Meyer Lansky

Based on Wikipedia: Meyer Lansky

The Accountant of the Underworld

In the summer of 1970, an elderly man with a slight frame and unremarkable appearance boarded a flight to Israel. He carried no weapons, commanded no soldiers, and had never been convicted of a serious crime. Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation had spent nearly fifty years trying to bring him down, convinced he controlled a hidden fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. His name was Meyer Lansky, and he was quite possibly the most misunderstood figure in American organized crime history.

The popular image of Lansky is that of a criminal mastermind—the "Mob's Accountant" who invented money laundering, built Las Vegas, and died with three hundred million dollars stashed in Swiss bank accounts. The reality is more fascinating and far more elusive.

When Lansky died in 1983, investigators expected to finally uncover his legendary wealth. What they found instead was an estate so modest it barely covered his medical bills. No Swiss accounts materialized. No hidden caches emerged. Either Lansky had pulled off the greatest disappearing act in financial history, or the mythology surrounding him had grown far beyond the man himself.

From Grodno to the Lower East Side

Maier Suchowljansky entered the world on July 4, 1902, in Grodno—a city that belonged to the Russian Empire at the time but now sits in Belarus. His family was Polish-Jewish, and throughout his life, whenever anyone asked where he came from, Lansky would answer simply: "Poland."

When Maier was nine years old, he traveled with his mother and brother Jacob through the port of Odessa, bound for America. His father had made the journey two years earlier, in 1909, and was waiting for them in the cramped tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side of that era was a world unto itself. Imagine cramming over three hundred thousand people—mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—into less than one square mile of Manhattan. The streets teemed with pushcart vendors, the air thick with Yiddish and the smell of pickles and fresh bread. It was also a place where young men learned quickly that survival often meant bending rules.

Here, young Maier Suchowljansky became Meyer Lansky.

A Partnership Forged in Defiance

The story of how Lansky met his two most important associates reads like something from a film script.

Benjamin Siegel was a childhood friend. The two boys grew up together, eventually becoming partners in bootlegging and running what would become known as the Bugs and Meyer Mob—a gang with a fearsome reputation for violence during Prohibition.

Charles Luciano's introduction came differently. The young Italian was running a small extortion racket, demanding protection money from Jewish kids walking home from school. When he approached Lansky, the smaller boy refused to pay. He didn't run. He didn't cower. He simply said no.

Luciano was impressed. He'd expected fear, and instead found defiance. The two teenagers struck up a friendship that would reshape American organized crime.

What made this partnership unusual—even revolutionary—was that it crossed ethnic lines. In the early twentieth century, crime was tribal. Italian gangs worked with Italians. Jewish gangs worked with Jews. The Irish kept to themselves. Luciano and Lansky saw past these divisions.

The Vision of a National Syndicate

By the late 1920s, Luciano had developed an ambitious idea. What if, instead of competing and killing each other, the various ethnic crime organizations cooperated? What if they pooled resources, divided territories, and turned their chaotic enterprises into something resembling a real business?

In May 1929, this vision took concrete form at a conference in Atlantic City. Luciano organized the gathering, with help from Lansky, Johnny Torrio, and Frank Costello. The meeting brought together crime figures from across ethnic lines and geographic boundaries.

What emerged from that conference would later be called the National Crime Syndicate—though historians debate whether it was ever as structured as that name implies. Regardless of the organizational details, something fundamental had shifted. Cooperation was now possible where only conflict had existed before.

Lansky's role in this new arrangement was distinctive. He wasn't a territorial boss who commanded crews of soldiers. He wasn't a killer, though he certainly knew killers. His value lay in his mind for numbers and his ability to bridge different criminal worlds.

The Gambling Innovator

While many organized crime figures focused on narcotics trafficking, Lansky gravitated toward gambling. By 1936, he had established operations in Florida and Cuba, and he brought two innovations that would define illegal gambling for decades.

First was mathematical expertise. Lansky understood odds. He knew the precise percentages on every popular wagering game. This wasn't just useful for maximizing profits—it meant his operations could be run professionally, with predictable returns.

Second was the concept of guaranteed integrity. This might sound strange applied to illegal gambling, but it was crucial. Lansky's establishments—known as "carpet joints" for their upscale appointments—were never "clip joints" where the games were rigged against players. Customers could trust that if they won, they'd actually get paid.

Why would a criminal care about fair play? Because rigged games attract attention. Angry losers who've been cheated complain loudly, sometimes to authorities. But customers who lose fairly often come back, convinced their luck will turn. Lansky understood that sustainable profits came from running honest games—honest in the mechanical sense, even if the entire enterprise was illegal.

An Unusual Act of Patriotism

The 1930s brought a threat that Lansky took personally.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazi ideology began spreading beyond German borders. In America, German immigrants formed organizations like the Friends of New Germany and later the German American Bund. These groups held rallies, marched through American streets, and openly celebrated Hitler.

