SPECTACULAR FEATURES MAGAZINE #3 (AUGUST 1950)

 Subtitled "True Crime Cases from Police Files," so you now where this issue is heading.  In case you're slow on the uptake, the front cover also emblazons, "JUSTICE ALWAYS WINS!"

We start off with a 12-pager, "Lucky Luciano - The Super-Gangster."  It's 1916, and 18-year-old Salvatore Lucania has just been nabbed by federal agents with a supply of narcotics.  He is convisted of possession, but not of distributing, and was sent to prison.  Six months later he was paroled.  The light sentence and the fact that he was only charged with possession gave him the nicknme "Lucky."  He began working for an illegal dice game operator but decided to go out on his own a few years later.  As his power in the underworld grew, he changed his first name to Charles.  He came to the attention of Al Capone and started working for him in Chicago, but there was always the desire to be his own boss back on his own turf -- New York City.  Luciano's New York protection racket placed him in bad favor with other, more established, gangsters.  Taken for a ride and left for dead, Luciano survives, again earning the name "Lucky."  Luciano begins his long climb to the top of the New York underworld, soon to find himself the super-ganster of the city.  Unlike Capone, Nitti, Mad Dog Schultz, and others, Luciano kept a low profile while tightening his grip on the city.  He controlled the dope, numbers, and prostitution rackets, and carved a swarth through the city with violence and bloodsshed.  Lucky's luck ran out 20 year after his first conviction and he was sent to Ossining Prison and placed in solitary confinment.  Ten years went by before Lucky Luciano was released and deported back to Italy.  His reign of crime had ended and the ganster was "Lucky" no more.  Because JUSTICE ALWAYS WINS!

Charlie Zack was the baby-faced butcher with "The Trigger Finger That Knew No Friends."  The deadly Zack began working for gangsters Silk Fletcher and Mugg Carter, but the two underestimated the deadliness of their new employee.  After killing both Fletcher and Carter, Charlie Zack took over the bootlegging gang.  Anyone who objected was killed.  As the law closed in on him, Zack goes to a plastic surgeon to alter his very recognizable looks.  Still bandaged after the operation, Zack kills the surgeon.  Now no one is alive who knows what he now looks like.  But the plastic surgeon suspected he would meet with foul play and he carved Charlie Zack's initials on his new face.  Once the bandages were removed, the cops closed in and the baby-faced killer died in a blaze of bullets.  Because JUSTICE ALWAYS WINS!

Mike Kranik was a slow-thinking giant who works in Joey Flam's repair shop.  When Kranik murdered his boss and robbed his safe, he thought he had all of his bases covered.; he even washed all the blood off his hands.  Detective Lindstrom poured an alkali solution on Kranek's hands, turning them red.  The dim-witted Kranik thought the blood on his hands from killing his employer had come back and confessed to the crime.  Because, even with dumb criminals, JUSTICE ALWAYS WINS!

Think you're lucky just because you escaped from prison?  You're not, because JUSTICE ALWAYS WINJS!  Think you have prison officials fooled because you run a counterfeiting operation from behind bars?  Hah!  Think again, because JUSTICE ALWAYS WINS!

There's a theme here.  Can you guess what it is?

Enjoy this issue.

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