The Governor and the Gangster: Dewey, Luciano, Commutation, and Controversy

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Thomas E. Dewey and Charles "Lucky" Luciano became household names during a 1936 vice trial in which Dewey successfully prosecuted Luciano, a prominent Mafioso, who received a thirty-to-fifty-year prison sentence. Later, Dewey became the Governor of New York and a perennial Republican presidential candidate while Luciano, still in prison, took part in a joint Navy-Mafia intelligence operation in World War II. In 1946, Governor Dewey commuted Luciano's sentence on the condition that he be deported to his native Italy. The commutation led to years of controversy fomented by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which downplayed Luciano's wartime services, spread … continued below

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Rzeppa, Joseph July 2023.

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  • Rzeppa, Joseph

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Thomas E. Dewey and Charles "Lucky" Luciano became household names during a 1936 vice trial in which Dewey successfully prosecuted Luciano, a prominent Mafioso, who received a thirty-to-fifty-year prison sentence. Later, Dewey became the Governor of New York and a perennial Republican presidential candidate while Luciano, still in prison, took part in a joint Navy-Mafia intelligence operation in World War II. In 1946, Governor Dewey commuted Luciano's sentence on the condition that he be deported to his native Italy. The commutation led to years of controversy fomented by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which downplayed Luciano's wartime services, spread rumors that he had bribed his way out of prison, and claimed that he was smuggling drugs into America from Italy. The FBN's narrative was echoed by muckraking journalists and Dewey's political opponents, finally prompting Dewey in 1954 to order an investigation that thoroughly debunked FBN assertions. However, the records of that investigation were quarantined until the mid-1970s. Since then, most scholars have used those records to explore the Navy-Mafia wartime alliance, but this dissertation exhaustively mines them and other documents in Dewey's papers, along with federal records, to disprove the FBN's narrative that there was something untoward about Dewey's commutation of Luciano's sentence and that Luciano spearheaded a drug ring during his Italian exile. Originally antagonists, the Governor and the Gangster later became unlikely allies of sorts, if only because they shared the same scurrilous detractors whose reckless accusations are belied by this study.

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  • July 2023

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  • Sept. 21, 2023, 7:45 a.m.

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  • Dec. 8, 2023, 5:53 p.m.

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Rzeppa, Joseph. The Governor and the Gangster: Dewey, Luciano, Commutation, and Controversy, dissertation, July 2023; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2179330/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .

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