🔥 Legend of Lucchino: The Man Who Took On the Mob, Part I
In booming Pennsylvania coal country, immigrant Italians were exploited by corporations and terrorized by mafiosi. One brave insider turned against them, risking everything to stand up for workers.
If you love big, exciting, cinematic reads, seriously, cancel your plans for the next hour because This. Is. It. Our entire team at Narratively is thrilled to present this four-part series, the biggest, most epic saga we’ve ever published. Vinnie Rotondaro — an intrepid reporter who has penned several of our all-time most popular stories — has spent well over a year unearthing the incredible true tale of Sam Lucchino, whose unbelievable life story upends everything you thought you knew about the American mafia — and whose fight for immigrant workers’ rights resonates starkly today.
On a balmy night in July of 1920, Sam Lucchino walked home alone from work in Pittston, Pennsylvania. God only knows what weighed on his mind as he made that fateful stroll up Railroad Street toward the boomtown’s “Italian colony.”
The miner’s strike likely dominated his attention. Earlier in the day, Lucchino had met with a higher-up at the Pennsylvania Coal Company, where 10,000 men walked off the job, rallying against the company’s collusion with vampiric third-party subcontractors, who were bleeding the rank-and-file workers dry. By then, Sam, a former mobster turned detective, saw protecting Pittston’s Italian immigrant community as his life’s mission, and he was knee-deep in the mess.
Walking alone late at night was dangerous. Sam’s brother, Peter, usually accompanied him. But Peter was away, and for 10 years, Sam had lived as a marked man on Railroad Street, within spitting distance of those who wished to see him dead.
A few blocks away, his wife, Nellie Lucchino, sat on a porch swing with the couple’s only child, waiting for her husband to come home.
A neighbor, Catherine Hogan, was out on her porch across the street. She saw Sam pass by at around 10:50 p.m., with another figure following closely behind. As he approached his house, Sam bade the neighborhood butcher goodnight, buona notte, then crossed into the street, when — bang! — a .45 caliber bullet ripped into his back.
Catherine Hogan ran inside and hurriedly drew down the shades.
Nellie shot to her feet as Sam staggered forward, blood beginning to seep through his shirt. Heart pounding, she raced down the steps of their house.
Sam wheeled around and attempted to reach for his revolver — just as the second slug tore through his chest. Both bullets passed clear through his body, one first striking his metal badge.
Frozen in terror, Nellie watched as a man in a tan suit and a Panama hat stood over her husband. He calmly tucked a pistol back into his pants, then walked away.
Another neighbor watched from her upstairs window as Nellie crawled over to Sam, cradling his head in her lap. She cried out for help, then began to sob and weep bitterly.
As the authorities arrived and a crowd gathered, everyone wondered if this fifth attempt on his life would be the final chapter in Detective Sam Lucchino’s legendary and incredibly improbable career.
His story “reads like a page of fiction,” as a local paper once put it.
We know much about Sam Lucchino’s life from the robust newspaper reporting of the time. But in other ways, the inner workings of his mind remain a mystery.
Lucchino was caught in between two worlds: loyalty to his community and a need to break free from his past. Originally named Salvatore, he moved to Pittston from Sicily at 18 — a mobster in a booming coal town, soon to become one of its most feared and, later, beloved citizens. Born into the old Sicilian Mafia in a sulfur-mining village called Montedoro — where many peasants left for Pittston — he was part of a migration that carried both hardship and the Mafia’s influence into northeastern Pennsylvania.
For a time, Sam was a rising criminal star in Pittston. It was the turn of the 20th century, when southern Italians like him were widely viewed as a criminal and inferior race. He terrorized his own people with shocking bravado and violence. But then something inside him shifted, causing him to do an about-face.
There are plenty of pentiti in American Mafia lore — former hitmen and foot soldiers who rat out the mob in exchange for protection or a lighter sentence. But Sam Lucchino was apparently driven by something much deeper. When his first undercover boss — a celebrated Secret Service sleuth who later ran the FBI — asked Lucchino to explain his motivations, he replied, with deep resolve, that he had “an ancient wrong to right.”
The years immediately preceding Lucchino’s arrival were momentous for northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1900 and 1902, two historic strikes rocked the anthracite mining industry, halting production of the energy-dense, compact coal at a time when the nation relied heavily on its output. A primary grievance driving these strikes was the much-hated practice of subcontracting.
