Well, it’s true. What I’ve dug up is that the navy realized that a lot of Italian dock workers were former rum-runners for the mafia, and since Mussolini had a hard-on for bombing the Sicilian mafia and arresting them, he made himself into a big of an enemy to Cosa Nostra in the US, actually driving a lot of the Sicilians out of Italy and to the US to get away from him. Due to that, and Cosa Nostra being considered THE most anti-fascist organization in the world, the then-ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) decided to strike a deal with Cosa Nostra.
Most information I’ve been able to find online, which isn’t much, only discusses a bit about Lucky Luciano’s involvement and his sentence commutation for his assistance to the US government. Print sources not online indicate a good deal more than that, but I want something more definitive due to the overall lack of sources to cross-reference.
So I’ll be filing through here: DNI FOIA
Let’s see what I can get.
Would anyone know if we just made everything up for The War Years? No. Does it matter anyway? Yes.