Tommy Lucchese would be Lucchese's only conviction. Lucchese was released from prison in 1923, three years into prohibition. His old friends Charlie Luciano, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky had become partners with Jewish gangster Arnold "the Brain" Rothstein selling bootleg alcohol. During the 1920s, Lucchese became a strong ally of Luciano's and became a top member of Gaetano Reina's crime family. In August 1927, Lucchese was arrested under the alias of "Thomas Arra" and charged with receiving stolen goods. On July 18, 1928, Lucchese was arrested along with his brother-in-law, Joseph Rosato, for the murder of Louis Cerasulo; the charges were later
Meyer Lansky out," he said. Lansky even went as far as to tell people he had lost almost every penny in Cuba and that he was barely scraping by. Hank Messick, a journalist for the "Miami Herald" who had spent years investigating Lansky, said that the key to understanding Lansky lay with the people around him: "Meyer Lansky doesn't own property. He owns people." To him, the FBI and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, the reality was that Lansky had kept large sums of money in other people's names for decades and that keeping very little in his own was nothing new