The term may sound harmless today, but for turn-of-the-century anthracite miners, subcontracting symbolized a baked-in form of exploitation. Mine owners maximized profit by renting out sections of their mines to intermediary bosses, effectively distancing themselves from responsibility for the brutal working conditions. Together, the subcontractors and mine owners sapped the workers’ earnings, leaving the miners in the proverbial dust — with no job security, no benefits and little recognition.
During the first strike, roughly 110,000 previously divided immigrant workers joined forces under the United Mine Workers of America, walking off the job in the span of a week. The second strike dragged on for six months and threatened to shut down the East Coast’s winter supply of fuel, forcing President Teddy Roosevelt to intervene to broker a deal. In the wake of the strikes, the companies begrudgingly agreed to certain concessions and eased up on subcontracting — for a while.
At the time, America led the world in coal production. Mineable quantities of “hard” anthracite, a slow-burning and cleaner alternative to more plentiful bituminous coal, only existed in northeastern Pennsylvania. Gleaming like glass, the valuable resource became known as “black diamond.”
Located along the winding banks of the Susquehanna River, Pittston, despite its tiny size, was quickly becoming a regional hub. The Bicentennial Issue of the Pittston Gazette notes its Revolutionary War settlement-era roots as a “‘tidy village’ [where] the few people who were here mostly lived in cabins.” When anthracite coal was discovered, it triggered an explosion of growth. By the time Lucchino arrived in 1903, the former coal patch town — established by the Pennsylvania Coal Company (PaCC) in 1853 — was charging into modernity. Locomotives blared. Horse-drawn buggies rolled and clacked, and trolleys rumbled down Main Street, where beautiful buildings were being erected.
There were nearly twice as many people living in Pittston then as there are now. The city boasted a dizzying number of churches, plus a synagogue; there were fruit stands, tobacconists, barbers, department stores, butchers, banks, and an outrageous number of saloons. Not to mention, of course, all the undertakers, since coal mining was one of the deadliest jobs in the country.
Below the ground, there were a million ways to meet a violent end: crushed by falling rock, kicked in the gut by a mule, eyes blown out by dynamite, run over by a line of cars.
Above ground, in towering coal breakers that belched smoke over the once verdant landscape, child laborers known as “breaker boys” sorted rock and impurities from coal, their lungs filling with poisonous, dust-laden air. Many workers lost their lives and their limbs in the gears, as happened to 24-year-old Emmanuel Skidmore, who “met a terrible death in the Pine Ridge breaker” where his clothing got snagged in the “whirling” machinery.
“Without a moment’s warning he was lifted and dashed against the beams to be turned over the shafting and dragged to the lower section again,” reported the Pittston Gazette. “Other workmen were horrified at the sight but gave the signal to stop the machinery. … He was dead.”
Death notices like these appeared in the region’s newspapers with stark regularity, and often in pairs. Beneath news of Skidmore’s death was a notice about a 15-year-old boy who had gone searching for work in the mines. After being told there was none, he was struck and killed by a line of cars as he made his way home.
Over the course of roughly a hundred years, an estimated 35,000 men and boys lost their lives. Multitudes more were seriously injured. And if you didn’t die in the mines, black lung disease would surely get you. To mine owners, workers were viewed as fungible parts in a machine — mere numbers, subject to the whims of super-capitalist financiers like J.P. Morgan, who monopolized the industry from afar.
It was, in a word, horrific. Yet, amidst all this tragedy, the industry also presented a historic opportunity for countless immigrants leaving behind legacies of misery in Europe.
In southern Italy, a virtual exodus was underway. Forty years had passed since Italy’s political unification in 1863, with promises of social and economic reform. Things were supposed to be getting better. But they weren’t.
Centuries of colonial rule and feudal landholding had left the peasant masses in shocking conditions of poverty. As new forms of corrupt power and exploitation set in, they fled in staggering numbers. In 1910, the African-American orator Booker T. Washington traveled to Europe to investigate the root causes of European migration to America, where Italians and others were competing for jobs with former slaves like himself.
In The Man Farthest Down, he recalled his visit to the province where Montedoro sits, and where he observed sulfur miners “like ants running in and out of little holes in the earth.”
At the mouth of a mine, Washington encountered a haggard-looking worker who was “almost stark naked,” his graying skin dripping with sweat. After exploring the mine’s infernal depths, he commented, “I am not prepared just now to say to what extent I believe in a physical hell in the next world, but a sulfur mine in Sicily is about the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life.”
