Nazism: How Miami Became the Center of International Fascism, Murder of President Kennedy - Part 4

CIA, NATO and the Great Heroin Coup: Charles “Lucky” Luciano (1897-1962) was the most powerful and successful gangster in American history. He is considered the father of modern organized crime in the United States for having established The Commission in 1931. In 1936 Luciano was convicted for compulsory prostitution and running a prostitution racket. He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison, but during WWII, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) made him an offer. Luciano was promised eventual liberty in return for delivering the southern Italian Mafia as the fifth column backing the Allied cause against Mussolini. This would be the seed that would generate the powerful Mafia families of southern Italy, assigned by the United States to act as praetorian guards within the stay-behind armies. Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish mob, became the liaison between Luciano and ONI and Operation Underworld was born. Luciano ordered his men to obey Lansky who became essentially the head of a large portion of the Italian-American Mafia. Thomas Dewey (then Governor of New York), although responsible for putting Luciano in prison, pardoned him in 1946 due to his service towards the Allied cause and Luciano was deported to Italy along with some of his lieutenants, however, not before he met with agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). In June 1973, Le Monde spelled out the American side of the intelligence-Mafia connection: “Instructed by his [Luciano’s] own experience of collaboration with the American intelligence services, Lucky Luciano used to recommend to his honorable correspondents scattered from Beirut to Tangiers, via Ankara and Marseilles, to operate as he had done. It was in this way that drug dealers and couriers served as informants to [the British] MI5, to [the American] CIA, to [the French] SDECE, to the [West German] Gehlen organization, even to the Italian SIFFAR.” This special relationship between the Mafia and these intelligence agencies would go strong for several decades and has lasted to this day.