A global war can make for strange bedfellows. Such was the case when the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) needed eyes and ears to find out what was going on with East Coast shipping and Axis movements on the sea.
Just months after entering World War II, the U.S. Navy was already feeling vulnerable. Enemy submarines were picking off vessels along the East Coast with alarming ease, and many believed that German saboteurs had set the massive fire that sank a French ocean liner, the SS Normandie, that was being converted into a warship in the Hudson River on February 9, 1942. The ONI suspected that longshoremen must be ferrying supplies to Axis watercraft stationed in the Atlantic, and they were desperate to root them out. Not only did the Mafia pretty much run the docks, but they were also Italian—and therefore more likely to know which Italians might sympathize with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
So the military enlisted New York mobsters and some who were Mafia-adjacent to find out what they could in an operation called Operation Underworld. Their participation was approved by Lucky Luciano (shown above) from prison, where he was serving a 30-50 year sentence. The plan was kept secret from the public for more than twenty years, but you can read about it at Mental Floss.