The sight of carusi — child laborers as young as 7, laden with heavy sacks of ore — left Washington shaken. The children had ashen skin and misshapen spines. Many spent the rest of their lives as debt bondage “slaves,” he learned, their desperate parents entrapped in predatory loans for their children’s labor that they could never repay. “I could never mistake their slow, dragging movements,” he wrote, “and the expression of dull despair upon their faces.”
Sam Lucchino, like so many others, fled the hardships of Montedoro for Pittston. On August 14, 1903, he arrived aboard the steamship La Veloce to be processed at Ellis Island. His older brother, Pietro (later known as Peter), had preceded him by three months, and his younger sister, Rosina, had arrived just two days before. According to her manifest, Rosina intended to find her father, Tranquillo, at a Lower Manhattan address that would later be linked to a future Lucchese crime family capo, hinting at early ties between the Lucchinos and other powerful mafiosi.
In Pittston, immigrants from Montedoro mingled with others from Sicily, southern Italy, and a contingent of displaced workers from Umbria, further north in the country. Like the overwhelming majority of Italian men, Sam went to work in the mines, as the Lucchinos re-connected with other families that would form the Men of Montedoro, or the Pittston Crime Family — years later run by Russell Bufalino, one of the most powerful mafiosi in American history.
According to The Informer, a publication that covers the history of American organized crime, the Men of Montedoro was “a shadowy organization [that] played an important role in the development of the American Mafia, serving as an adhesive force between the New York City and Buffalo Mafia clans … and blurring the boundary between underworld rackets and legitimate enterprises.”
While the word “Mafia” occasionally appeared in local papers, the term “Black Hand” struck more fear. Black Hand crime referred to a method of extortion achieved through intimidation and extreme violence. It was typically — but not always — perpetrated by Italians, and so named for the signature death-threat letters that were sent to victims, featuring crude depictions of a mano nera, alongside other ominous imagery, like daggers with dripping blood.
“This will be the last, and believe it will end the question,” read one chilling Black Hand letter, “because you are so miserable that you would rather die, and not, blood of God, disburse the money requested by us. … From today on we will adapt ourselves to your destiny. … Therefore think of the funeral, think blood of God, that for money you will die, and you are so serene …”
In 1904, a Black Hand hitman named Tomasso Petto, known as Il Bove, or “The Ox,” fled to Pittston after evading a sensational murder charge in New York, where the mutilated body of a Sicilian man was found stuffed in a barrel in Lower Manhattan.
In Pittston, he settled in a suburb called Browntown, located up a series of hills from the river, surrounded by thick woods, just outside the city limits. Browntown was where Railroad Street ended, and where the Pittston Black Hand established its reign.
Petto reportedly had a “large following throughout the city.” But karma caught up with him on a rainy night in 1905, when he was riddled with bullets after receiving a knock at the door. One of the shots struck his revolver and exploded his right hand. A dagger was reportedly found in his chest, along with “a little brass bound crucifix with a skull and cross bones at the Saviour’s feet, an exact duplicate of that taken from the body of the man found in the barrel.”
Naturally, the Pittston Police got nowhere with their investigation into his death. “The Italians of the community are as usual very reticent,” a local paper reported. “Not one in a dozen can be found who will admit having had any acquaintance with the man.”
The immigrant community’s historical distrust of authority didn’t help. But more pressingly, they were terrified of Black Hand retribution.
“The authorities have been almost helpless,” another article reported. “On numerous occasions frightened Italians have informed the police that they have received the usual threatening letter … but when told they would be required to appear as witnesses, they wilted. … Many have fled from the region to avoid the wrath of the society. Even in flight there was no safety. A few months ago an Italian who refused tribute fled with his family to Berwick [a town 40 miles way], and there one morning was called to his door by three men and shot dead.”
Others were literally beheaded. In 1905, a breaker boy named John Swift Jr. discovered a decapitated body on his way to work at 6 in the morning.
The victim’s body was half submerged in a culm bank, “neatly attired in a black suit, with black shoes of good quality.” Cigars, “such as Italians smoke,” were found in one of his pockets. His .38 caliber revolver rested next to him in the culm, “wrapped in a red handkerchief,” still in its leather case.
The man’s head was later found down a mineshaft.
Sam Lucchino’s name first hit the headlines in February of 1907, when two industrious Italian immigrants reported a harrowing story to police.
