These conferees represented leading mobsters from New York and Brooklyn, Newark, Philadelphia, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other points which do not seem important, but for strategic or geographical reasons developed gang personalities. It was then and there decided that, instead of jamming their thousand- and ten-thousand-dollar bills into strong boxes, they would form a pool and invest in sound enterprises. In these they got actual, tangible, negotiable securities. They engaged the best management, often retaining the executives of properties they bought. Then came the war and everything flourished and multiplied--everything honest and dishonest. Their assets snowballed. Now they run into incalculable figures. Every member has his exact "piece"--from the take of a prostitute summoned in the night, to the income on Park Avenue, State Street and Hollywood Boulevard frontage. Any man who owns 2 per cent is a millionaire. The principal participant is said to own 7-1/2 per cent and he is now the richest man in Italy. He is, of course, Charles "Lucky" Luciano. When Luciano, a swarthy Sicilian with a drooping eye, who had been a pickpocket, a pimp, a collector, a gun-toter for his betters and in time the top racketeer of the United States, was convicted by District Attorney Tom Dewey, it was said that he was railroaded and that he was guilty of everything except what he was convicted for--peddling women. He was guilty of them all and that, too. But Dewey, with his eye looking far ahead, realized that this was the most spectacular path and he took it and followed it through. It was the same Dewey, as governor, who shortened Luciano's sentence at Dannemora under circumstances never plausibly explained. It was published that Luciano had provided the government, then at war, with priceless information about the Italian underworld, which had helped us in the invasion. It was even bruited that he would get a medal of honor. This was all pure hokum, invented by the paid press agent of the syndicate in New York, which maintains a year-round public-relations employe who earns his $300 a week if he manages to get in one choice item, such as the above, in a year. It was no political deal, which also was intimated, but which is as erroneous as the balderdash about Luciano's service to his adopted country. Luciano got an excessive sentence, running up to 30 years. It was not contemplated that he would ever sit out all of that. The Italians, who are rapidly overtaking the Irish as the leading power in Tammany and in Republican councils as well, had put on heavy pressure to get amnesty for the little mug, who was the head of the Sicilian Society in the United States, a branch of the ancient Mafia. After Luciano was deported, he turned up in Havana.