Salvatore Lucania showed promise. At 8 years old in 1905 he arrived from Palermo, Sicily, and by the time he was a teenager he was earning $6 a week as a shipping clerk for the Goodman Hat Company in Lower Manhattan. Within five years, he had gotten a 33 percent pay increase as a laborer for the Gem Toy Company. The following year, he was supporting himself, making $8 a week, plus tips, as a barber.

Those tips must have been pretty hefty. Or, he must have lived very frugally. Or, maybe, he was just lucky.

By June 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, he had done so well for a 38-year-old with a sixth-grade education who last held a full-time job in 1922, that for the last seven months he had been living at the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Those biographical insights into the man, who would go on to become the powerful crime boss best known as Charles (Lucky) Luciano, were gleaned from newly digitized New York State Department of Corrections inmate records that were previously available only at the state archives in Albany.