In the early hours of February 15, Pittston’s chief of police led a raid in Browntown with 35 state troopers. Twenty-five Italian immigrants were apprehended and a wagonload of weapons was confiscated. Lucchino and his brother, Peter, were among those apprehended, along with key members of the future Men of Montedoro.
The next day, 13 Black Hand suspects, “all swarthy of complexion,” as described in one paper, were arraigned at a courthouse in Wilkes-Barre.
The hearing was buzzing with lawyers and witnesses, and a throng of Italian spectators packed behind the back bar. Prosecuting “the largest haul of Black Hand members ever made in this country at one time,” the trial was attended by members of the U.S. Secret Service and the NYPD.
Lucchino stood handcuffed in a line with the other suspects. They waited in “sullen silence” as the charges were read against them. First in English, then in Italian, whereupon, “there broke out an excited babbling,” which was “interpreted to be a plea of not guilty.”
The case centered around harassment and assault claims by the Rizzo brothers, who were described as “small and slight of build, but with an immense quantity of iron nerve in their little bodies.” Aspiring developers who later ran brothels, the Rizzos likely had a little money, which put a target on their backs.
The intimidation they suffered was instantly felt when Joseph Rizzo took the stand, and became “so palsied he could hardly proceed,” as the defendants were “muttering” threats. But he proceeded to tell his tale after a detective removed the men “looking their blackest” to another part of the room.
Their trouble had started on Christmas Eve in 1905, he said, in Browntown, while the Rizzos were hosting a party.
A feast was being prepared when Joseph Rizzo’s wife heard rustling outside. Looking out a window, she saw Sam Lucchino “standing about three paces away from an electric light,” and another suspect, Charles Gonzaga, crouching alongside the house with a gun.
When she tried to open the back door, a pistol was shoved in her face. Seconds later, a bomb went off in the backyard, sending the guests inside stampeding to the front door, where men with leveled guns were waiting to “bade them to remain in the house.”
Lucchino and Gonzaga were accused of setting the bomb, which had been positioned to instill “terror” rather than injure. Days later, another suspect known as “Jimmy Long” dropped by the Rizzos’ house. He presented himself as a “friend” and invited the brothers to join his “society,” but they cautiously refused.
Not long after, the Rizzos were lured to Long’s house, where a Black Hand meeting was underway. The brothers were told to sit down and listen. It was explained that the men inside belonged to a larger society called the Iron Head, with 500 members and branches in dozens of cities. There would be no use in running. The association would find them wherever they went. The Rizzos were then “invited” to join, but they refused.
They were shown a large display of “vicious looking” knives and guns, “used for the purpose of getting revenge from persons who did not heed their suggestions.” The brothers were told that “in America it was absolutely necessary for all Italians to belong to the society in order to get justice in the courts and other places.”
But still, they refused. They reportedly “begged to be let off,” to which Jimmy Long responded that if anything bad should happen, “they should blame themselves.”
A relentless campaign of harassment then followed through 1906, culminating in early 1907. In the middle of the night in June, their home was riddled with bullets. Then they received a Black Hand letter.
“Browntown, June 13
Dear Friend: For the last time you are notified that our advice is that we shot last time only to warn you. If you want trouble you will get only trouble. If you don’t answer by Wednesday evening we will make our answer by blowing your house to pieces.
Your friend,
“STRONG ARM”
The Rizzos became “determined to defy the society.” They asked the police department for permission to bear arms, and took turns standing guard at night with a “repeating rifle” poking out of loopholes they cut into a barn.
The standoff culminated in the middle of the night on January 24, 1907, when one of the gang members banged on their door and demanded to speak with Charles Rizzo. Seeing armed men outside, Charles grabbed a “pump gun” from upstairs, and stormed out onto his porch, unloading 10 shots into the crowd of Black Hand gangsters. Three men were hit and dragged away by friends.
An uneasy calm followed, until Sam Lucchino came by a couple of days later to talk.
“Now see what you’ve done?” the Rizzos claimed he said. “One of the men is dead and another is near dead.”
Lucchino reportedly demanded $500 to “keep things quiet.” But the Rizzos went to the police instead.
Lucchino was described as a “ringleader” of the harassment operation. His involvement became a focus of the prosecution’s attack. One witness claimed that he and Gonzaga had threatened to kill him, “cut off his head and use it for a football.” Another, when asked to identify Lucchino in court, started trembling “as though he had a bad case of chills,” then refused to ID him.
