Lucky Luciano had a routine. Every morning at 7:30, he would leave his apartment building on the Upper West Side, get into his black Cadillac, and drive to his office in Midtown Manhattan.
October 5, 1931, began like any other morning. Lucky left at 7:30. His Cadillac was parked exactly where he had left it the night before, right in front of the building. He opened the door, sat down, put the key in the ignition, and turned it. The last thought that crossed Lucky’s mind before the explosion was, “I should have looked under the car.” Then everything went white, then red, and finally black.
When Lucky opened his eyes, he was on fire. And he had a choice to make. Stay in the car and burn to death, or crawl through the flames and see what would happen. Lucky chose the flames.
To understand why someone tried to kill Lucky Luciano with a car bomb that October morning, you have to understand where Lucky was in 1931. He was 34 years old and had already made more enemies than most men do in a lifetime.
Five months earlier, Lucky had helped orchestrate the murder of Joe Masseria, one of New York’s most powerful Mafia bosses. He was shot dead in a Coney Island restaurant while eating spaghetti. Then, just three weeks before the car bombing, Lucky had arranged the assassination of Salvatore Maranzano, the self-proclaimed boss of all bosses. He was killed in his own office by men dressed as police officers. Lucky had eliminated the two most powerful Italian mobsters in America.
And in doing so, he had become the most dangerous man in the underworld. But power comes at a price. And that price is a target on your back. There were old-guard Sicilian mobsters who hated Lucky for killing their leaders. There were Irish gangs who resented Lucky’s grip on Manhattan. There were rivals within his own organization who thought they could do a better job.
By October 1931, at least a dozen different people wanted Lucky Luciano dead. The question wasn’t if someone would try to kill him. The question was when and how.
Lucky knew it. He wasn’t naive. He varied his routes, changed his schedule, kept his bodyguards close, checked his food for poison, and watched for signs of being followed. But there was one thing Lucky did every day, in the same way and at the same time. He got into his car. And someone had been watching, waiting for that pattern, that single, predictable moment.
That someone was an Irish explosives expert named Daniel “Dynamite” Murphy. Dan was 52 years old, a former coal miner from Pennsylvania. He had learned to use dynamite in the mines and began using that skill for less legal purposes: blowing up safes, demolishing buildings for insurance fraud, and occasionally killing people.
Dan had worked for several Irish gangs over the years, but in October 1931, he was working independently, and someone had paid him 5,000 euros to plant a bomb under Lucky Luciano’s Cadillac. Dan was good at his job. Very good. He had killed seven men with bombs in the last decade. None had survived the initial blast.
Lucky Luciano would be number eight.
Except Dan made one mistake. Just one. He used too much dynamite.
Dan planted the bomb on the night of October 4th, at 2:00 a.m. The street was empty. Lucky’s Cadillac was parked in front of his apartment building, alone, unguarded. Lucky didn’t believe in having men watching his car at night. Too obvious, too much attention. He preferred to blend in, to be invisible.
Dan slid under the car with his tools. He worked quickly, professionally, connecting six sticks of dynamite to the ignition. When Lucky turned the key, the electrical current would activate the detonator. The dynamite would explode, the car would be destroyed, and whoever was inside would be vaporized.
Dan used six cartridges because he wanted to be sure. Six cartridges was excessive for a car bomb. Three would have been enough, but Dan didn’t want Lucky walking away from this one. He finished the job in 12 minutes, slid out from under the car, and checked his work. Perfect. Dan walked away feeling confident. By tomorrow morning, Lucky Luciano would be dead, and Dan would be €5,000 richer.
What Dan didn’t know was that six sticks of dynamite was too much. Not too much to kill Lucky, but too much to kill him cleanly. The explosion would be so powerful, so violent, that it would actually save Lucky’s life. Because instead of instantly incinerating everything inside the car, the blast would flip the car over, create chaos, and give Lucky a split second to react.
That fraction of a second would make all the difference.
At 7:42 a.m., Lucky turned the key. The explosion was massive. The sound echoed through six city blocks. Windows in the buildings across the street shattered. Car alarms began to wail. People threw themselves to the ground, thinking it was an earthquake. The explosion was so powerful that it lifted the Cadillac three feet off the ground and flipped it completely over.