In 1938, a New York judge named Nathan Perlman approached Lansky with an unusual request. Would his gang be willing to disrupt these Nazi gatherings?

Lansky agreed, but not for money. When Perlman offered to pay, Lansky refused.

"I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering. They are my brothers."

On April 20, 1938—Hitler's birthday—Lansky and fourteen associates attended a Bund rally in Yorkville, a German neighborhood in Manhattan. The stage was decorated with swastikas and a portrait of the Führer. Speakers began their familiar rants.

Then Lansky's men went to work.

"There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."

This wasn't an isolated incident. Lansky's gang made a practice of breaking up Bund meetings throughout the late 1930s—one of history's stranger examples of organized crime serving, in its own violent way, a broader social good.

Operation Underworld

When America entered World War Two, the government faced a problem. German submarines were sinking Allied ships at an alarming rate along the eastern seaboard. There was genuine fear of Nazi saboteurs infiltrating the New York waterfront—the same docks where warships were being built and supplies were being loaded for the war effort.

The Office of Naval Intelligence, known by its acronym O.N.I., developed an unconventional solution. If the waterfront was controlled by organized crime, why not recruit organized crime to protect it?

This initiative became known as Operation Underworld, and Lansky played a crucial intermediary role. He helped connect naval intelligence officials with Lucky Luciano, who was serving time in prison. The deal was straightforward: Luciano would order his people to watch for German infiltrators and prevent sabotage. In exchange, the government would consider early release.

Luciano reportedly instructed Joseph Lanza to secure the New York waterfront. Whether this arrangement actually prevented any sabotage remains unclear—the historical evidence is murky. But it demonstrates how thoroughly Lansky had positioned himself as a bridge between worlds that normally never touched.

The Rise and Fall of Bugsy Siegel

In 1946, Lansky convinced his Italian-American partners to put his old friend Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel in charge of a new venture in Las Vegas. The project was the Flamingo Hotel, and Lansky became a major investor.

The Flamingo was a disaster in the making. Costs spiraled out of control. Construction fell far behind schedule. Siegel's investors—dangerous men who expected returns, not excuses—grew increasingly unhappy.

A meeting was called in Havana to discuss the Siegel problem. The other bosses wanted him killed. Lansky begged them to give his friend a second chance.

They agreed, but the reprieve was temporary. The Flamingo continued losing money. Another meeting was held. By now, the casino had turned a small profit, and with Luciano's support, Lansky again argued for patience. The investors reluctantly gave Siegel more time.

Then the hotel started losing money again.

What happened next has been debated for decades. It is widely believed that Lansky—because of his long friendship with Siegel and his stature in the organization—was ultimately asked to approve the decision to kill his childhood friend. Whether he actually gave that approval, and what it cost him emotionally, we can only speculate.

On June 20, 1947, Benjamin Siegel was shot to death in Beverly Hills, California.

Twenty minutes later, Lansky's associates walked into the Flamingo and took control.

Years later, Lansky would tell interviewers: "If it had been up to me, Ben Siegel would be alive today." Whether this was truth, self-justification, or simple nostalgia for a lost friend is impossible to know.

The Cuban Empire

While Las Vegas captured the American imagination, Lansky was building something arguably more ambitious ninety miles off the Florida coast.

Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s offered what Las Vegas couldn't—a sovereign nation where gambling could operate without any pretense of American law enforcement scrutiny. Lansky developed a close relationship with Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's military strongman, that would last a decade.

The arrangement was nakedly transactional. During a stay at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the late 1940s, Batista and Lansky reached an understanding. In exchange for kickbacks, Batista would give Lansky and his associates control of Cuba's casinos and racetracks. The Cuban government would even match, dollar for dollar, any hotel investment exceeding one million dollars.

In December 1946, Lansky organized what became known as the Havana Conference. Held at the Hotel Nacional, it was the first major gathering of American underworld figures since a Chicago meeting in 1932. The attendees read like a who's who of organized crime: Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Santo Trafficante Junior, Carlos Marcello.

The first to arrive was Lucky Luciano himself, traveling on a false passport. Entertainment was provided by, among others, Frank Sinatra, who had flown in with the Fischetti brothers.

Lansky presented his vision: a new Havana, rebuilt as a gambling paradise, profitable for anyone willing to invest.

Batista's Return and the Golden Years

In 1952, Lansky reportedly offered Cuba's president, Carlos Prío Socarrás, two hundred fifty thousand dollars to step aside and allow Batista to return to power. Whether this bribe actually happened, Batista did seize control in a military coup that March.

