No gangster has ever been more powerful than Charles "Lucky" Luciano (1897-1962). By the mid-1920s, he had taken over the New York bordellos and was making more than a million dollars a year. In 1931 he engineered the murders of the two reigning New York crime bosses, Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, and quickly took over the entire New York crime racket. The Luciano Story is the definitive biography of this legendary gangster, based on years of research and dozens of interviews with Luciano himself and among other first-hand accounts. First published in 1954, this book authenticated, for the first time, the far-reaching and sinister operations of the international crime syndicate and its direction by the keenest criminal mastermind in American history.