The car landed upside down in the middle of the street and then burst into flames. Black smoke billowed into the October sky. The flames shot 20 feet high. The heat was so intense that people across the street could feel it on their faces. A woman named Margaret O’Connor was hanging laundry in her backyard.
She heard the explosion, dropped everything, and ran to the front of her building. She stood there with a dozen other neighbors, all staring at the burning wreckage, all thinking the same thing. No one could survive that. The car was an inferno. The metal was melting. The rubber tires burned with thick black smoke.
For 90 seconds, everyone stood there frozen, waiting for the fire trucks, knowing that whoever was inside was dead.
Then Margaret O’Connor saw something that would stay with her for the rest of her life. The driver’s side door moved slightly, pushed from the inside.
“Oh my God,” someone whispered beside them. “There’s someone alive in there.”
The door was kicked open, and violent flames shot through the opening. Then a figure emerged. Lucky Luciano crawled through the fire. His entire body was ablaze. His hair was gone. His face was blackened, but he was moving. He crawled three feet, then collapsed in the street and began to roll, trying to extinguish the flames on his body. People were screaming.
Someone ran to him with a coat and threw it over Lucky to smother the fire. Lucky lay there for a moment, motionless, smoke rising from his body. Margaret O’Connor thought he was dead.
Then Lucky’s eyes opened. He looked around, assessed the situation, saw the crowd gathering, heard the sirens in the distance, and Lucky Luciano did something no one expected. He stood up.
His legs were trembling. His skin was steaming. He could barely breathe, but he stood up. A man ran to help him.
—Don’t move! An ambulance is coming.
Lucky pushed him.
“I’m fine,” Lucky said. His voice was hoarse, damaged by inhaling smoke.
—He needs a hospital.
“I know,” Lucky said.
And then he started walking. Margaret O’Connor watched Lucky Luciano walk down the street away from the burning car, away from the crowd, away from the approaching sirens. He walked like a man who had just had a bad day at the office. Not like a man who had just crawled out of a car that exploded while engulfed in flames.
One block, two blocks, three blocks. People stopped on the sidewalk, stared, and pointed. A man covered in burns, his suit destroyed, walked calmly down a Manhattan street. Someone asked him if he needed help. Lucky waved them away.
Four blocks later, Lucky Luciano walked through the main doors of Bellevue Hospital. He approached the admissions desk. The nurse looked up. Her face went pale.
“I need a doctor,” Lucky said.
Then he collapsed.
The doctor’s name was Robert Chen. He’d been working in Bellevue for 12 years. He’d seen it all: factory accidents, apartment building fires, gang shootouts. But he’d never seen anyone walk into the emergency room with injuries like these. Second-degree burns covering 40% of Lucky’s body, his face blackened by smoke, his suit melted into his skin, and possible internal injuries from the explosion.
Dr. Chen worked on Lucky for six hours, removing the burned clothing, treating the burns, checking for internal bleeding, and giving him morphine for the pain. When Lucky finally regained full consciousness, Dr. Chen asked him the obvious question.
—What happened to him?
Lucky looked at him. His eyes were completely calm.
—My car exploded.
—I should be dead.
Lucky smiled. It hurt to smile, but he did it anyway.
—People keep telling me that.
Dr. Chen would later learn that the man at his table was Lucky Luciano, the most powerful mobster in New York. And Dr. Chen understood something then. This man didn’t survive by luck. He survived by will.
Lucky spent three weeks in the hospital, not in a regular room, but in a private suite on the top floor, guarded around the clock by his men. The first week, Lucky barely moved. The pain was constant. Every breath hurt. Every movement felt like fire on his skin. But Lucky didn’t complain, didn’t cry out; he simply lay there thinking.
The second week, Lucky started asking questions. Who planted the bomb? Who paid for it? Who knew his routine well enough to time it perfectly? Meyer Lansky visited him every day, bringing updates, names, theories.
“It was professional,” Meyer said. “Not an amateur job. Whoever did this knew about explosives.”
“Irish?” Lucky asked.
—Probably. The Irish bands have been making noise. They’re angry about Maranzano. They think we’re taking over too much territory.
“Find out who,” Lucky said. “I want a name.”
The third week, Meyer returned with information.
—Daniel Murphy, who calls himself “Dynamite Dan.” Explosives expert. He works independently. He has carried out seven car bombing jobs. All successful.
