Gay was proud of her conquest. When asked by one of your reporters, "What about Munds?" she replied, "Oh, Theus is O.K. But all he's got is money. Lucky, he's sinister!"
When that was printed, it was the first intimation Dewey's detectives had of the romance. When Gay returned to New York, they tapped her wires, and thereby traced Luciano to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was hiding out.
After Lucky's conviction, Uncle Sam deported Gay as an undesirable alien. When last heard of she was a Paris mannequin, still beautiful, still in love with Luciano, still bitter at your reporters—and trying to get a passport to Italy.
His conviction was another lesson to his kind. It showed them that, with all their accumulated power, they were not sure of their liberty.
Luciano had conducted his vice operations from a duplex suite in the Waldorf Towers. These activities were traced right into his two manicured hands. The syndicate came to the conclusion that that, too, must be changed.
Now the important stockholders delegate everything illegal. In one season the outfit netted $6,000,000 in Miami gambling houses. But these were all run by stooges, few of whom knew to whom the money eventually went, and none of whom knew how or where it went—into corporations with strange and remote names, into sinking funds, reserves, depreciation allocations and undivided profits.
Corporations can be sued and can be taken, but they cannot be locked in a prison.
That, briefly, is the story of the gangsters' progress, one of the biggest-monied combinations in the nation. That is the reason why the shootings have stopped and top men are no longer put on the spot.
"Bugsy" Siegel and Binaggio, slain after this chapter first appeared in print, were exceptions. Benny, who got his nickname because the boys said he was "nuts," had threatened to blow the whistle on the syndicate when Luciano refused to bail him out of his $6,500,000 white-elephant gambling casino-hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
He was put on the spot because he refused to be "organized"; preferred old-fashioned gang methods learned when he was the No. 1 torpedo for Murder, Inc. Binaggio, too, double-crossed the boys.