Given the number of witnesses and level of detail involved, it was a slam dunk case for the prosecution. The suspects were already licking their wounds when a verdict was reached in May. The day got off to a rough start for the defendants, when the county prison van lost a wheel and flipped over on its way to court.
“All the prisoners were inside and handcuffed together,” it was reported. “When the smoke cleared way, one Italian defendant was found to be painfully injured by a gash across his head. … Everyone was more or less shocked and bruised.”
Eleven of the 13 men were found guilty.
Incredibly, the judge only sentenced them to a single year in prison, explaining that he went easy because they were new to the country and not “familiar” with its laws. Perhaps the fact that the district attorney had received death threats played a role in influencing his decision.
The ‘Iron Head’ trial was reported far and wide, dealing another black eye to the image of Italian immigrants in America.
On one hand, Italians were readily portrayed as comic figures. Around Pittston, the poems of a humorist named T.A. Daly appeared in the local papers, which were written in caricatured Italian dialect, with titles like “Da Comica Man” and “Da Leetla Boy.”
On the other, Italians were widely viewed as criminal by nature. In 1907, an opinion piece titled “Criminal Italians in Pennsylvania” appeared in the Wilkes-Barre News:
“It is time to make some wholesale raids on these offending aliens and teach them that they cannot further continue their vicious and criminal practices … it might be good politics for the state constabulary and the police in the cities and towns to raid all suspects in the various Italian Colonies and sections, and at least confiscate the murderous weapons owned and concealed by hundreds of these people. Too wide a latitude is given to them.”
While Lucchino was in prison, a race riot erupted in Pittston. A local man named Parke Clelland had been shot and killed during a brawl on Railroad Street, where he and his friends clashed with a group of young Italian men.
“A shudder of horror ran through the city,” reported the Pittston Gazette. “The scene that followed the murder was such as had never before been witnessed in this city.”
The city police kicked into high gear. “All the Italians in the neighborhood were stopped and searched,” the story continued, “a half dozen Italian houses in the neighborhood were entered … prisoners were picked up one after another.”
As word spread, thousands of enraged Anglo-American citizens poured into Pittston’s streets, and surrounded the city prison where the Italian suspects were being taken. As the police escorted them through the mob into jail, “there were ominous threats of lynchings.” (These were not empty threats. In 1891, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history occurred when 11 Italians were killed by a mob in New Orleans.) Others spoke of burning Italian homes.
In the ensuing chaos, one of the Italian suspects was bum-rushed and nearly beaten to death before Pittston’s Mayor William Gillespie charged out of City Hall “hatless and coatless” to pry the man free.
Fearing a “fatal race war,” Gillespie called in state troopers on horseback, who struggled to drive the “mass of humanity” away, as “probably 2,000 men remained on the streets until daylight.”
The following day, 1,500 residents attended a mass meeting at the state armory. A citizens committee was formed, issuing an “A Letter to Italians” that was published in the Pittston Gazette. The letter expressed regret for the mob violence, “by which one of your countrymen, without being proven guilty of any offense … was assaulted and wrongfully abused.”
“We do not believe for a moment that all Italians are desperadoes,” the letter read. “But you must be aware,” it added, “that circumstances have arisen in the history of communities, when existing and available authority could no more control public indignation …”
The letter urged “every member of the Italian race in this community … to do everything possible, by precept and example, to suppress crime of whatever nature.”
It continued: “Depend upon it, your conduct will now be more closely watched than ever, and your future in America is in your own hands. You must know that you are being boycotted. You must know that very soon, if a radical change is not made, that you will have no market in this country for your labor, and that thousands of your race will not be able to make a living on this continent.” (Directly below the letter, a headline reported another unfolding disaster: “Trapped in a Mine: Thirty Men Are Probably Dead in Burning Shaft.”)
This was the climate when Sam Lucchino and the other Iron Head men were released from prison in 1908.
Friends and family gathered to greet them with cheers. “Wives kissed their husbands,” it was reported, “male friends shook hands, and for nearly five minutes the court room was practically turned over to the foreigners. … One of the defendants attempted to kiss Attorney James Morris.”
For the Black Hand leaders, the trial seemed to mark a turning point. With so many eyes now explicitly trained on them, they slowly began to pivot from brazenly aggressive exploits to a more strategic and insidious, if no less violent, Mafia-style corruption. But one of them was headed in the opposite direction.
While we can only speculate what was going through Sam Lucchino’s mind during his time in prison, his journey was about to take a sharp turn.