After the SS Normandie burned and capsized at its New York pier in February 1942, amid fears of sabotage, Naval Intelligence turned to the one power that truly controlled the waterfront: the Mafia. Through Meyer Lansky, officers approached Lucky Luciano, then serving 30 to 50 years for compulsory prostitution. Luciano ordered the docks cooperative; longshoremen supplied union cards and contacts; Sicilian mafiosi later provided intelligence for Operation Husky. In 1946 Governor Dewey commuted Luciano's sentence, and he was deported to Italy, never permitted to return.
The Normandie fire was officially accidental, welders and life preservers, no arsonist ever found. The mob's own legend holds that the fire, or the panic around it, was engineered to create the emergency that would spring Luciano. What is certain: the Navy got dock security, the mob got legitimacy and access, and the marriage outlived the war by decades, surfacing in CIA-Cuban exile assassination plots and heroin routes.
The claim, central to Webb's volume 1: Operation Underworld is the founding treaty of the crime-intelligence fusion, the moment the state taught itself that deniable partners are useful partners, and everything after, Gladio, Iran-Contra, Epstein, is the treaty being renewed in new ports. Verdict: the founding event is real and genuinely precedent-setting. The straight line from 1942 to Epstein is the argumentative leap: history gives us a door opened, not proof of everyone who later walked through it.
If the alliance was necessary in 1942, when was it supposed to end?