There is an intercommunicating liaison among the lawyers, many of whom are engaged for their exclusive services by the year, and all supervising the main channels and watching hawklike to guard against letting their employers become involved in actionable tax delinquencies.
As for all other matters, they can be handled locally. The syndicate owns plenty of judges, strong men in both parties and great fluid assets. It is no secret that money can square anything in the United States.
Luciano was no peanut when Dewey ruined him. But there are few Deweys. And Luciano had not yet learned to cover his tracks. The money came in so fast and his drag was so good, he felt immune, but Tom Dewey wanted to be President of the United States, and Lucky hadn't thought of that.
Luciano had been taken for a ride in the orthodox manner, between two executioners, and had come out alive. They left him for dead in a lonely spot, but he beat it.
After that he felt that nothing could break him.
Like Samson, he was betrayed by infatuation for a doll. She was Gay Orlova, a fabulously beautiful, but plump, blonde White Russian refugee, who had come to Broadway and Earl Carroll's choruses by way of Turkey.
Said by Carroll to be "the sexiest gal who ever worked for me," Gay quickly found a protector in the late Theus Munds, rich and elderly Wall Street broker, who went whole hog with diamonds, furs and limousines.
During the Florida season of 1935, Gay appeared as a featured show girl in the floor show Carroll presented in the flamboyant Palm Island Casino, then operated by Bill Dwyer, a Prohibition-time big-shot rumrunner, on Al Capone's private island.
There she met Luciano. Lucky, who had had the pick of girls, never had had one so glamorous—or amorous. He moved right in.