Without a doubt, it is Luciano who revolutionized the LCN (with the help of Lansky).
Not only did he introduce the Commission as a way to resolve disputes among the families, but he also was instrumental in the development of the National Crime Syndicate and believed that making money was the way to go (and not in turf wars), and had no qualms in working with other ethnic gangs such as with the Jewish mafia and the Irish mob, to name a few.
Why do you think Al Capone was more famous than Luciano?
At the height of his power he certainly was, he was everywhere and very public, giving interviews to nationally-syndicated newspapers, opening soup kitchens for the poor, appearing in movie Newsreels (the TV news of the time), etc. Early mobster movies (like the original Scarface) were transparently based off of him.
Imagine if El Chapo today was giving interviews on Fox News or CNN every week, parading around downtown Hollywood and had blockbuster movies based on his life coming out every few months all the while running a huge criminal organization in public. That's how huge Capone's public visibility was at the time. He was very good in manipulating the press and popular culture until the Feds came down on him.
Luciano's public profile was rather low until Laguardia started to go after Costello's gambling business and Dewey's prostitution trials in the late '30s. What we know of Luciano and the castellammarese war comes from sources and accounts that were published after World War II, after Luciano had been deported and was in Italy. Newspaper accounts of Luciano's organization in the 1930s make it sound more like well-organized street gang of "hoodlum" racketeers, he earned didn't earn the reputation as the "grandfather of the mafia" until histories started to be published in the 1950-60s and Valachi and Gentile talked.
And I've seen no evidence that the Natonal Crime Syndicate was actually anything but another name for what we now know as Cosa Nostra and the Jewish mobsters who operated under them.
A lot of these concepts of the late 1930s and 1940s were made up by police organizations who didn't understand the criminal organizations they were dealing with and were doing a lot of guesswork-if they were interested in not taking a bribe that this. All of this was fed to the press who sensationalized it because there was a very competitive newspaper press at the time who were ready to print what lurid and wild story on crime that they could get thier hands on, the truth be damned. There was not a lot of what we would call today "investigative journalism" in to crime in those days. Just a lot of nieghborhood rumors and what the police stated publically.
