Cokey & Lucky

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The stock market crash of October 1929 plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression, but there was at least one business that didn't suffer at all, prostitution. A hard working girl still had plenty of customers at the going rate of $2 for 15 minutes. That'd be like picking up about $45 for a quarter hour's work today. Even then, prostitution was a mob racket, and one of the biggest gangsters in the game at the time was a man named Charles Luciano.

You might know him better by his nickname, Lucky, Lucky Luciano. Luciano was the most powerful mob boss in America. He made his fortune during Prohibition. It was his idea to create a commission to oversee organized crime in the United States. He had his hands in everything dirty, from bootleg liquor to gambling to prostitution.

And then the law came calling. This is the story of how Lucky Luciano's luck ran out and the woman who helped bring him down. I just told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And they got a small game of life. True weird stuff. She was a prostitute and a madam and a grifter. She was a liar sometimes, like any of us, and a heroin addict who became a star witness in a mafia trial.

She was born Florence Newman, but collected aliases like it was a hobby. Florence Brown, Florence Martin, Florence Marston. I guess when you're living on the wrong side of the law, it helps to not be too attached to whatever's written on your birth certificate. The name that stuck, though, was the nickname the tabloid press gave her, Koki Flo.

We've all heard prostitution called the world's oldest business about a zillion times. And that's only because it probably really is the world's oldest business. It's mostly illegal, too, which makes it a playground for criminals, organized and otherwise. When sex becomes an illicit commodity, you've got a black market, an underground, unregulated economy with no regulation on how the product is distributed or consumed.

Workers are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. That's the nice way to say it. Sex workers are at risk in all directions. And there's no legal protection available because the very work is illegal everywhere in the U.S. except for the state of Nevada. Prostitution is big business. It's worth about $100 billion a year worldwide and anywhere from $15 to $28 billion a year here in the U.S. The sex workers themselves aren't making bank.

Oh, no, that's not how things work. The Department of Justice did a study back in 2014. They learned that Atlanta was the most profitable city for sex work and that Denver was the least. They learned that $150 an hour was pretty much the standard rate and that pimps and traffickers were earning as much as $32,000 a week.

The DOJ soberly observed, though, that even at that rate, it wasn't a hugely profitable industry since expenses could be high. Those poor pimps, they were shelling out for hotel rooms and shopping sprees and advertising, proving that 3-6 Mafia and Cedric Coleman told us the straight truth in the song, It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp, and that won an Oscar, by the way, Best Original Song, 2006.

And in 1930s New York City, prostitution was illegal, but the market for it was as strong as ever. Times were life and death hard and the crime rate spiked as people did whatever they had to do in order to survive, including the many women who turned to prostitution. Back then, they called female prostitutes, bluesies, loose women, soiled doves.

They called brothels, houses of ill repute, disorderly houses. They called what we sold counterfeit love. Doesn't that sound nice, as if love has a thing to do with it? It is making money off of unfortunate women. Most of these women have low IQs and have gone into the life because of stupidity, lack of self-control, born promiscuity, and so on.

They are of inferior morality with no desire to earn their living in any other way. Speak for yourself, mister. I'm not the one paying for something I can get for nothing. Why, that'd just be stupid. We also have no respect for men who confine their love to the arms of prostitutes. Such men seem to be about as pathetically ineffective as you can imagine.

That's the New York Daily News in 1935. Now, there might not have been much respect for the johns who paid for counterfeit love, but there were also few consequences for those men. Something that's still true today in the sex trade. But back then, stamping out the vice of prostitution was more about restricting the supply in hopes of eliminating the demand.

That's a strategy that never seems to work. And why hadn't the enormous failure of prohibition taught these people anything? Maybe that's not fair, though. Because some people learned the lessons of prohibition very well. Those people were criminals. Criminals like Charles Luciano. Luciano was born in Sicily in 1897. He emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1906.

He may have struggled to learn English, but it took him no time at all to teach his new classmates who was boss. He was a born gangster. An enterprising little hoodlum whose first criminal business was a protection racket. Kids at school paid him to keep them safe from, well, kids like him. They very quickly came to see the wisdom of giving Charlie Luciano what he wanted.

Because when they didn't, he'd smack them around himself. No one protested when he dropped out of school in 1914. Charlie was real good at making friends. Meyer Lansky and Buck Siegel and Giuseppe Masseria. The one they called Joe the Boss. Joe was good to Charlie. They both were born in Sicily. Those people are loyal to each other.

As loyal as those people can be. Look what happened to Joe the Boss. Should have never trusted Charlie. Joe taught him too good. Koki Flow has a point. Joe the Boss was enjoying a late lunch in April 1931 at a restaurant in Coney Island called Scarpados when he died and hailed bullets. Fired by his own men. Fido Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and Buck Siegel.

Their leader on the hit? Charlie Luciano. A.K.A. Lucky Luciano. As for how he got his nickname? Luciano survived a brutal attack in 1929. He was savagely beaten, stabbed and left for dead on a Staten Island beach. It was only by chance that a police officer stumbled across the badly injured Luciano and got him to a hospital just in time to save his life.

The attack wasn't a robbery gone wrong and it wasn't random. It was a mob hit. Nothing personal, just business. No one was talking, but Luciano knew. He knew it was his old friend, Joe the Boss, who tried to take him out. Now, Luciano wasn't a street thug anymore. He was a powerful, wealthy gangster at that point who'd made a fortune in the illegal liquor business on the East Coast.

He was good at strategy, at seeing the bigger picture. He was convinced that Joe the Boss wanted him dead, and he knew why. Joe was fighting to hold on to power, and rival boss Salvatore Marazano wanted that power. It was a gangland turf war, and Luciano had shifted his loyalties to Marazano, which meant that Joe the Boss was a dead man walking.

Like I said, nothing personal, just business. Luciano's reward for betraying his old friend was a new nickname and a new job. With Marazano's blessing, New York now had a new top boss, Lucky Luciano. You know, you often only see it in hindsight, the way some people are born with natural talents and gifts that could have been put to such good purpose.

