The Navy concealed its use of the mafia for the Sicily invasion

Evidence

Although the Navy long tried to cover up the story, Luciano also aided preparations for the Allied invasion of Sicily. There’s debate about exactly how much help the mafia provided, but at the very least, Luciano and others supplied information about the island and local contacts to help with the landing and to ensure social order would be maintained after the Allies took control. It was an early example of the links between the military and the mob. Luciano’s reward for all this wartime usefulness was a 1946 letter of clemency from New York governor Thomas Dewey, and immediate deportation from New York to Italy. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 331

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Lucky Luciano aided the Allied invasion of Sicily from prison (similarity 0.90)
• Military expedience first forged the U.S.-mafia alliance in WWII (similarity 0.87)
• The U.S. Navy freed Lucky Luciano to use mafia dock alliances against Axis saboteurs (similarity 0.83)
• Allied forces appointed accused murderers as mayors in occupied Sicily (similarity 0.80)
• U.S. officials may have deliberately relied on the Mafia to secure base sites (similarity 0.79)