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entered the store. Shots rang out and the four mobsters ran out into the street, causing panic as bullets flew everywhere. One gangster fell mortally wounded just outside the grocery store. A crowd gathered around him and called for a priest, but as soon they recognized him as a Black Hander, the mood changed. “Beware of La Mano Nera !” one shouted, and the crowd disappeared, leaving the man to die alone on the sidewalk. The Calandros were tried and acquitted for his murder.
    Two years later, Black Hand mobsters turned to poisoning the horses needed for delivering goods. When Jewish blacksmith Louis Blumenthal still refused to pay up, gangsters drove a car that cost them $3,400—all raised from frightened local businessmen—to his street, where they shot him dead. His murder roused all the other traders to get together and work with the police to run down the murderers. They succeeded, but they faced another major problem. “The immunity of the gangster from arrest has been due to the fear of the victims to appear against him,” said Eighth District Assemblyman Solomon Sufrin. “The only way to prevent the development of gangs in future will be found in giving more attention to the growing boy in the streets.”
    One of these growing boys was Salvatore Lucania, and he keenly followed the news of all the latest gang outrages. At the age of fourteen, he acquired his first gun. As he was showing it proudly to a friend, it went off and the bullet grazed his left leg.
It gave him a scar he would bear for the rest of his life—the only time he would ever be shot. When his father found the gun, Antonio pointed it at his son and said he should shoot him for bringing disgrace on their family.
    “So I stopped coming home, when he was around,” Lucania later recalled. “I’d sleep in empty apartments in the neighborhood, or in pool halls. I’d only go home in the daytime, to get a hot meal from my mother. But I stayed away from my old man as much as I could.”
    His friends out on the street were his family, and it was them—not his brothers or his parents—who would help him get on in the world. When he got some money, he shared a furnished flat on East Fourteenth Street with two other men, one of them another wannabe gangster called Joe Biondo.
    Working as a delivery boy for the Jewish hatmaker Goodman helped shield Lucania’s criminal activities, but all the time he was building up his name as a gang leader with a following of violent kids who would do anything for money. Lucania and his mates would steal old-fashioned pocket watches and gold chains from wealthier Italian immigrants. He said he averaged a haul of three items a day. Early on, he was aware of the market in illicit drugs—especially heroin and cocaine—and started running errands for a local drug dealer. One day he delivered a vial of heroin to a prostitute in a bar who turned out to be a police informer, and he got caught. On June 27, 1916, at the age of eighteen, Salvatore Lucania was sentenced to eight months in prison at New Hampton Farms Reformatory.
    A later probation report declared that he had already acquired a “definite criminalistic pattern of conduct” by this age. “His freedom from conscience springs from his admitted philosophy: ‘I never was a crumb, and if I have to be a crumb I’d rather be dead.’ He explains this by stating that a crumb is a person who works and saves and lays his money aside; who indulges in no extravagance. His description of a crumb would fit the average man.”

    When he came out on parole after six months, Lucania was acclaimed as a “stand-up guy” by his criminal associates. He’d taken his punishment like a man and hadn’t squealed. He also had a new name. He didn’t like the fact that Salvatore could be shortened to Sal or Sally. It invited sexual advances from convicts. Besides, he was an American gangster now and he wanted an American name, so he took up “Charlie” and became Charles