If only life had dealt them one or two different cards, or if they had made one or two different choices. Lucky Luciano was one of those people. The man had a knack for business. Where others saw chaos, he saw patterns. He saw possibilities. He had big ideas. He could have been a captain of industry, never mind his violent tendencies.

He wouldn't be the first CEO to be a psychopath. A study done in 2010 found that there are three times as many psychopaths in top executive or CEO roles than in the overall population. Of course, if you work in corporate America, that's not exactly news, is it? Now, the first thing Lucky Luciano did as New York's new top boss was to turn a disorganized patchwork quilt of crime families and gangsters and crooks into one coherent, functional organization.

And his first step was to divide the Big Apple between five families. Bonanno, Columbo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lacase. Charlie himself was the boss of the Genovese family. Next step, create what he called the Commission. The meeting went down on Al Capone's old turf, Chicago. Luciano did not want to be known as Capo di Tutti e Capi or the boss of bosses.

He had a different approach to management, one that consolidated his power much more quietly. Like a right proper MBA, Luciano proposed a board of directors to both oversee the mob's sprawling interest in America and to mediate any potential conflicts between the families. Luciano believed that this was the best way to prevent messy gang wars and to discourage other crooks from encroaching on mafia territory.

For Luciano, everything was about business and streamlining operations. The other families agreed, naming Luciano the chairman of the board. As head of the Commission, he would occupy the highest rank among all the families, but his hands would stay clean, in theory at least. Charlie had big ideas. He couldn't see any reason why the rackets couldn't work like any other business.

See, something you have to know about Charlie is that he wasn't afraid to learn something. He paid attention, Charlie did. And one of the things Charlie paid attention to was prostitution. It was a perfect business in so many ways. A bottomless demand and an endlessly renewable supply. Sure, it was illegal, but so was everything else in lucky Luciano's empire.

The law was an annoyance, but not a problem that couldn't be solved. Now you sound like Charlie. Prostitution in New York City in the early 1930s was a mixed bag. There were elite brothels like Polly Adler's. She ran one hell of an operation out of a building on West 75th Street. There were secret rooms, hidden stairways for discreet entry and exit, and even a saloon modeled after King Tut's tomb.

Her clients were a who's who of wealthy and powerful men, like the actor Milton Berle and the legendary mobster Dutch Schultz. The liquor and food were the best to be had, and the women were handpicked for their beauty and charm. It's said that women lined up for a chance to work at Polly Adler's house, and for every one that made the cut, 40 more were turned away.

And then there were the smaller houses scattered all over the city, and of course the streetwalkers. Lucky Luciano thought this was unnecessarily chaotic and wasteful. Why shouldn't the sex trade be consolidated into something more manageable and far more profitable? Luciano's crime family began taking over these smaller brothels and operations.

It should have all worked out for Lucky, but there was one thing he didn't anticipate. An honest-to-God, virtuous, pure-of-heart hero showing up on the scene to vanquish the bad guys. Thomas Edmund Dewey. He's probably best known to most people, if the name even rings a bell, as the guy who ran against Harry S. Truman for the presidency.

It was a close election, but Dewey was in the lead when newspapers went to print with the headline, Dewey defeats Truman, only to discover that Truman was the real winner. Oops. Dewey accepted defeat gracefully, which is apparently a thing people did back then. Crazy, right? But many years before Dewey set his sights on the White House, he served as a New York City prosecutor and district attorney.

Dewey was a real goody two-shoes. He had it out for Charlie. He hated the rackets, and he despised the men who ran them. She's not wrong. Thomas Dewey was on a crusade against organized crime in general and the American mafia in particular. There is scarcely a business in New York which does not somehow pay its tribute to the underworld, a tribute levied by force and collected by fear.

There is certainly not a family in New York which does not pay its share of tribute to the underworld every day. Every barrel of flour, every chicken, and the products of fish markets and vegetable markets under threat of slugging, destruction of goods, threats, and stink bombs. Dewey had clocked real success prosecuting bootleggers during Prohibition.

Dewey had the memory of an elephant, the patience of a saint, and the tenacity of a starving dog biting down on a juicy bone. Criminal defendants hated to see him coming. With his easy recall of seemingly every detail of a crime, he was able to trip up witnesses on the stand. No one wanted to go up against Thomas Dewey.

He was tireless and relentless in his pursuit of justice. One famous story involves a case against a bootlegger, a case Dewey won through sheer stubborn attention to detail. If it took sifting through 100,000 pieces of evidence to get a conviction, then that's what it took. And that's what Dewey did. His reputation for thoroughness almost eclipsed his reputation for honesty.

Almost. I mean, the man's nickname was Admirable Dewey. In 1934, a grand jury was convened to investigate racketeering and organized crime in New York City. The testimony was shocking and revealed how criminal rackets had a nearly limitless hold on the city. New York's governor, Herbert Lehman, pressured then-District Attorney William Dodge to do something about it.

Dodge had been, well, dodging responsibility. On his watch, prosecution of racketeering or political scandals had been lax at best. William Dodge ducked and weaved, but the governor wouldn't let up. Eventually, Dodge had no choice but to capitulate and appoint it, under force, a special prosecutor. Manhattan lawyer Thomas Dewey.

Dewey already had a reputation for battling gangsters. By the time he was appointed special prosecutor, he'd put the notorious New Jersey beer baron, Waxy Gordon, behind bars for a decade and had the legendary Dutch Schultz facing trial for tax evasion. Colleagues said that Dewey was militant and methodical and a genius at building an airtight case.

He was a genius, all right. He and Charlie had a lot in common, you know. Seeing the bigger picture, like how Charlie brought the five families together, but he was the boss, because you have to have a boss. Mr. Dewey, see, he understood that. He only took this special prosecutor job after they told him that he would be the boss.

They promised him a free hand and all the support and loyalty of every government enforcement agency. Now, who does that remind you of? See, him and Charlie, like two sides of the same coin, as they say. Dewey was going after it all. Gambling, vice, and commercial racketeering. Dewey had the budget, the support of New York's police commissioner, who was, like Dewey, renowned for his honesty, help from the U.S. Treasury Department, and even the FBI agent who brought down Al Capone.

