The Jews in America Trilogy (172 page)

His personal life was almost entirely free from scandal. When, in one Bureau report, Lansky's daughter Sandra was described as “a divorcee of doubtful reputation resident New York City,” Lansky was outraged. It was true that his daughter was divorced, he protested, and of course he had been saddened by that, but that did not make her reputation “doubtful.” Sandra was a law-abiding housewife, a fine, upstanding Jewish woman. The closest thing to scandal to touch the Lanskys' lives was the murder, in 1977, of one of his stepsons, Richard Schwartz, who was shot in his car behind a restaurant he owned in Florida. Schwartz had been about to stand trial for the alleged murder of a young man named Craig Teriaca four months earlier when the two, in a barroom argument over who was going to pay the check, became violent and Schwartz pulled out a gun and shot Teriaca in the chest.

The press, making much of the Jewish and Italian names, called Schwartz's murder a gangland-style revenge murder, and Teriaca's father was said to be a Mafia member. This may have been true, but Lansky had another explanation. “You see, Richard had been drinking too much. He was really an alcoholic—and carrying a gun when you're drinking is crazy, never mind that his was licensed. Several months before he died he had started swinging his gun around a lot. I think it went off
accidentally and killed the man he was drinking with. Richard had four children—one of them spent two years in a kibbutz in Israel, by the way. I'm sure his death wasn't vengeance by the Mafia. It was probably suicide, a straightforward family tragedy.”

By 1970, meanwhile, Lansky had begun to weary of the constant surveillance under which the government was keeping him. He was sixty-eight years old, his heart had been giving him a bit of trouble, and there was the recurring problem of his stomach ulcers. Over the years, he had been very generous to Israel—not only with personal contributions, but also by regularly turning over his Las Vegas hotels and casinos for Bonds for Israel rallies. Israel continued to offer itself as a land of refuge to Jews of any nationality. Lansky's grandparents were buried there. There, he decided, he and his wife would go to live out their twilight years in peace. Though the United States government was still fruitlessly pressing a number of different charges against him, Lansky had begun to fear that his luck might be running out. He had become convinced that, if he remained in the United States, the FBI would find some way or other to get him behind bars. He had begun to see himself, rightly or wrongly, as a victim of anti-Semitism—and it was true that a number of FBI reports on his activities had mentioned him as part of “the Jewish element” in organized crime. Lansky applied for, and received, an Israeli tourist visa, and flew with his wife to Tel Aviv, where he planned to apply for Israeli citizenship. His visa was good for two years.

Lansky spent his two tourist years in Israel pulling every string, using every contact and connection he could muster to try to gain his citizenship. He even had a friend who was on good terms with Golda Meir take his case directly to the prime minister. Mrs. Meir was sympathetic, and agreed that the one gambling charge for which Lansky had been convicted was definitely minor. But she refused to commit herself. The original blanket invitation to all Jews had been given a bothersome amendment in 1950 to bar any Jewish “undesirable.” It was in this category that the FBI insisted that the Israelis place Lansky in order that he could be returned to the United States to face the various indictments it had waiting for him.

In the end, according to his biographers, Lansky became a bargaining chip in an international power maneuver that was
being played out between Israel and the United States. The Six Day War was over, but Russia had begun selling missiles to the Egyptians, and Mrs. Meir was worried about an arms buildup in the Sinai. France, meanwhile, had declined to sell Israel any more of the Mirage jets that had been so helpful in the war. But a deal was about to be struck with Washington whereby Israel could purchase a number of 1140-E Phantom fighter-bombers. So determined was the FBI to have Meyer Lansky back within its jurisdiction, incredible though it seemed, that part of Washington's price for the planes was the return of Meyer Lansky. Israel was advised that if it gave Lansky asylum, the planes might not be forthcoming. And Golda Meir wanted her fighter planes more than she wanted to help Meyer Lansky.

