By the mid-1970s, however, Meyer and his friends considered themselves retired. They were slowing down a bit, so they spent much of their time together reminiscing, testing each other’s memories for fun, a trivial pursuit of their own devising, the subject categories heavy with remembrances that were particular to them. What was the number of the amendment that ended Prohibition? Did Estes Kefauver have a middle name?
If they disagreed on the facts, someone was dispatched across the grass to the reference shelves of the library — and great was the merriment if it was discovered that Meyer had got his answer wrong. He was supposed to be the one with all the answers in his head.
These old friends laughing and gossiping round their basket of pastries had all, in their time, had their brushes with the law, and they survived by staying sharp. But Meyer, they would acknowledge, was the sharpest of all of them — the one who was blessed with something really special up top.
The comedian Jackie Mason had a joke about it. All those Italians with broad shoulders and dark glasses? he would ask. How could they possibly have created something like the Mafia — unless they had a Jew to show them how?
“Meyer Lansky? He’s their Henry Kissinger.”
According to the FBI, Lucky Luciano was the first of the modern Mafia chieftains, and Meyer Lansky was Lucky Luciano’s right-hand man. Meyer was Lucky’s partner and friend in the early 1930s, when Luciano was trying to leaven the traditional Sicilian way of doing things with some current business theory and practice. So if Meyer served as Lucky’s one-man think tank in those formative years, then he has a fair claim to be considered one of the architects of modern organized crime.
Meyer Lansky was the man through whom the U.S. Navy went in 1942 when naval intelligence wanted underworld help to combat the U-boats operating off Long Island. Then the navy turned to him again in 1943, when it was wondering how the Italian Mafia’s cousins in America might be able to help with the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.
Lansky was the key man in 1946 and 1947, providing some of the financing to help Bugsy Siegel get started in Las Vegas, the most profitable piece of business diversification that the Mob ever did — and if Bugsy had only run his business the way that Meyer did, he might not have ended up dead in Beverly Hills, a set of bullets in his head.
In the 1950s it was Meyer Lansky who fixed things with President Batista so that big-time gambling could start up in Cuba. Moe Dalitz, Santo Trafficante, Jr., George Raft — gangsters real and cinematic went down to Havana, and it was Meyer who did the best deal of all, raising his twenty-one-story, mosaic-covered Riviera Hotel, with its pool and egg-shaped casino, beside the Caribbean.
In the 1960s Meyer’s friends and partners were busy in the Bahamas and in London — and most of all in Las Vegas — skimming the tables in the last, happy fling before the big corporations moved in. The money went offshore, via Canada or the Bahamas, often ending up in Switzerland, a process which gangland folklore gave Meyer the credit for devising. He was said to be the prophet of the voguish new gospel of money laundering, and he was profiled at length in the
Wall Street Journal,
which quoted unnamed federal agents who set his worth at $300 million.
When FBI agents raided the New Jersey operations room of the Lucchese crime family, a back area of the Hole in the Wall luncheonette, in Newark, in the mid-1980s, they found two black-and-white icons on the wall: a photograph of Al Capone and, alongside it, a photograph of Meyer Lansky — the twin patron saints.
Capone stood for all the traditional violence and toughness of U.S. urban crime — the machine gun in the violin case, the menace that lies at the heart of gangster appeal. Meyer Lansky stood for the brains, the sophistication, the funny money — the sheer cleverness of it all.
After a two-year trial, the Luccheses all got off.
Through his very specialized abilities, Meyer Lansky became his own version of the great American success story: the poor boy who made it to the top, the very top in his own field. He chose his business, and he prospered in it, as a bright boy can hope to prosper in the land of the free.
He did not, perhaps, quite win respectability in the process. But he did secure acceptance, and in a rather particular form. At the high holidays, the fund-raisers would come calling.
“Money for Israel? You did not have to ask Meyer Lansky twice,” remembers Shepard Broad, mayor of Bay Harbor Islands, and, since World War II, one of the most eminent Jewish activists on Miami Beach. “Not like some. He was always waiting for me in the lobby, ready with the check.”