Not to mention a certain key witness who would captivate the public and help end the criminal reign of Lucky Luciano. That's me. She's talking about me. Where to begin unraveling Lucky Luciano's massive web of vice in New York City? Dewey began piecing evidence together, like a jigsaw puzzle with 10 million pieces that all look the same.

One by one, Dewey's team of cops and investigators scooped up what they called the small fry, the lackeys and runners working their way up to lieutenants in Luciano's crime family. Slowly, a picture came together of Luciano's vast empire, an empire that had grown considerably with the assassination of the freshly acquitted Dutch Schultz.

Yup, those tax evasion charges failed to stick. And when the jury returned their verdict, Judge Frederick H. Bryant fumed at it. Shakes the confidence of law-abiding people in integrity and truth. In hindsight, Dutch Schultz might rather have gone to prison, though, than be acquitted, since he was gunned down just a few months later in the men's room at the Palace Chop House restaurant in Newark, New Jersey.

Lucky Luciano didn't pull the trigger himself, but he for damn sure orchestrated the hit. And the reason for that wasn't just greed or a desire for more power. Dutch Schultz wanted to assassinate Thomas Dewey. Luciano, ever the strategic tycoon, knew that murdering a public official, especially one as high profile and squeaky clean as Dewey, that'd be extra bad for business.

In ordering Dutch Schultz to be killed, Luciano saved Dewey's life. Paging Atlantis, because isn't it ironic? Quietly and carefully, Luciano began the takeover of prostitution in New York. Between the power of his name and the fearsome reputation of his gunmen, there wasn't much of a challenge. His concept was right out of a business school textbook, the chain store.

Lucky envisioned a group of brothels all offering the same services at the same price points under the same management. Independent operations unwilling to get on board were simply frozen out, bullied and threatened into closing shop. You know, it was actually a really solid plan, one that dumped about $12 million a year into Luciano's already bulging piggy bank.

And $12 million in 1935 America? That's equivalent to almost $263 million today. It is crazy how much money Lucky Luciano pulled in from prostitution alone. And he didn't earn one nickel of that on his back, let me tell you. She's right about that. And he wasn't exactly generous with his money when it came to the prostitutes whose company he enjoyed.

Going right back then was about 20 bucks for a tumble. And that's exactly what Lucky paid. Sometimes if he was feeling flush, he might tuck a five dollar bill in a brassiere as a little tip. But even that wasn't a regular thing. Lucky considered himself a businessman. And business was business, regardless of how wealthy he happened to be.

I know some of y'all capitalists are like, he's the owner, he's the boss. He didn't have to pay at all if he didn't want to. Do you hear yourself? Do you? Defending a mobster on the grounds that he never stiffed a hooker? Wow, the part really is in hell, isn't it? Anyway, as Lucky was building his counterfeit love empire, Thomas Dewey was right behind him, drawing closer and closer to bringing the chairman of the Mafia Commission to his knees.

And the view from down here? He's not going to like it one bit. April 1st, 1936. April Fool's Day. Lucky Luciano was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his girlfriend, Broadway dancer Gay Orlova. Ensconced at the Arlington Hotel, taking in the entertainment at the nearby Southern Club Casino. Never dreaming that his run as America's most powerful mob boss was about to end.

Lucky had no reason to be nervous. Hot Springs was a favorite of gangsters. And it's not like Luciano was a wanted man at the time, or a fugitive. He was just a businessman, enjoying the perks and pleasures of a resort designed to cater to his every whim. What he didn't know was that New York detective John J. Brennan was there too.

Just waiting for the moment when he could slap handcuffs on Luciano. Lucky was outraged. For one, what was a New York cop doing in Arkansas? And two, why could he not talk, bribe, or threaten his way out of this? Nothing his lawyers did made any difference. His fight to avoid extradition to New York was a bust. Lucky Luciano was facing 90 indictments for pandering and procuring and running a prostitution racket.

He was hauled back to New York to stand trial. For all of his careful, patient work in assembling the case against Lucky Luciano, Thomas Dewey was facing a classic predicament in prosecuting organized crime. Who would be willing to talk? And even beyond that, who would be willing to talk who could actually link Luciano to a crime?

Because no matter how many charges he was facing, the truth was that Lucky had done a fine job of protecting himself. Dewey would have to prove that Luciano was significantly and directly connected to the prostitution ring he so richly profited from. And in the first week of the trial, things didn't look so good for Dewey.

The man was well insulated. Nobody was allowed to even mention his name. And then, everything changed the very next week when Miss Florence Brown took the stand. That's me. I'm Florence Brown. My friends call me Flo. It's the news hawks that came up with this kooky Flo business. I don't mind that so much as I do being called stringy haired.

That's not any way to talk about a lady now, is it? Say what you want about Florence Brown. And trust me, people had plenty of ugly things to say. But imagine the courage it took to walk into that courtroom on Friday, May 22nd, 1936, and face Lucky Luciano and nine of his henchmen. Kooky Flo got clean while in detention.

They called it taking the narcotics cure. But with only a week under her belt, she was visibly uncomfortable. Fidgeting, restless, compulsively clasping and unclasping her hands. The sight of her entering the courtroom wearing her trademark scarlet lipstick was enough to jolt Lucky Luciano out of his aggrieved indifference.

Now the man was paying attention, beaverishly scrawling notes and passing them to his lawyers. Kooky Flo had a story to tell about a night at a restaurant in Chinatown. It was a business meeting. Lucky and his chief aide, Jimmy Fredericks, were discussing how to best organize the bookers for their hookers. Kooky Flo went along as Fredericks lady.

Who was there? At that time, Charlie, Lucky, Tommy Bull Pennochio and Dave Petillo. They were sitting at a table. Pennochio and Petillo were two of Lucky's co-defendants. Was there any conversation? Yes, mostly in Italian. What do you remember of that conversation? There wasn't much said in the restaurant. Did you leave the restaurant finally?

Yes, in a car which I drove. Was there any conversation then about prostitution? Yes. Jimmy spoke up and said, gee, I think some of the bookers are holding out some of the joints on us. And Charlie spoke up and said, can't you get them all together? And Davey said, yes, we can get them in a line, but it'll take some time.