“Not this one,” Lucky said.
—No —Meyer agreed—. Not this one.
-Where is?
—Brooklyn. He’s been in hiding. He thinks you’re dead.
Lucky’s eyes turned cold.
—Let me keep thinking about that for a few more days.
On October 26, three weeks after the explosion, Lucky Luciano discharged himself from Bellevue Hospital against the doctor’s orders. Dr. Chen tried to stop him.
—He needs at least two more weeks of treatment. The burns are not completely healed. He is at risk of infection.
“I have something I need to do,” Lucky said.
—More important than your health?
Lucky looked at him.
—Much more important.
Lucky left the hospital that afternoon. His face was still scarred. His hands were wrapped in bandages. He moved slowly, carefully, but he moved, and he had a destination in mind.
Dan Murphy was celebrating. October 30th, almost four weeks since the car bomb, and no one had come for him. Not the police, not Lucky’s men, nothing. Dan figured Lucky’s organization was in chaos, fighting over who would take control. They had bigger problems than finding an Irish bomb maker.
Dan was wrong.
That night, Dan was having drinks at a bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A small, quiet place. Dan liked it because no one asked questions. He was on his third whiskey when two men came in. They didn’t look at Dan, didn’t recognize him, just sat down at the bar and ordered drinks. Dan didn’t think much of it.
Fifteen minutes later, Dan decided to leave, paid his bill, and stepped out into the October night. He walked half a block before feeling a gun pressed against his spine.
“Keep walking,” said a voice.
Dan’s blood ran cold.
-Where to?
—To the warehouse. At the end of the block.
Dan walked on. The gun was still pressed against his back. A second man appeared on his left, cornering him. They reached the warehouse, old and abandoned. The door was already open. They pushed Dan inside.
The warehouse was dark and empty, except for one thing: a chair in the middle of the floor under a single hanging light bulb. And sitting in that chair, smoking a cigarette, was Lucky Luciano.
Dan stopped walking. His legs buckled.
“You’re dead,” Dan whispered.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” said Lucky.
Lucky slowly got up. His movements were still stiff from the burns, but he stood up.
“You’re good at your job, Dan. Seven successful jobs, seven dead men, all car bombs, clean work.”
Dan said nothing.
—But you made a mistake with me. Do you want to know what it was?
Dan shook his head.
“You used too much dynamite. Six cartridges. That’s excessive. Three would have been enough. But you wanted to be sure. You wanted to make sure it was vaporized.”
Lucky walked closer.
“The problem is that six cartridges were so explosively powerful that they actually saved my life. The explosion was so violent that it flipped the car before it could incinerate me. It gave me a split second to react, to cover my face, to position my body.”
Lucky was standing right in front of Dan now.
“If you had used three cartridges, I’d be dead. But you got greedy. You wanted to make it spectacular.”
Lucky nodded to his men. They grabbed Dan, forced him into the chair, tied his hands behind his back, and bound his feet to the chair legs. Dan was hyperventilating now.
—What are you going to do?
Lucky walked to the corner of the warehouse, picked something up, and came back. Six sticks of dynamite connected together. Dan’s eyes widened.
—No, no, no, no, no, no.
“You know what’s interesting about dynamite, Dan? It’s unpredictable. Sometimes it kills you instantly. Sometimes it just blows you to bits little by little.”
Lucky’s men placed the dynamite behind the chair and carefully connected it.
—These are six cartridges. The same amount you used on me. Let’s see if it works better this time.
—Lucky. Lucky, please.
Lucky didn’t move.
—Did you use six cartridges because someone paid you extra or because you simply wanted to be safe?
Dan was crying now.
—I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It was just a job. I was paid €5,000. I didn’t know.
—Who paid you?
—I don’t know. I swear. An Irish guy never gave me a name. Just money and a target.
Lucky believed Dan. He was too terrified to lie.
“Okay,” Lucky said.
He took out a lighter and lit the fuse.
—Lucky, Lucky, please.
Lucky and his men walked toward the door. The fuse was burning. Thirty seconds, maybe. Dan screamed, yanked the ropes. The chair tipped over. Dan was on the floor now, still tied up, still helpless.
20 seconds.
Lucky stopped at the door and turned around.
—You used six rounds because you wanted to be remembered. You wanted people to talk about the bomb that killed Lucky Luciano.
