Larry Ray of Gulfport, Mississippi spent some time in Naples many years ago and enjoys sharing his memories wich i thought this one would be interesting for you guys....

"Great story that brought me back to Napoli and 1959, as a barely nineteen-year-old who had arrived fresh from a year of US Navy electronic and instructor schools for a posting to Naval Air Facility Capodichino. I have told you about my instant fascination with Napoli and making the transition from speaking Spanish to Italian facilitated by my taking a tiny apartment on Cupa Carbone, a stone's throw literally across a wooden fence from the American base which in a fenced off area just down from the Italian civilian airport facilities.

A large gray Mercedes bus shuttled us between the Capodichino air base and Piazza Municipio which was a central hangout with the enlisted Bluebird Club, and all sorts of other bars and even a huge pizzaria on the second floor of a large building on the corner of Via Medina and Piazza Municipio above where the entrance to Monte Dei Paschi di Siena bank is today.

Across the piazza roughly around where via Verdi comes into the piazza from Via Santa Brigida there was the California Bar which attracted lots of American sailors as well as locals. I was having a great time trying to communicate, learning Italian and, unwittingly, mimicking the strong local Neapolitan accent and vernacular. I had developed a friendly repartee with a waiter in the California Bar and he found it a novelty that an American was trying so hard to learn to speak Italian.

One afternoon I stopped in the California Bar and there was just one other person, an older man sitting alone at a table. As I bantered with the barrista, the man at the table smiled and motioned me over. He was nicely dressed, very friendly and he complimented me on my Italian. Really a nice old guy. I asked him how he learned his English so well and he allowed as how he "had lived in the states" and that he always liked meeting "you young fellows stationed here." Sort of like talking to a favorite old uncle.

I saw him a couple of more times and wrote my parents that I had met the nicest interesting old man, an Italian who had lived in the USA, a Mr. Luciano, but everyone called him "Lucky." I got a stern almost screaming letter from my father who told me to stay away from the man and not to talk to him ever again because he was a notorious gangster.

I was sure father had bad information, but after mentioning this to one of the guys who had been stationed there a couple of years he told me that Lucky Luciano did indeed hang out at the California Bar and that he had been deported by the US government and that it was best not to even be seen with him. So I quit going to the California Bar and never saw my friend "Lucky" again.

A few months before I was was discharged, ready to return to Texas and enter the University of Texas, all the newspapers had a photo of a well dressed man sprawled on the pavement at the entrance to Capodichino airport where the US Naval Air Facility was located . . . and, incidentally, just across the fence from Cupa Carbone and not far from my little apartment. In the photo he was being lifted into a plain wooden coffin. Someone had taken what looked like a cushion from a chair inside the airport lobby and thoughtfully placed it under the head and shoulders of the man who had collapsed and died. He was sixty-five years old.

As a gangly kid from Aransas Pass, Texas who knew nothing at all about gangster mobs, or for that matter, not about much of anything at all outside South Texas, it was one of many real life history lessons I got while living in bella Napoli."

http://ac-support.europe.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/naples/LRay.htm#11

So sorry that I am replying to such an old topic but I was just so curious. I had heard some stories of people seeing and talking to luciano in Italy but this was by far my favorite.

My father told me that my great grandfather was also friendly with Lucky after he was deported to Italy. This was in the Naples area and Lucky liked to talk to people who had spent time in the states (my great-grandfather, like many Italians, returned to Italy after living in the states for a while).

Back in thouse days,greatest thing for american soldiers was bringin home a autograph from Lucky Luciano

I would love to have an autograph of lucky luciano.