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The Mafia, the Navy and the Normandie

PADDY KELLY tells Shelley Marsden about his book ‘Operation Underworld', which charts a fascinating period in WW2 history… By Shelley Marsden - 09/02/10

Author Paddy Kelly left Ireland for New York in 1966. Since then, he has worked in TV advertising, given cookery lessons to stressed-out couples, spent four years in the navy and eight years in Special Operations before returning to Ireland, where he now splits his time between writing and theatre directing.

Operation Underworld is the first book in a four-part series called The Building of Empire, which all chronicle the relationship between organised crime and government in America at different periods in history. Each story has a fictitious protagonist but is historically accurate, and Operation Underworld tells the story first told to Kelly by his Sicilian mother, whose own father was in the Mafia.

It is about how the Mafia duped the US navy (by sabotaging the liner The Normandie, in 1942) into using them to guard the waterfront during WW2 - which in turn allowed them to set up an international drug cartel. A fascinating and lesser-known part of Mafia and WW2 history, his exciting and brilliantly-researched novel is quite an eye-opener…

You’re obviously quite a history buff, are you?

I love history. I was reminded of this story when I was working on an advert in Greenwich Village, and two of the lighting guys started arguing about The Normandie – everyone in the US knows about that ship, but they don’t know the real facts. When the fire that gutted it happened, there were stories in the press that a submarine came into the harbour and sank it, not true of course! The fire was set by a guy called Alberto Anastasia, at the time President of the Mafioso organisation known as Murder Inc - the guys you paid if you wanted somebody dead, you know?

And so what did he do?

It was an idea to get the head honcho of ‘the Syndicate’ (only the press called them The Mafia) Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano out of prison. They were organised like an American corporation, and were very low-profile; they didn’t like headlines. They would do the opposite of Al Capone, who when he wanted to teach somebody a lesson would carry out a shocking, bloody, public murder. Luciano understood that things couldn’t be like that, that they had to cooperate with the authorities – you couldn’t ultimately win against them. People don’t really know that ever since 1935 well up into the late 50s, J. Edgar Hoover was on the take – though he denied the existence of organised crime for so many years.

What are the most fascinating things you unearthed in your research?

Well, you had Jewish-American Meyer Lanski, who was the No.2 guy after Lucky Luciano and Frankie Costello, who were both of Italian origin. Lanski was Luciano’s best friend through his whole life. I actually came across correspondence between him and Alberto Anastasia, the guy who started the fire because two days after, he disappeared for two years. I discovered that he had actually enlisted in the army, under his Italian name – that’s where he hid! He would write back to Lanski, asking him if it was safe yet to come back.

Yes, because things hadn’t gone as planned, had they?

No - he lit the fire and it spread so fast that in four hours they abandoned ship, and in eight hours it sank. That wasn’t the intention; he wanted to light a small fire, make it look like the Germans, and scare the Navy into using them. Remember, this all happened five weeks after Pearl Harbour, meaning the US had just lost the Pacific Fleet and now people were thinking ‘The Germans are on the East Coast, we’re surrounded!’ – there was a lot of paranoia. It worked like a charm, more than they expected it to. What Alberto didn’t know was that the bulkheads on the ship had just been freshly painted, that there were stacks of mattresses close to the fire, so it spiralled out of control within two hours; you’re talking a ship larger than the Titanic, it was bigger than Central Park!

It’s set years ago, but is Operation Underworld relevant to the current political situation in the States?

Absolutely. The point of all four books is that nothing really changes in America in terms of how people do business. You have different politicians and criminals at different levels now. For instance, because Luciano organised the Syndicate along the lines of a corporation you have things like Enron, and criminals from that organisation that will never be caught or punished know how to operate around the law. And when they do eventually get exposed, they know how to wriggle out of it and defend themselves.

A Sicilian mother and an Irish father… is that a fiery mix?!

It’s a great mix, because I grew up with the best whiskey and the best food! It’s a great mix of cultures, you’ve got the cuisine; you’ve got the languages, all of that stuff. There’s no possibility of growing up without an international insight into things and that’s entirely reflected in my writing and my interests.

How and when do you find you write best?

I’m working on the fourth book in the series, and I find it’s normally late at night. With Operation Underworld I was working almost 24/7 on it, because the story was just so clear in my head. Nobody had ever written it before, and I had hundreds of facts, so it was relatively easy to piece together. Writing is like making a statue, you’re constantly reshaping and moulding – then you get to the point where you put the finished product into the kiln... and hope it doesn’t blow up!

Visit http://sites.google.com/site/paddykellywriter for more info. Operation Underworld is available at all good bookshops.