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.  The records, including files from Newgate in Greenwich Village (1797-1810), the first New York State penitentiary and the inspiration for the phrase “up the river”; Clinton (1851-1866, 1926-1939); and Sing Sing (1865-1939), will be available free to New York residents from Ancestry.com later this month.  Prison records from San Quentin and Folsom, both in California, are also being digitized.  “Family history is a puzzle, and some pieces are more surprising or salacious than others,” said Michelle Ercanbrack, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com. “There’s something wickedly comforting in the notion that nobody’s perfect.”  Luciano’s details were recorded on Sing Sing’s receiving blotter after he was sentenced in 1936 for profiting from a prostitution ring. (He had only a watch and $199.40 in cash with him when he was admitted.) The blotter describes his “true name” as Lucania. In the records, the mob boss says he occasionally attended church and attributes his crimes to “innocence.”  Among others on the Sing Sing roster are Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. Described as an unemployed clerk, he was admitted in 1918 at age 18 after being convicted of grand larceny. His personal habits are described as “temperate,” a condition that apparently changed as he matured. In 1944, after being convicted of murder as the head of the mob hit squad Murder Inc., he was executed at Sing Sing.  Ruth Snyder, who murdered her husband in 1927 in collaboration with her paramour, Judd Gray, was still listed as married when she got to Sing Sing. She describes herself as a churchgoer, though she had not regularly attended in 14 years.  As a 32-year-old self-described Queens housewife, she had no prior criminal record and is characterized as habitually “moderate,” between temperate and intemperate. Her 1928 execution in the electric chair was captured in a famous Daily News photograph.  Charles Chapin, a 60-year-old New York newspaper editor, was more accurately registered as a widower when he was admitted in 1919 for murdering his ailing wife; he, too, is described as habitually temperate. That description was belied by colleagues’ characterizations of his bullying disposition in the newsroom, according to Andy Logan of The New Yorker.  “They had known he would be involved in a murder some day,” she wrote, “but had always assumed he would be the victim.”  A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2014, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Digitized Records From Three New York PrisonsWill Be Available Online. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
The New York State Department of Corrections is releasing the archives of state prison records for public consumption on Ancestry.com