weren't followed?

Yeah, I'm sure.

Just... make it fast, huh?

You've been bringing a lot of heat on us, Dutch.

What am I supposed to... - You know what you're supposed to do.

You gotta turn yourself in.

Come on.

Lucky, I...

It's the only way.

Look, you'll get the best lawyers, all right?

The best lawyers, huh?

All right.

If I do this for you,

you gotta help me beat this rap.

Whatever it costs.

You have my word.

After nearly two years of successfully eluding

Thomas Dewey and the FBI,

the most wanted man in America is turning himself in.

I don't think Lucky Luciano was a genius.

I think he was a very bright guy at the right time

in the right situation.

A Sicilian wiseguy once told me...

he said, 'When you got them by their balls,

their hearts and minds will follow.'

With Schultz in custody,

Thomas Dewey is now closer than ever

to clinching his first victory over the New York Mafia.

But what he doesn't know

is that Lucky Luciano has already put a plan in motion

to make sure Schultz goes free.

In the old days, when a member of a group

got into trouble,

the group took care of them as far as a lawyer was concerned.

They didn't go hungry.

They got them out on bail.

Days after Schultz surrenders, he easily posts bail.

And the Mob's lawyers win a petition to move his trial

400 miles north

to Malone, New York.

If the Mafia can't buy off the biggest city in America,

they'll settle for something smaller.

The minute Schultz arrives in Malone,

he begins spreading money all over town...

and hosting parties for local officials.

Enjoy it! Enjoy it, enjoy it.

And it's on me.

People often think that the way to succeed in the Mob

is to be feared.

Livin' up.

Certainly that's important,

but what's more important is just being charming.

She's very funny. She's very funny.

That's all I can...

A week before his trial,

the Jewish mobster takes his public relations campaign

a step further.

Schultz had tried to ingratiate himself so much

that he actually converted to Catholicism.

These ambitious, lawless gangsters... they were cunning.

They were capable of presenting themselves

as men of respect.

Judge.

The jury has been unable to reach a verdict in this case.

I got... I got off!

Just as Luciano promised,

Schultz gets off and is free to get back to business.

Dewey has spent two years of his life

building his case against Dutch Schultz.

And once again,

Schultz is back on the streets.

There were frustrations

in the prosecutions in the cases he made.

But he was a fighter

and he was never going to back down.

Dewey and his team work tirelessly night and day

on a new case against Dutch Schultz.

This one.

Right here, that's the guy. Get him in here.

You got some kind of intel?

These are the new numbers, just came in.

About $6 million.

Just bring him in.

Just six weeks after the trial in Malone,

Dewey pins Schultz as the leader

of the largest illegal gambling ring in New York,

sending over 60 officers on a citywide raid

to shut down Schultz's most lucrative racket.

I don't care what it takes.

I don't care how much it costs.

Get me Dutch Schultz!

With Dewey closing in, Dutch Schultz goes into hiding

and decides there's only one way out...

to kill Thomas Dewey.

Now that Thomas Dewey has issued

a second warrant for his arrest,

Dutch Schultz is once again the most wanted man in America.

Dutch Schultz got very intimidated by Dewey.

He realized Dewey was out for him,

and he decides Dewey has to be assassinated.

This Dewey is a rabid dog.

He's not gonna stop.

He's not the first and he's not gonna be the last.

Well, what if he is the last, huh?

What if Thomas Dewey takes down you, Luciano?

What if he takes down every damn one of you?

Is that a chance you're willing to take?

We can't just knock guys off

every time the law kicks up some dust.

Since when? - Since now.

Settle down, Schultz.

It'll all blow over. - Oh, not this time.

Not this bastard! - What are you saying, hmm?

I'm tellin' ya, this son of a bitch Dewey is not gonna rest one day

until every one of you is behind bars.

Maybe Dutch is right.

Maybe we should take him out before he causes any more trouble.

It's gonna wreak havoc on our business.

Business isn't everything. - Yes, it is.

It's not gonna happen.

When the Commission, and especially Luciano,

hear about this,

they realize Schultz is bad for business.

You can't kill a prominent prosecutor.

You'd bring the whole wrath of the criminal justice system.

Why risk it?

After being rejected by the Commission,

Dutch Schultz sees no other option

than to plan the murder of Thomas Dewey on his own.

So he turns to Murder, Inc. hit man Albert Anastasia.

Albert?

Christ, Dutch, you know the kind of trouble you're in right now?

You know how many people are talking about you, watching you?

But it's what you do.

That's not how this works.

You gotta get it approved by the Commission.

You scared?

I'm not scared of nothin', Dutch, but I'm not stupid.

It'll cost you double.

I open the back of the truck up... six cases.

That's all this guy's driving down the road is six cases.

I go to the front,

go to this guy and say, 'What's wrong with you?'

He looks at me, 'It's my favorite brand.'

Know what I'm gonna do?

I'm gonna take a leak.

After he's tipped off by Albert Anastasia

of Schultz's plan to kill Thomas Dewey...

Lucky Luciano has ordered a hit on one of his own.

But what Luciano doesn't realize

is that by taking out Thomas Dewey's number one target...

he's just put himself on the top of Dewey's most wanted list.