And Charlie said, I tell you what to do. Get all the bookers downtown tomorrow and we'll straighten the matter out. Then they started talking in Italian. So listen, so extreme were Kooky Flo's symptoms of withdrawal that the judge directed the prosecution to serve her small doses of brandy at regular intervals throughout her testimony so that she might be able to complete the whole ordeal.

Frail though she appeared, Kooky Flo was as tough as the gangster she ran with, seduced at age 15 by a businessman who kept her as his mistress. She fell into prostitution by 18. Her one weakness was Jimmy Fredericks. She swore that he was nothing more than a bond agent who thought his business was legal. The bond was what Luciano's gang called the kickback payment expected from both the madam and the bookers.

Kooky Flo testified that Jimmy hated violence and was opposed to beating a madam who refused to pay her bond. And then Kooky Flo added that she had heard for herself, Luciano ordering that both madam and bookers be brought into line by whatever means necessary, fair or foul. She also described another Chinatown meeting where Luciano said he regretted getting into prostitution.

There were just too many investigations going on. Go on. Davey said, well, there have been a lot of pinches and that took money out of the combination. But when we get them all in line, it'll be OK. Charlie said that he'd like to be quiet for a while and that then maybe they could open up and syndicate like they did in Chicago.

And Davey said, I don't think that'll be so tough to do. The investigation won't get us. They'll just pick up a couple of bondsmen and let it go at that. What did Charlie say? He said we could combine the places on a large scale, the same as the chain stores. We could even get the madam on a salary or commission basis.

It would take a little time, but we could do it. And there it was. No more rumors, no more hearsay. First person testimony about Lucky Luciano's grand vision to run prostitution in New York like a chain store. You can best believe that the defense tried hard to discredit Koki Flo as a witness. But she was one hard case.

Nothing the defense threw at her even fazed her. She very calmly insisted that her motives were pure as she had made the decision to go straight and get out of this business. If I have to be punished, I may as well clear my conscience by telling the truth. Koki Flo's description of Luciano's attempt to run the sex racket like a chain business was backed up by one very intriguing piece of evidence.

It was one of the so-called white tickets. Small slip of paper printed with the numbers one through one hundred issued to each prostitute by Luciano's crime syndicate. When the ticket was punched to a one hundred dollar total, the prostitute received another. At the end of the week, all the tickets were submitted and payroll was distributed.

A prostitute might gross anywhere from 250 to 450 dollars per week, of which she would receive half. But there were other expenses taken from that paycheck, too. Like a ten dollar bonding fee, 25 to 50 bucks for board. That was meals. Five dollars for a weekly visit to the mob doctor. Two dollars for maid service. And on top of all that, another 10 percent to cover our bookings inside the brothel.

At the end, a prostitute might be left holding 50 bucks, out of which she still had to pay for some kind of lodgings of her own outside the brothel. It wasn't a great deal for her, not at all. Yet at the same time, it was worlds better than what she might have earned in a legit job. On the very day that Koki Flo took the stand, the Florence Crittenden League released a survey showing that employers were paying young women between only two dollars and fifty cents and eight dollars a week.

You do the math. Koki Flo's testimony was so damning, so damaging, that Thomas Dewey jailed a lawyer and five other witnesses in connection with what he called a brazen attempt to wreck this case by way of perjured testimony. That freshly jailed lawyer, Samuel Kornbluth, tried to coax or maybe coerce is the better word, a witness for the prosecution named Dorothy Russell Calvert, into taking the stand and calling her friend Koki Flo a liar.

Kornbluth had also allegedly tried to persuade Dorothy to get Koki Flo to change her story. This trial really lived up to the hype. Gangsters, murder, hookers, perjury. The star witness being fortified with sips of brandy. And Thomas Dewey, that unflappable defender of truth and justice, calmly presiding over it all. Twenty witnesses for the prosecution testified about the operations of Luciano's twelve million dollar vice ring.

But not one could link Lucky directly to the crime. It was looking like Lucky might really live up to his name. Would a jury take the word of a hooker with a drug problem? Just because a gal has a little trouble with dope, don't make her a liar. That is so true, Koki, and so fair. As it happened, Koki Flo wouldn't have to shoulder the burden of nailing the mob king alone.

Dewey called three other women to the stand who'd worked as prostitutes in Luciano's houses. Nancy Pressure, formerly Genevieve Fletcher of Auburn, New York, testified that girls in Lucky's employ had their feet and stomachs burned. Some had their tongues cut out for talking too much. Thelma Jordan took the stand and described how she and other women had been threatened with death if they dared to testify.

She said she knew they all did what happened to people who talked. Mildred Harris had a particular axe to grind. She'd fallen in love with one of Luciano's top bookers. A couple married, and Mildred pleaded with Lucky to let her man Pete Harris go straight. Lucky coldly refused. And now Mildred was talking. Mildred had been involved from the start.

She testified that two of Lucky's eight co-defendants told her of the plan to form a prostitution conglomerate when they brought her on as a madam. Between that and her intimate knowledge of bookings and cash revenue, Mildred Harris finished the job Koki Flo started. And now it was up to the jury. When the judge announced a verdict in the case.

Luciano stood scowling. His thundering herd of heavily guarded racketeers marched into the courtroom behind him. Their quivering, shifty faces registering various degrees of apprehension. The jurors grim, tired eyes told the whole story long before the lengthy process of announcing their verdict. Covering 558 counts, it took more than 40 minutes to recite the doom of the nine chain store bordello lords.

Got to love the New York Daily News. That's some tasty tabloid journalism right there. It was a sing song monologue of finality. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Luciano's fate was revealed first. The big mogul of the citywide vice empire sat between his guards, not even blinking. A total victory for Thomas Dewey. Luciano and his eight co-defendants, each convicted on 62 counts of compulsory prostitution.