10 seconds.
—Well, congratulations, Dan. People will remember you as the man who tried to kill Lucky Luciano with a car bomb and failed.
5 seconds.
Lucky stepped outside and closed the door. The explosion shook the entire warehouse district. They found Dan Murphy’s body the next morning—or rather, pieces of it. The police ruled it an accident. Explosives expert killed by his own materials. It happens sometimes. Tragic.
A note was affixed to the warehouse wall, untouched by the explosion.
“Your work was sloppy. Mine wasn’t. LL.”
The police removed the note before the reporters arrived. The news spread quickly through the underworld. Lucky Luciano had survived a car bomb, crawled out of the flames, walked to the hospital, recovered in three weeks, then hunted down the terrorist and killed him using his own methods. The story became legend.
People began calling Lucky “immortal,” “enchanted,” protected by something more than luck. Lucky never encouraged these stories, but he never denied them either, because there was power in being seen as indestructible.
A month after the bombing, Lucky had returned to his normal routine. Same apartment, same Cadillac, same schedule. Except now, he checked under his car every morning, and no one had tried to plant a bomb there again. The scars from the explosion never fully healed. Lucky’s hands remained slightly discolored. His face bore marks that makeup couldn’t completely conceal. When he smiled, you could see where the burns had damaged his skin.
But Lucky wore those scars like armor. They were proof. Proof that he had survived something that should have killed him. Proof that he was tougher than his enemies. Proof that you couldn’t kill Lucky Luciano with violence alone. You needed to outsmart him. And nobody was.
Years later, when Lucky was in prison, Dr. Chen visited him. The doctor was older now, retired, but he had never forgotten the man who walked four blocks with 40% of his body burned.
“I’ve been practicing medicine for 35 years,” said Dr. Chen. “And I’ve never seen anyone survive what you survived.”
Lucky shrugged.
—I had things to do.
—Most of the men would have died from the shock alone. The pain should have incapacitated him. He shouldn’t have been able to move.
“I needed to move,” Lucky said. “If I stayed there, if I let them take me in an ambulance, if I went to a hospital near the scene, my enemies would know exactly where I was. They’d finish the job.”
—So he walked.
—So I walked.
Dr. Chen shook his head in amazement.
—He’s the toughest patient I’ve ever had.
Lucky smiled. That same calm smile.
—Doctor, let me tell you something. Toughness isn’t about not feeling pain. It’s about feeling the pain and deciding it doesn’t matter. It’s about being on fire and choosing to crawl through the flames instead of staying in the car.
“That’s not toughness,” said Dr. Chen. “That’s survival instinct.”
“Maybe,” Lucky agreed. “Or maybe survival is just another word for refusing to give your enemies what they want.”
That conversation stayed with Dr. Chen. He told it to his students for years. He used Lucky as an example of the human body’s capacity to endure. But what Dr. Chen never fully understood was this: Lucky Luciano didn’t survive that car bomb because of his body. He survived because of his mind.
Because when that explosion happened, when everything turned white and red and black, when Lucky opened his eyes and found himself engulfed in flames, he didn’t panic. He calculated. He thought, “If I stay here, I die. If I move, I might die. But moving gives me a chance.” And Lucky always took the chance that control gave him.
That’s what made him lucky. Not fortune, not fate. Choice. The choice to crawl through the fire rather than accept death. The choice to walk four blocks in agony rather than wait for help that might not come. The choice to spend three weeks recovering and then spend one night getting revenge.
Daniel Murphy made a mistake with that car bomb. He assumed six sticks of dynamite would be enough. He assumed Lucky Luciano was just another man. He was wrong on both counts.
If this story of survival, willpower, and brutal revenge moved you, hit that subscribe button. We’re telling Lucky Luciano’s stories that show intelligence and toughness can overcome impossible odds. Leave a like if you think crawling out of an exploding, burning car is the ultimate survival moment. And in the comments, let me know what you would have done in Lucky’s position.
Turn on notifications because next time we’ll tell the story of how the FBI hid their star witness in a secret location, and Lucky found him within 48 hours and left his body on the FBI director’s doorstep. Remember, toughness isn’t about not feeling pain. It’s about feeling the pain and deciding it doesn’t matter. And Lucky Luciano proved that when he chose to crawl through the flames.