A check? Not cash in a brown envelope? Meyer Lansky paid his taxes — some of them — and he was careful to document his deductions properly. He was a faithful contributor to WPBT-TV, the local public television station, sending in his check like all the other inhabitants of Miami and Miami Beach who enjoyed noncommercial news coverage and wildlife documentaries.
That was what gave the achievement of Meyer Lansky real flavor. Not the millions of dollars that the world presumed he was worth, nor the hard, sinister power that Meyer Lansky had been part of, back in the days of Lucky Luciano and the contract killers of Murder, Inc. But to finish up here in south Florida in the ranks of all the other retired accountants, finally free to hang his shirt outside his trousers with the rest of them, to enjoy the condo on Collins, the doorman’s salute, the homage of the fund-raisers, the greetings of his neighbors as he walked his dog along the palm trees in the sun.
When visiting reporters came to town, the crime desk of the
Miami Herald
liked to drive them over to Collins Avenue to cruise amongst the Cadillacs so they could photograph him, the notorious Meyer Lansky caught in the act of walking his dog.
It was not that he stood out in any way. The power of the image was that he looked just like anybody else. The magazine features usually described him as looking like a tailor or a violin teacher. The difference was that none of the other retired accountants, tailors, or violin teachers who patronized public television and the Miami Beach library in the mid-1970s, who drank their coffee in Wolfie’s or took the air along Collins Avenue, were followed, at fifty yards’ distance, by an unmarked surveillance car containing plainclothes police.
In May 1951, Senator Estes Kefauver named Meyer Lansky as one of the principal partners in the crime syndicate dominating New York and the eastern half of the United States. The nationwide inquiries of Kefauver’s Senate Crime Committee marked the beginning of modern America’s horror and fascination with organized crime, and from 1951 onward Meyer Lansky was the target of law enforcement inquiries of every sort. The Immigration and Naturalization Service examined his past, trying to get him deported. The Internal Revenue Service scrutinized his tax returns, hoping to catch him as it had snared Al Capone in the days of Prohibition. The Federal Bureau of Investigation followed him everywhere, listening to his phone calls and bugging his home and the hotel rooms in which he stayed.
When they got him into court, however, Meyer Lansky would often claim illness — ulcers, emphysema, a poor heart — as a reason for delaying his case. So one day, in the mid-1970s, Sergeant David Green, of the Dade County Public Safety Department, decided to find out just how frail the ganglord really was.
Green was part of an undercover inquiry into illegal bookmaking and betting in Miami Beach. Hymie Lazar and Benny Sigelbaum, Lansky’s friends from Wolfie’s, were among his targets, and one morning, driving down Collins Avenue, Green caught sight of Lansky walking in the opposite direction.
The policeman made a U-turn, drove up ahead of Lansky to a parking lot, and went into hiding. Green was in his Hell’s Angel undercover mode. More than six feet tall, 260 pounds in weight, with long hair, a greasy beard, and a lurid T-shirt, he was “a pretty horrible-looking person,” as he himself cheerfully admits.
Green found himself a perch beside and a few feet above the sidewalk, and as Meyer Lansky came abreast of him, the policeman suddenly jumped down with a thud, flapping his arms and letting out a bloodcurdling “Grrrrr!”
“It would have scared anybody,” remembers Green. “But he just backed up calmly, put his hand in his pocket like he had a knife, and kind of lifted his other hand. ‘What do you want?’ he said.
“‘How ya’ doing?’ I said. ‘I guess you own the planet, don’t you?’
“He said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m Green, from Dade Public Safety.’
“‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’re Green.’ I had put some of his associates in jail for bookmaking, you see. So I guess he knew who I was.
“I said, ‘I’m probably not going to get you in your lifetime, or in my lifetime, but I’m gonna keep on truckin’.’”
“You want anything else from me, Green?” Meyer Lansky asked — and he went on his way, quite unruffled.
