#igea lissoni

[falsenote]

this tiny dog lucky luciano and his non-speaking girlfriend keep dragging around. the real star of the show

[organizedcrime]

Sicilian-American gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano with his long-time girlfriend, Igea Lissoni. 

[gregarnott]

Igea Lissoni once told a reporter that she hoped to marry Charles “Lucky” Luciano one day. When told of her remarks, Luciano quipped that he was too old for marriage.

[buffyfan145]

Love the deleted scene AMC posted from the latest ep of "Making of the Mob: NY" as it was Igea's debut!!! :D  The scene does seem very similar to how they showed Charlie meeting Gay so I'm thinking that's why it was deleted but Igea is supposed to be in the finale Monday night.  The actress they cast is stunning and love seeing Rich show off how fluent he is in Italian (which he confirmed last night on Twitter he is). :D

[meyerlansky]

What do you think made Igea more special to Charlie than the other women he's been with?

getting awfully meta on me here, anon. I dunno man, I don’t doubt that he had genuine feelings for her [and those are the kinds of things I’m not comfortable speculating on, since there’s no way to know the way people feel just from reading stuff], but there’s something to be said for how being isolated from everyone and everything you knew makes you cling to comfort where you find it. so. I doubt that wasn’t part of the attraction.

[saintghoul]

Charlie and his lady

[megcampos]

Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Igea Lissoni in Italy.

[renfields--moved]

July 15, 1949 - Charlie Luciano interviewed in Rome after his release from prison. Standing in the background is Igea Lissoni, Luciano's 28 year old girlfriend.

[organizedcrime]

Igea Lissoni once told a reporter that she hoped to marry Luciano one day. When told of her remarks, Luciano quipped that he was too old for marriage.

[meyerlansky]

Who were Luciano's girlfriends? And what were his relationships with them like, was he abusive?

okay well I’m sure he had more women in his life than just these but the three he makes a point of mentioning in TLT are Gay Orlova, Igea Lissoni, and Adriana Rizzo. There’s also speculation that he had relationships with Thelma Todd and Beverly Paterno

Stuff on Gay is annoyingly vague, as is most stuff on his early life: they met at some point before 1936 [TLT doesn’t give a specific date but it implies they met around the end of 1928; Boardwalk Gangster and Mysterious Tales of a Gangland Legend, on the other hand, put their meeting at 1934 while the two of them were in Miami] and got very close very quickly, enough that in January they were either living together in the Waldorf or were at each other’s places often enough to give that impression. They obviously cooled off a bit while Charlie was on trial and in jail, and again things are kind of sketchy on whether or not they ever saw each other again after he was incarcerated. TLT mentions her more than a few times between his incarceration and his deportation but MToaGL says she left for Paris in 1937 and committed suicide in 1948 without ever having seen Charlie again. Given TLT’s various veracity issues I tend to buy MToaGL’s story a bit more, especially since it cites newspaper articles.

Thelma Todd and Beverly Paterno were probably more flings than anything else, if they were actually anything at all, but in my opinion worth noting for a few reasons. Todd apparently committed suicide in 1935; BG implies that it was either the result of foul play, or that she committed suicide as a result of her involvement with Charlie and the NY Mob. She had some restaurant holdings in LA that Charlie wanted more control over to get a foothold on the West Coast. So he might’ve been involved in her death. Beverly Paterno, on the other hand, was a fling in Cuba, and was apparently a publicity hound, so in addition to the orgy, their very public dalliance contributed to US attention falling on Charlie in Cuba, which, obviously, resulted in his second deportation.

After Charlie was back in Italy for good he met Igea, who he considered the love of his life, and the only woman he ever considered marrying. She was a ballerina and 26 [when Charlie was 51, mind you. on the one hand: holy shit Charlie that’s pretty gross. on the other: GET IT GIRL] and they met at a party in Milan in 1948, and stupid idiot nerd MOB BOSS CHARLIE LUCIANO was apparently “too shy to make a move at their first meeting” so he found out when she was performing at a nightclub in Rome and made sure to be at the performance, asked her on a date, and kept asking when she said no the first time until she changed her mind. She was living with him by June though so presumably they got on fairly well. He fucked around behind her back because of course he did, and at least once when she called him out on it he slapped her. So not everything was rainbows and roses, clearly. Anyway, they were together for ten years until Igea died of breast cancer in October 1958; by all accounts Charlie was devastated—for a while, anyway.

By 1959 he was with Adriana, who was 24 [when Charlie was 61 YOU JUST KEEP GETTING SKEEZIER MAN] and who he met after he pinched her ass as she walked by. What a charmer. It’s pretty clear she was a replacement goldfish, though, and I’m also pretty sure part of Charlie’s motivation in getting her to move in with him was she was also a trained nurse and he was having a lot of health problems [SUCH AS the heart attack he had a month after she moved into his apartment after a marathon sex session with her. hurting more than helping there Adriana]. They were together until his death in 1962, and Bart sold Charlie’s apartment and kicked her out with $3000 as a parting gift. CLASSY MOTHERFUCKERS THOSE LUCIANOS.

So. Yeah. Those are all the ladies I know of. As far as whether or not he was abusive, he certainly wasn’t a paragon of gentlemanly behavior, given the generally sexist stuff like the ass-pinching and the cheating, and given that he hit Igea at least once, and there’s also a story in TLT related with absolutely no remorse, where he encountered a woman he believed was a honey trap working for Vito or some other rival, and when she came upstairs with him, he ripped her dress and straight up clocked her in the jaw. So anyone who talks like he was somehow better to the women in his life than any of these other guys is clearly ignoring a fuckton of evidence that says otherwise.

[renfields--moved]

Do you know anything about Igea Lissoni? :)

I don't know a huge amount, since between all my gangster books I've been reading chunks of each and then getting distracted - so I have yet to finish Charlie's, and that's the biggest mention of her that I'm aware of. You can ask Vanessa since she did finish it quite a while ago!

But what I do know is that she was a good 20 years his junior - she was born in 1921, in Italy. She was a dancer. Charlie met her in 1948 after he was exiled to Italy for the second time - and apparently he had to try like hell to get her attention before she finally agreed to date him. The really interesting thing - and I don't know how much you can scratch up to loneliness, or maturity come with late age - is that Charlie seems to have really loved her, at least as much as he could. It wasn't some fling, or just a sex thing, or that she was pretty and around. They didn't get married - possibly since Charlie couldn't legally due to being a deportee, but she lived with him in Naples for the 11 years they were together. He apparently told her so much about his life as a gangster that she had to plead him to stop. He also tried... or at least pretended to go legit for her, which is something, from the guy who so proudly voiced as a younger man that he "never wanted to be a crumb". Charlie opened things like candy factories and toy stores because of Igea.. and maybe to create incognito ways of smuggling heroin out of the country. Ahem. 

Not that everything about their relationship was fantastic - she was still dating the man the world knew as an infamous crime boss, and I really wouldn't be surprised if he cheated on her a bunch no matter what he said to the contrary. 

Igea died of breast cancer in '59, three years before Charlie died himself. He spent the last 3 years of his life with another girlfriend, though that relationship definitely seems to be more about general companionship and sex. 

Also, Igea was really pretty.