In November, 1972, a few days before his visa would expire, Lansky realized that his cause was hopeless. If Israel did not want him, he decided, he would leave the country voluntarily. Armed with a clutch of airplane tickets and entry visas to a number of South American countries that he hoped might take him in, he headed for the Tel Aviv airport. He had no sooner passed through Passport Control, however, than he was joined by FBI agents, who followed him on a zigzag journey halfway around the globe—to Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paraguay—where, at each stop, he was denied entry despite his valid documents. His last hope was Panama, for which he also had a visa. Alas, he was denied entry to Panama. The FBI had done its advance work well. The next stop was Miami.

The irony was that, during the decade that followed, in none of the cases that the government had arrayed against him was the government able to obtain a conviction. Millions of dollars of American taxpayers' money were spent, only to have case after case dismissed for insufficient evidence. And so, in the end, officially declared innocent of all his crimes, Lansky was allowed to live out his life in retirement at Imperial House, forbidden to leave the country, his passport revoked, forbidden to go to Israel—the man who may have been the most successful criminal in American history sentenced to life imprisonment in Miami Beach. At the time of his forced return, Lansky was both bitter and philosophical. “That's life,” he told reporters. “At my age, it's too late to worry. What will be will be. A Jew has a slim chance in the world.” He died in Miami in January, 1983, at eighty-one.

Asked once what he considered his greatest feat, Lansky did not mention his bootlegging millions, his contributions to Israel and its war of independence, or even his extraordinary ability to stay out of federal prisons. He did not mention his knack, in a business where lives were often cut off exceptionally early, of staying alive until a ripe old age. Nor did he mention his son, the West Point graduate, or his daughter, the suburban matron, or his law-abiding grandchildren. Rather, he felt that his most significant contribution had been in striking blows against social anti-Semitism in America. “Bugsy and I could never stand hypocrisy,” he told his biographers. “People would come to our casinos and gamble and then go back to Washington or New York and make pious speeches about how immoral gambling was. But they didn't make speeches about something I think was a lot worse. When we started out, most of Florida and many resorts in other parts of the country were out of bounds to Jews. Before the Second World War, Jews were forbidden to step inside some hotels and casinos and apartment houses. Our casinos were pleasant places and open to everybody. Jews, Christians, Arabs, anybody could come and gamble.”

Seated in the blue-and-white living room of the Imperial House apartment overlooking Miami Beach, Meyer Lansky's widow, whom everyone in the building affectionately calls Teddy, reminisces about her husband. Still petite and pretty in her mid-seventies, she sits surrounded by a collection of Lalique and Steuben crystal objects, a particular enthusiasm of hers. Books on Lalique glass adorn the glass-topped coffee table. Teddy Lansky thinks, perhaps understandably, that her late husband was much misunderstood by the public, much maligned by the press. “Most of what they wrote about him was fiction,” she tells her visitor, “including how rich he was. Hundreds of millions! What hat do they pull figures like that out of? One of his troubles was that he handed out money to anybody who asked. Oh, I suppose my life with Meyer may have seemed difficult, but it wasn't difficult for me because I loved the man. Once, when I was coming back from Europe, a lady reporter from I think CBS stuck a microphone in my face and asked me how it felt to be the Godmother. I'm afraid I did a very unladylike thing.”

Teddy Lansky shows her visitor her ultramodern kitchen. One of her hobbies is cooking, and friends have urged her to write a cookbook. When her son was living, she and her daughter-in-law used to do all the baking for the restaurant, called The Inside, that Richard Schwartz ran, and Mrs. Lansky still contributes baked goods to this establishment. Another hobby is horticulture, and the apartment also houses many lush, tropical plants. “Still, people come to me and want to talk about Murder Incorporated,” she says. “That was another invention of the media. One reason why the government couldn't make any of its cases against him stick was that he told the truth. In one case, I was called as a witness, and the government lost the case simply because I told the truth.” She produces a photograph of her late husband, taken when he was in his fifties, and says, “Tell me what you see in this face.” Then she answers herself. “Character. Strength of character. Integrity. He wasn't a great talker, but he had a dry, quiet wit. He was the kind of man who could be in a room full of people, with everybody talking, and Meyer would say something, and everybody would stop talking, just to hear what he had to say. You could hear a pin drop. Yes, he was a small man—small in stature. But he was also a
big
man—big in every other sense. Was he bitter about the way the government treated him? Never! It was all political, you know. He understood that, and he forgave.”