They were dumped into the prison van and transported to their cells in the tombs. Before their departure, the nine men were allowed a few moments conversation with their wives. These women, perhaps the sorriest victims of the vice lord's careers, formed a picture of grief. It was in no sense of personal victory. Each count carried two to 20 years, meaning the mobsters were staring down a combined 1865 years in prison.

Bad news for lucky Luciano, who believed that the law couldn't touch him. For all the top notch, expensive lawyers and the threats to witnesses. For all his money and political connections. Lucky was brought down by the most morally upright citizen in all of New York. And a handful of women he considered his property.

What were they but bodies, meat, commodities. You love to see it. Thomas Dewey had no illusions that he could have any effect on prostitution in New York. It's the world's oldest profession for a reason. Like we said, endless demand, bottomless supply. But he knew for damn sure that Luciano's guilty verdict and the 30 to 50 year prison sentence would most definitely hit organized crime right in the coyotes.

This was not a vice trial. It was a racket prosecution. The control of all organized prostitution in New York by the convicted defendants was one of their lesser rackets. The prostitution racket was merely the vehicle by which these men were convicted. Lucky Luciano had his defenders, men like him always do. But it made no difference.

He began serving his sentence at Sing Sing, then was transferred to the much more remote prison in Dannemora, New York. They had him working in the prison laundry. But, you know, he thought of himself as a good Roman Catholic. They all do. The bastards. Did you know he figured out a way to get a church built at the prison?

He did. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Lucky Luciano didn't stay in prison and he didn't escape. He walked out the door a free man courtesy of the United States government. He'd cut a deal. The mob would do all it could to help win World War Two by supplying intelligence to the U.S. Navy. Thomas Dewey wasn't happy about it, but he reluctantly agreed to see Luciano's sentence commuted on the condition that Lucky be deported to Italy.

Can you believe that? Just strolls right onto a boat and it's off to Sicily. As for Koki Flo, in March 1937, she recanted her testimony. She claimed that Dewey and his team took advantage of her addiction to force her to fabricate a story that would bring Luciano's crime syndicate down. What I said was Mr. Dewey threatened to send me away for seven to 20 years if I didn't talk.

So no one really knows which version of the story she told is true. What we do know is that Koki Flo traded the brothels of New York City for sunny California. Then in 1937, found herself immortalized on the silver screen in the film noir thriller Marked Woman. Betty Davis played me. The character was based on me. And Humphrey Bogart played a lawyer who was inspired by Mr. Dewey.

Please don't ask him to talk. He'll kill me. You help me to prove that he was responsible for this and I'll put him where he won't kill anybody. You don't know what he's like. He stops at nothing. People just disappear and never hurt him again. I don't want that to happen to me. From now on, you're working for me, understand?

Most of you have been around long enough to know how I operate. We know the kind of action they want and we are going to give it. From tiddlywinks to roulette. And you work the way I tell you. Or you don't work at all. Betty, I want you to tell me the truth. I want to know why you're not going back to school. I'd be too ashamed.

Ashamed of what? Of you! All I know is that that kid sister of mine came back here again last night. And then nobody has seen her since. If I find out that you or anybody else has laid a finger on her... You'll what? I'll get you. It sure looked like a promising second chapter for Cokie Flo. She teamed back up with Mildred Harris and the pair opened a gas station in California with the money they'd earned from writing articles about their experience.

This would be a pretty happy ending. If the story ended here. It's awfully hard to leave the life behind. It was what I knew. Cokie Flo ended up in the brothels of Juarez, Mexico. Don't feel sorry for me, Dollface. I had my choices and I made them. I did what I had to do. I survived. And what about the Lucky Luciano trial?

Did you tell the truth on the stand? Did you recant later because you were afraid? What does it matter? Mr. Dewey got to be a hero. Charlie made out fine in the end. I lived my life. Nothing changed anyways except the faces. You think they took down the racket? You can't take down the racket. The racket is forever. Next time on True Weird Stuff.

If it looks like a ghost and acts like a ghost, is it a ghost? If you look like a killer and act like a killer, are you a killer? It can be awfully hard to tell, especially late at night on a lonely country road. Better take a closer look at that apparition before you shoot. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode.

Don Morgan as Thomas Dewey and Brittany Lynch as Cokie Flo. Sherry, I was so excited that I didn't have to figure out the differences between matter and antimatter or try to imagine neutrinos going through my fingernails or alternate universes or anything else. I don't think that comes into play much in the story. The other part of this is this is a story that I actually was quite familiar with.

I sort of love the convergence of organized crime and Dewey defeats Truman. We learn about stuff separate. We don't ever learn context and connectivity. Everybody knows the infamous Dewey defeats Truman newspaper headline. Especially if you watch gangster movies or Boardwalk Empire or whatever, you know a little bit about Lucky Luciano.

But what we often don't know, what's waiting for us like the prize in a box of cereal is, oh, these lives intertwined and overlapped and none of these individuals and events are separate. Everything, everywhere, all at once to borrow the title of the movie. So I really did love having a chance to bring Thomas Dewey back to life to tell part of this story.

Because he really was, I mean, of course, you don't know what someone's like behind closed doors, but he really was like such an altar boy in so many ways. So on the one hand, you kind of look at him as this uptight stiff. You know what I mean? But on the other hand, as you're telling the story, I went, you know, the thing is, he's on the right side of things.

And if we don't have the Thomas Deweys of the world, we'll have nothing but Lucky Lucianos. It's anarchy, yeah. You know what's interesting that you say that about Thomas Dewey? Movies have trained us to root for the mobsters. Yeah, that's true. No, it is true. You really are rooting for gangsters more than you are law enforcement in these stories.

And Thomas Dewey, you know, was, he was just one of those people that was, you know, impeccable. His vibes were immaculate, and there was no coming for him. And Luciano and Joe the Boss and all these other gangsters with their colorful nicknames and their flashy suits and their diamond pinky rings and, you know, their cigars and expensive dinners, they're more fun to follow.

They're more fun to root for. But damn are they some violent sociopaths when you get right to it. Oh, yeah. I mean, Dutch Schultz was an awful person you talked about. He was the one that was involved with the Black Sox scandal in 1919 with the White Sox, and they had fixed the World Series. He was the one that was responsible for that.

