Who would you call bigger and more successful.. Al Capone or Lucky Luciano?

Luciano, plain and simple.

Al Capone was really one of the top guys in American organized crime. He was the kingpin of Chicago at his time, and he made more money and was more succesful than his mentor Torrio ever dreamt of. One of the downsides was that his reign only lasted a few years.

Luciano also made huge money, but he was also the unofficial capo dei capi of the Sicilo-American Cosa Nostra. He worked with some of the brightest people ever in the world of organized crime, such as Maranzano, Lansky, Adonis, Costello, ... and his role played much longer than Cpaone's.

So: Luciano.

Here you have to make the old division between power syndicate and business syndicate. When it comes to money, influence and respect Lucky is the big winner, but when it comes to brutal military power i would say Al Capone. Lucky had himself slapped in his face, by a normal power syndicat camorrista, without having the power to revenge himself. This insult was only a few years later revenged by partners of Lucky, who made him a favour.
But alltogether i still stick to Lucky.

True, but that was after he was exiled from the US to south Italy. Luciano was a mafioso, and he came in an area full of Camorristi, where he had no official power.

I agree with most of you in that I put Luciano above Capone. Luciano settled the war (at least came out on top once it was over), established the Commission, and ruled the primo location. Capone did rule Chicago (but he was alone there in many ways.. didnt have other families to worry about and deal with---but he did have Eliot Ness to contend with..lol).

Hard question because you can define "big" and "successful" in different ways. Capone was nominally "bigger" because his Chicago rackets, at their peak, generated more than $100 million per year--probably more than Luciano made during his peak years. But Capone wasn't so "successful": his fellow gangsters forced him to get himself arrested and spend a year in prison because of the heat and negative publicity his wild ways were generating. And he spent more than a decade in prison for a stupid tax rap that he could have avoided, and died of a venerial disease that he could have been treated for if he weren't afraid of needles. By the time he got out of prison, he'd lost everything, including his marbles.
Luciano, by eliminating the Moustache Petes, forming the Commission, and modernizing and opening up the Mafia, was more successful in making a lasting impact on organized crime. But his arrest and imprisonment for "white slavery" were scarcely less dumb than Capone's imprisonment for tax evasion. He was exiled in 1946. He made a brief comback attempt that year that failed, and his power diminished steadily after that.

I would have to agree with Turnbull. They both were successful in what they did, but looking back on it now and the impact of what Luciano would make the mafia into, makes me have to say that Luciano was greater.

Capone


Did you ever read John Davis' book MAFIA DYNASTY where he recounts meeting Luciano in Italy?
Lucky told him he could never start any business without
having the cops hassle him. At the time, his Italian Tomato importing business had just flopped. The Cops opened all the cans
looking for heroin.

Charlie was a racketeer, he was never big on all that Mafia stuff. He couldn't speak Sicilian well, and italian even worse.

He was hard up for cash towards the end. Like Lansky, he thought writing a memoir would be good for the bank acct.