Of Mr. Sam Bronfman's four children, “the artistic one” was the younger of his two daughters, Phyllis. She had graduated from Vassar, where she had majored in history, and been briefly married to a suave European-born financier named Jean Lambert. But by the early 1950s, while her older sister, the Baroness de Gunzburg, was busily carving a place for herself in Paris high society, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert was a reclusive divorcée living in a modest Left Bank atelier and studying painting and sculpture. Minda de Gunzburg had become a regular at the showings of French couturiers, but Phyllis's uniform was a pair of carpenter's bib-topped coveralls and scuffed sneakers. Her father fretted that she was turning into a wealthy, expatriated beatnik.

In 1954, to give her something to do as much as for any other reason, her father sent Phyllis an architectural rendering of a new Seagram's world headquarters building he planned to
erect on property he had acquired at 375 Park Avenue, opposite New York's elite Racquet and Tennis Club, and asked her what she thought of the drawings.

Phyllis leaped to the bait. She thought the design for the new building was atrocious, and she dashed off a lengthy critique to her father explaining just why she thought so. Impressed, her father put her in charge of the new building's design, and for the next three years Phyllis had a full-time job.

She researched contemporary architects, visited their studios, interviewed them, studied their models and sketches, and explored their buildings. She consulted with museum heads and city planning experts, poured through volumes of architectural books and magazines. She signed up for courses at the Yale School of Architecture. In the end, she decided that only one man must design her father's new office building—the master himself, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Van der Rohe agreed, and was given free rein with the forty-one-million-dollar project. Mr. Sam offered only one injunction, which was to “make this building the crowning glory of your life as well as mine.” A slight hitch was encountered when it was discovered that the celebrated Mies, then at the peak of his career at sixty-eight, had no license to practice architecture in New York State. He had been completely self-taught, had not even attended high school, but in order to obtain the necessary building permits the architect had to be licensed, and in order to obtain a license Ludwig Mies van der Rohe would have to take a state-administered test, like an ordinary civil servant. Huffily, the great man refused to comply with this demeaning bureaucratic condition. But the problem was solved—by Phyllis—by having the New York architect Philip Johnson named as Mies's collaborator.

When the bronze and glass Seagram tower opened its doors in 1957, it was hailed by art and architecture critics all over the world as not only the crowning glory of Mies van der Rohe's career but as the crowning glory of New York City and perhaps one of the most strikingly beautiful office buildings in the world. Lavish—even wasteful, economically—in its generosity of outside space, the building is set back from a huge public plaza of marble and pink granite, made inviting by a brace of fountained reflecting pools. Through most of its main floor, which a less generous designer would have given over
to shops and other commercial space, runs the spectacular block-long Four Seasons restaurant. There were even unexpected design benefits. Again, with Phyllis supervising the interior details—including the furniture—the windows of the restaurant facing the street and plaza were strung with thousands of yards of bronze and gold watch chains, looping festoons to give the effect of Austrian shades. When the air-circulating system was turned on, it was discovered that this caused the tiers of chains to shiver and shimmer in perpetual movement, an effect that was as delightful within the restaurant as it was to passersby outside. “This building,” declared Edgar Bronfman proudly—he had that year been named president of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons—“is our greatest piece of advertising and public relations. It establishes us once and for all, right around the world, as people who are solid and care about quality.”

Well, yes, in a sense that was so, though Edgar Bronfman still seemed to be brushing at the spiderwebs of raffishness and scandal that had clung to the family and its business since the old days of Prohibition and bootlegging. There were some who might have argued that there seemed to be something in the Bronfman family temperament that kept giving the family unwanted headlines, and with each new one some diligent reporter would hark back to the unsolved murder of Paul Matoff in 1922. In 1965, for example, Phyllis Lambert's ex-husband's partners were involved in a complex variety of deals that culminated with the seventy-five-million-dollar bankruptcy of the Atlantic Acceptance Corporation, which Jean Lambert had helped organize. By then, he and Phyllis had been divorced for more than a decade, and Lambert himself was absolved of any involvement in the debacle, but it was a fact that Lambert's seed money in his enterprises had been a million-dollar loan from his men wife.