And really, it's because of what he did that leads to a present-day character who just died, Pete Rose, who got involved with gambling. It was so abhorrent to them that when it came up that Pete Rose was gambling, it was like, no, I'm sorry, you're out. See what I mean about the interconnectedness of these people and these events?

It's true. I was reading something about this not long ago that was saying what Dutch Schultz did really was connected to that. And the other bit of information I think a lot of people don't know, but I'll tell you a funny conversation I had with my parents when they first moved to Nevada. So I'm sitting in their little living room, you know, and we're talking and that thing, and all of a sudden the two of them are starting to talk about prostitution.

Well, you know, it is legal here unless the local jurisdiction says that it's not. And the two of them, I don't know where they got the information from. They're having this conversation and passing all this information along to me, and I am sitting there going, I really can't believe I'm having this conversation with my very straight-laced parents.

You know, I'm one of those people that does not think that prostitution should be illegal for a lot of reasons. Prohibition is such a great example of what happens when you take something that is a human vice or need in the case of sex and you make it a crime. What you do is you don't lessen the use of the product, in this case sex.

You simply create these enormous black markets and openings for crime and racketeering. You just do. And it's naive to think otherwise, right? You're just being like a wide-eyed child to think that you're ever going to make this go away. And if it's legal and regulated, you kind of push the bad guys out of the room. And the other issue that I have with prostitution being illegal is there are people who, for whatever reason, they have to pay for it.

They pay for companionship. Some people want to because sex with a prostitute can be a judgment-free zone. What was the Charlie Sheen line? Are you paying for sex? He said, no, I'm not paying for sex. I'm paying for them to go home. Yeah, like it's transactional and literally transactional. And there are some lonely people.

I saw there was a documentary on HBO. Do you remember? What was it called? It was HBO's Real Sex, I think. This is way back. Yeah, they did that. They did a thing, and I don't remember the name of it. They did it about the Bunny Ranch. Yeah. I saw one where there was a gentleman. He was a military veteran, and he'd taken some, I think, maybe Vietnam.

And he'd taken some pretty catastrophic injuries. And there was this one sex worker at the Bunny Ranch that he was close to, and she was his preferred worker. And he felt like with her, he didn't have to defend or explain his injuries, his scars, what he could and could not do. That with her, he could just be himself.

And the camera is on both of them. It didn't get in super explicit, but you could see that there was a real affection between the two of them. And I know some people hear that and they go, well, how can there be affection? She's getting paid. Well, I like the guy that does my oil change a whole lot, and I'm paying him.

Do you know what I mean? Can you not feel warmth and respect toward a person you hire for a job? It's not surprising to me because that's human nature. That you, when I say fall in love, that you love people, that you get close to people. I saw this such a long time ago. I might have still been in school when I saw this episode, and it stayed with me for a lot of reasons.

One was this man, and he was a lovely person on camera anyway. I mean, you don't know, right? But this man who had sacrificed so much and had lost so much was just like, you know, I'm just, I want to be with someone. I want to feel desired. And so he's at the bunny ranch paying for it. And it shouldn't be a crime for him to do that, and it shouldn't be a crime for that sex worker to provide that.

The other issue I have with prostitution being illegal is that it's very seldom the customers who face consequences. Very seldom the customers. Like in the drug game, if you're selling me drugs and the cops are there, you're busted for selling, I'm busted for buying. But in the sex trade, it's so, so often the provider, the worker, who faces consequences, not the John.

Look at Jeffrey Epstein case. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, that is a situation where, you know, has anybody who was a customer there been prosecuted? No. The only person who seems to be experiencing any flavor of justice is Ghislaine Maxwell. Isn't that interesting? I firmly believe that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison to keep him quiet.

But he's certainly not, and maybe that's the ultimate justice, but he's certainly not rotting away behind bars, nor are any of the many men who availed themselves of the girls. I hate when they call them underage women. No. The other word for underage woman is girl. Yeah. And then there's another argument that somebody always likes to make, and here it is.

Even if prostitution was legal, crime would still be involved. Well, yeah, absolutely. Booze is legal, and there are still people making their own moonshine and selling it. In a lot of places in the country, pot is legal, and in those legal states, there's still an underground black market because some people think that the dispensary is overcharged.

You know, the common denominator here, Dennis Difficult, is human nature. There are people who are always going to go around the side and down the lane and in the back and circumvent the laws and the rules. Always, always. You're not going to eradicate that. Sports gambling is everywhere right now, but to what you're saying, I think that there are probably still a lot of illegal sports betting operations going on.

Sure. I mean, think about it. You know, yeah, you can bet on games like DraftKings, but maybe the payout's a little bit better with the neighborhood bookie. You're not, as long as human beings are here, we're not going to eradicate crime. Our attitude, our position toward the sex trade comes to us from those joyless, somber, black clad motherfuckers we call the Puritans.

I knew we were going to end up with them. Oh, I hate them. I hate them so much. So, you know, this weird pearl clutching, capital V virtue when it comes to the sex trade, and often, and I'm not going to name all of the individuals or maybe any of them because some of y'all send me some crazy screens. You know, we've had very prominent men who scream morality who got called prostitutes.

Yeah. Because sex is such a powerful drive and it gets tangled up in all sorts of other psychological mechanisms, what turns people on, what gets people off, you can see how it might be the biggest thrill in the world for a certain person to pull up alongside a street prostitute and get a $50 blowjob. You can see why that would be appealing.

It's forbidden. It's dirty. It's wrong. It's shameful. Ooh, I can't get enough. So, you're never going to completely eliminate that impulse. But because prostitution is illegal, that's what made it possible for organized crime in Lucky Luciano's day to make that much money off of it. Had it been legal, now you've got other entities making money off of it, like the city, the state, the IRS.

But if you regulate it, then you can make sure that whoever is involved with it is being paid fairly. And that there are some health department safeguards in place, right? You know, it goes without saying, y'all should be using a condom, but we want to keep people healthy. And there are places in the world where it is legal and regulated and still a booming frickin' business.