“He was just cold blooded,” remembers Green. “There wasn’t an ounce of fear in his eyes.”
The young policeman had wanted to scare Meyer Lansky, but it was Lansky who had given him something to think about — the cold, hard eyes, quite unmoved, that would stop anyone dead in their tracks. You could understand why, when people got to talking about organized crime in the 1970s, they used to call Meyer Lansky the Chairman of the Board.
When the telephone rang in the New York apartment of Lee Strasberg, actor, in December 1974, it was breakfast time, and Strasberg was lying in bed.
The Godfather, Part II
had recently received its premiere in New York, and in the weeks since then several million people had been introduced to the Chairman of the Board as depicted by this venerable and venerated drama teacher turned film star.
To avoid legal complications, Lee Strasberg’s character had not been given the name Meyer Lansky. The character was called Hyman Roth. But this Hyman Roth — the principal, and sinister, addition to the overwhelmingly Italian cast of characters established in the original
Godfather
movie — was Jewish, he functioned as the respected, almost academic eminence grise of gambling from Nevada to Havana, and he claimed to be living “in retirement” in Miami Beach.
“Michael,” breathed Lee Strasberg at one point to Al Pacino’s character, Michael Corleone, adapting a line picked up and much publicized by the FBI in the early sixties after they had bugged a hotel room occupied by Meyer Lansky. “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel!”
Strasberg, father of the Method school of acting in the United States — the inspiration of actors from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Monroe — had gone back to his own roots to distill the essence of Meyer Lansky on the screen. Born in eastern Europe, Lee Strasberg had come to America via Ellis Island when his parents fled the pogroms of the czar. He had grown up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a few blocks from Grand Street, where the young Meyer Lansky was graduating to street crime. So the history, the advancing years, the fragility, the Jewishness, these were part of him already.
To this Lee Strasberg added the figures: whenever he walked onto the set of
Godfather II,
he started doing sums in his head — quite complicated calculations. And he also added the secret: keeping things close, Strasberg decided, was where the power of Meyer Lansky lay. So as Anna Strasberg, Lee Strasberg’s young, second wife, went on location with her husband, she had found a distance developing as Lee got into his part, becoming more and more Lansky, less and less Strasberg.
When the phone rang that morning, it was Anna Strasberg who answered. The caller had a deep voice, firm and rather persuasive. He did not say he was Meyer Lansky.
“He didn’t have to. I knew. He said, ‘Lee Strasberg?’
“I said, ‘Lee — for you.’”
The Strasbergs each had their own phone, on the same line, on either side of the bed, so Anna Strasberg was able to listen in on the conversation that followed.
“He said, ‘You did good.’ And Lee said, ‘Thank you, I tried.’ And Lee said, ‘How are you?’ And he said, ‘Ah . . .’”
Meyer Lansky had obviously been doing his own research into the life and character of Lee Strasberg, because he started inquiring after the health of the actor’s young wife, and of Strasberg’s two sons by her. How were the young men?
“Lee said, ‘They’re a handful. They’re four and five, and you know . . .’
“And
he
said, ‘Now, why couldn’t you have made me more sympathetic? After all, I am a grandfather.’ He didn’t say it rough. He said it almost with a sense of humor.
“‘After all, I
am
a grandfather.’”
The deep voice on the phone was flesh and blood seeking contact with the celluloid image, intrigued to be the catalyst for such artistry and imagination. But Meyer Lansky, famous gangster, also wanted to remind the famous actor that there was a difference between the exotic imaginings of the outside world and the truth about his life as he actually lived it.
In 1948 the film critic Robert Warshow remarked on how the average American reckoned that he or she knew all about gangsters, but that this knowledge depended, in reality, almost entirely on what people had seen at the movies. Gangsters, wrote Warshow, had come to form part of the everyday, psychic experience of being an American, but rare was the American man or woman who had ever met a gangster in real life, let alone got to know one with any intimacy.