We're such a young country and we're so idealistic for all of our crazy dramatic rantings on social media. We're so idealistic that we really do think that we can make ancient practices go away. Like prostitution and substance use. Yeah. We do believe that. Now, let's talk about Ms. Florence Brown, Ms. Cokie Flo. So, she's such a character and such an important figure.

But of course, everyone else told her story. Most of it was told by tabloid reporters. And they heavied up on, you know, the drugs and her appearance and the fact that she was a whore and all of that. But as is so often the case, especially in that era, she didn't really have a voice. So, we gave her one in this episode because it's nice to let her tell her own story to the extent that we can.

And she really was, along with the women that she sort of emboldened to come forward, she really was the domino that fell and took down Luciano's empire and got him kicked out of the country. That's pretty big, isn't it? That's pretty major. Yeah, it is. Because otherwise, it wouldn't have happened. I mean, you know, these people were all so browbeaten and intimidated.

And the way that – I want to talk about Lucky's business acumen. Because really, he's one of those people – we see this all the time. We talk about this a lot. You'll see some criminal, like in the news, some dumb crook that went to these extraordinary efforts to be a crook. And his life might have actually been easier if he had just gotten a job.

Show up somewhere five days a week. Luciano was a genius businessman in a lot of ways. But, you know, he may have been a sociopath. I mean, he didn't have a lot of meaningful relationships in his life that were, you know, other than associates and the mob. So, you know, I think that – I mean, he had marriages. One of the things that I read about him is he had marriages, but he had no real relationships, if you know what I mean.

People can legally make a union between two people, but that doesn't mean that it's a relationship per se. I think that – armchair diagnosis – that Lucky Luciano was actually a psychopath. Not every psychopath is Jason Voorhees, right? But if you look at that so-called dark triad of personality traits, he showed them all.

And interestingly, from his earliest childhood. So that's what swings me over to Lucky was not just like a good businessman, but a psychopath. Like, unfortunately, many CEOs that we have working in the corporate world, and that's not my opinion. That's like – that was actually studied. If you look at the stories of his early life, what he was like as a kid, what he was like before he dropped out of school, you're seeing some really troubling signs.

He had no regard for the sanctity of life. He had no qualms about violence, and he was really one of those people that was big on expediency. So you're my friend, but you're in my way, and I believe I can be more successful without you than with you. See ya. He had no problem scheming and working to take out the men that he pursued as his rivals, even though some of these men had been his friends and supporters on his way up.

So I think he was probably a very charming, narcissistic psychopath. Yeah. What's interesting is that all of those people that brought him down, I don't know what happened to their lives, but I'm guessing that they didn't have mob hits put out on them. Well, the co-defendants, they all went to – Lucky and his eight co-defendants were all sentenced to pretty hard terms.

Right. Back then, they didn't really have a Camp Cupcake kind of prison situation. Sing Sing and then Dannemora, and of course, Dannemora is the famous prison. So many good things come out of Dannemora. But you know that Lucky had his sentence commuted because he had connections back in Italy under Mussolini and the allies in the United States wanted that information.

But you'll notice that his eight co-defendants did not get their sentences commuted. Right. So if you're a person and you think that by attaching yourself to power that somehow that makes you safe or that proximity to power is the same thing as power itself, let Lucky's co-defendants be a reminder to you that the big dog might get a break, but you ain't going to.

And so they disappeared into the correction system and fell out of the river of events that happened with organized crime going forward. Lucky, yeah, he did some time, you know, devout Catholic, built a church. And then he went home to Sicily and sat under an orange tree like what you would call it Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

He didn't get a bad deal, Max. No, he didn't. Not overall. Did not get a bad deal. And and I really did want a happier ending for Miss Florence Brown. And things were looking up for her, you know, she so she goes to California and it couldn't have been a more different life. And very little attention was paid to Cokie and Mildred after they left New York City.

It was really hard to find them like, you know, they're here and then they're 200 miles away. Like it was really hard to find them. But they tried. Those two women tried to to get out of the life they did. They they of all the things in the world, a gas station. But of course, this was the beginning of the heyday of the automobile.

Right. And sunny California and all of that. But you know how it is. It's hard to run a business. More fail than succeed. And for a smart and shrewd and strategic as Cokie and Mildred were, you know, maybe running a gas station called for a different set of skills. I hated that Cokie ended up back in the game down in Mexico.

Yeah, I hated that for her. But then, you know. She she was like, she says at the end of the show, she had her choices and she made them. And she had she had something that was very rare and I think unlikely for a woman in her position. She had agency. She had some power to make some choices. Sometimes, you know, when a person makes a choice that you don't love, you forget they still had the power to make that choice just because you disagree with it.

Doesn't change their agency in that moment. And it seems like she was aware of that. Yeah, she was. And then, of course, you know, she just sort of also disappears into the slipstream and and is gone. Aren't you surprised they weren't all killed by the mob? I mean, yeah, he went back to Sicily, but they won. That's the thank you for pointing that out.

These women led by Florence. They went head to head, toe to toe with the most powerful organized crime racket in the United States. And they won and they walked. And they they they lived out their days in whatever way. But they did not catch a bullet on a back alley. They won. And that is so unlikely. Dutch Schultz gone.

Joe, the boss gone. Fredericks all of the henchmen gone. Lucky Luciano gone. Koki and Mildred. They're in Florida or in California in the sunshine looking at gas stations to buy. Who's the winner here? Yeah. Other than Thomas Dewey, who I don't think is as remembered by the people of the today. I don't think he got his all his propers as a as an individual.

He did. He did some cool stuff. He did some good stuff. It was that, you know, I usually root for a criminal. I usually I'm usually on the side of the bad guys. There's a quote from Gandhi and I don't know exactly what it is. So I'll paraphrase a little bit. But it's like you take somebody who is a bad person who seems all powerful and it seems like nothing could ever bring them down.

He said, but they always fall. Always. Yeah. And so the same is true, even though he had everybody paid off. Luciano did because he had enough money to do it. He had everybody paid off and still was able to be brought down. Lucky was running a very tight operation. I mean, if you can step back from it, take the take the fact that, you know, he's a murderer and a gangster and a psychopath.

Set that aside for just a minute and look at look at what he accomplished. The crime landscape in America during Prohibition and after was mayhem. He organized it into something very familiar to anyone in the business world. He did that. He brought those families together. He created, you know, an oversight, a board of oversight and was well on his way to streamlining prostitution when Thomas Dewey arrived on the scene.

And it was just the perfect storm of Luciano is really pulling this together and it's really starting to run like a chain of grocery stores, as was his vision. But then we've got the crusader on the white horse and we've got the wisecracking saloon girl who knows way more than she should. Because she's a young woman with a drug problem and she's a whore.

And so they let her sit at the table and in the car because they don't think she's capable or interested in paying attention. Here's what I think, because I think the truth is somewhere in there with her. Do I think that they threatened that they would send her to prison? I do. Do I think that what she said was true? I think that as well.

So I was going to ask you about that. Talk to me about her recanting. Where do you come down? Well, I think you had mentioned it at the time that part of the recanting was in order to protect herself from impossible retribution from the mob. I mean, I that part of it is the thing that is a little surprising. But I think that she did tell the truth.

I think that there's so many details in what she was saying. And, of course, I didn't see all of the testimony or anything else. But the testimony that was there, it does seem like it's it's detailed enough that you say, you know, this is accurate. What she is saying is true and it makes sense. And there's not only that, but there's evidence to back up what she's saying.

So I think that I think she was threatened. If you don't tell the truth, then this. And I think she went ahead and said, OK, here's what the truth is. And I think that that was that was absolutely was the truth. I agree with you. I think that she told the truth on the stand and recanted to save herself. And, you know, you learn like we're not lawyers.

It's so interesting how they build a case. So Dewey had everything except for somebody in the room that heard with their own ears Luciano talking about building a racket. And so he's I mean, he's moving heaven and earth because without that, it's just hearsay. Well, you know, my friend told me or, you know, I heard it from the madam.

He desperately needed somebody in the room with Lucky Luciano. And as chance would have it, there is cookie flow. Who's the lady companion of one of the henchmen? And most most of those people are thought of as, you know, wallpaper in the room. They're not thought of as humans. I mean, if we're if we're just going to be real, a young woman working as a prostitute in 1935 New York City for the mob was barely considered a person.

Right. I mean, let's please be so real about it. They they didn't they didn't see her as a threat. They didn't have to worry about minding their words when she was around. She didn't speak Italian and they would go in and out if you noticed. But Lucky only needed to say one thing in English for Dewey to get him. And he did. And so that was fascinating watching the way that they pulled that case together.

And today the modern equivalent of it is like we often don't get the big drug lords and the big organized crime people on their actual crimes. We get them on tax evasion and racketeering. You know, like, my God, you're just lining people up and killing them. You're flying bricks of cocaine in the middle of the night. We can't get you on any of that.

That is because you see, you usually at some point along the line, somebody has to keep books somewhere on this. You can't just have it all floating around. So somebody is keeping books on it somewhere. And because that's real evidence, you can get real evidence on tax evasion. Did he have somebody ordered to kill? I don't know. You know, unless you have a recording of him saying it, everything else is hearsay.

And the crimes were so violent, like, you know, like just gunning people, like literal, a literal hail of bullets, like something out of a movie. I mean, that was all so real and bloody and nasty. That's not what brought Lucky Luciano down. What brought him down was him trying to turn whorehouses into a chain of subways.

That's what brought him down. Yeah. So, yeah, a nice little break from particle physics for you. Let me and I want to say so. Koki Flow, as you heard Max say at the beginning, Koki Flow was played by Brittany Lynch. Definitely relation. So Brittany is my niece. She's my big brother's oldest daughter. And she had done something for two weird stuff, just a line or something.

And she was like, and that was really fun. I want to do another one. I said, well, let me see if I can't write, like, find some truly epic character for you to play. So about a week or so later, I reached out and said, hey, how about you play the wise cracking drug addicted whore that took down the Lucky Luciano empire?

And she was like, now you're talking. It's all about it. Those parts are fun. By the way, don't you love the fact they were giving her booze in court? Oh, oh, my God. I almost forgot about that. Have you ever in your life? No, no. She's trembling on the stand. You know, she said they put her in detention before the hearing and she had to go cold turkey.

And depending on depending on what source you look at, the drugs were cocaine, Koki, heroin, opium, laudanum. I don't know what to believe, because so many so many of the reports coming out of that were breathless and hysterical, you know, just like super tabloidy. But she was definitely on something. And one week cold turkey.

She I mean, what's that like physically? It's got to be really difficult. Yeah. I mean, that's got to be really, really difficult. I want you to imagine turning on court TV or whatever, and they're pausing to give sips of brandy to the witness on the stand. I would never. I'm sorry. I don't know if you can hear it, but the dog or dog sitting is barking in the background.

And I apologize for that. If it's if it if you can hear it. Oh, no, I love I love. One of the things I've loved about life ever since 2020 was is the way people's pets just show up at work now randomly. And we're all just like, oh, yeah, I guess your dog's here now. But he even registers. I love it. So thanks for joining us for this episode of True Weird Stuff.

Next week, we're going to tell a ghost story. Problem is, is you got to be you got to be sure that what you're dealing with is a ghost. This is a tale that took more than 100 years to resolve. Can I tell you on Scooby Doo, it was never a ghost. I'm just going to say on Scooby Doo, it was never a ghost. It was somebody who had a financial thing to gain and hated those meddling kids.

Can I tell you, I shout out Scooby Doo in next week's episode. No, you don't. Because, no, it's so true. It's so true. Whatever it was, whatever the apparition or the monster was, Mr. Parker, the banker, always some shitty old white capitalist that was doing the town dirty. I got to tell you, Scooby Doo was revolutionary in so many ways.

It does not get the respect it deserves. All right. So join us next week for a ghost story right here on True Weird Stuff. And again, thank you for listening. Your support. You're the reason that we can now say thank you for listening to the award winning True Weird Stuff. We we love y'all, our fellow eyeballs and weirdos, and we'll see you next time.

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