What followed was a gambler's dream. Batista offered Lansky an annual salary of twenty-five thousand dollars to serve as an unofficial "gambling minister." By 1955, the laws had been changed to grant gaming licenses to anyone investing one million dollars in a hotel or two hundred thousand in a nightclub. Unlike Las Vegas, there were no background checks. The government provided matching construction funds, ten-year tax exemptions, and duty-free imports.

Lansky transformed the Cabaret Montmartre into Havana's most fashionable establishment. He installed a casino at the Hotel Nacional. In 1956, he began building his masterpiece: the Havana Riviera, a four-hundred-forty-room palace that cost eight million dollars.

The Riviera opened in late 1958. In its first year of operation, Lansky made three million dollars.

He would never see a second year.

Revolution

On New Year's Eve 1958, while Lansky was celebrating his windfall at the Riviera, Fulgencio Batista was preparing to flee Cuba. The revolution led by Fidel Castro had succeeded.

That night, mobs looted and destroyed many of the casinos Lansky and his associates had built. Seven days later, Lansky fled to the Bahamas. On January 8, 1959, Castro's forces took control of Havana, establishing their command post in the Hilton hotel.

The new government moved quickly against gambling. By October 1960, Castro had nationalized all hotel-casinos and outlawed gambling entirely.

Everything Lansky had built in Cuba was gone.

His brother Jake was less fortunate—arrested and imprisoned before he could escape. There are even stranger footnotes to this story. In 1975, American mercenary Frank Sturgis testified that an associate of Lansky's had offered him one million dollars to assassinate Castro. Sturgis claimed he was willing but never received approval from his contacts at the American embassy.

The Flight to Israel

By 1970, federal authorities were closing in. Tax evasion charges loomed. Lansky, now sixty-eight years old, made a dramatic decision: he would flee to Israel.

His choice wasn't random. Under Israel's Law of Return, any Jew could legally settle in the country and become a citizen. Israeli law at the time didn't permit extradition of Israeli citizens. Lansky had always been a strong sympathizer with Israel, and he saw a chance to spend his remaining years beyond the reach of American prosecutors.

He settled in Herzliya Pituah, a suburb north of Tel Aviv.

But Israel's government faced pressure from the United States and wrestled with the question of whether Lansky's criminal past should disqualify him under a clause allowing exclusion of Jews with certain backgrounds. After two years, Israel deported him back to America.

The federal government brought Lansky to trial, relying heavily on testimony from Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa, a loan shark turned government witness. It wasn't enough.

In 1973, Meyer Lansky was acquitted.

The Myth of Hidden Millions

Throughout his life, law enforcement and journalists estimated Lansky's wealth at anywhere from three hundred million to five hundred million dollars. He was called the "Chairman of the Board" of organized crime, a financial genius who had pioneered money laundering through Swiss banks.

Some of this was true. As early as 1932, Lansky was moving money from illegal activities in New Orleans to Swiss offshore accounts—well before most criminals thought of such arrangements. The Swiss banking secrecy law of 1934, which protected account holders from scrutiny, was practically designed for men like him. He reportedly owned an offshore bank in Switzerland, using shell companies to launder money through a network that law enforcement struggled to penetrate.

But the legendary fortune?

When Lansky died on January 15, 1983, at the age of eighty, investigators were finally able to examine his actual financial situation. What they found confounded decades of assumptions. He held few assets in his own name. His estate was modest. No verified hidden cache was ever discovered.

His biographer Robert Lacey would later describe Lansky's final years as far more humble than anyone expected. The man who supposedly controlled hundreds of millions lived quietly in Miami Beach, dying of lung cancer in circumstances that bore no resemblance to the life of a secret billionaire.

The Unanswerable Question

So what do we make of Meyer Lansky?

One possibility is that he truly was a criminal mastermind who hid his wealth so effectively that it simply vanished—taken to the grave, perhaps distributed to unknown heirs, or locked in accounts whose existence died with him.

Another possibility is that his legend grew far beyond the reality. Lansky was undoubtedly significant. He facilitated cooperation between criminal organizations at a crucial moment in their evolution. He ran gambling operations with unusual sophistication. He pioneered offshore banking techniques that would later become standard practice for legitimate corporations, not just criminals.

But perhaps he was never quite the mastermind of popular imagination. Historians increasingly caution that Lansky's role has been exaggerated—that he was important without being the puppet master controlling everything from the shadows.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Lansky was real enough to attract the FBI's attention for nearly half a century. He was connected enough to broker deals between Lucky Luciano and the United States Navy. He was wealthy enough to build an eight-million-dollar hotel in Havana.

But he was also a man who died with so little that his estate barely covered his final expenses—either the greatest financial magician of the twentieth century, or a figure whose mythology outpaced his actual accomplishments.

Perhaps that ambiguity is fitting. In a life spent navigating the shadows between legitimate business and organized crime, between ethnic communities that rarely cooperated, between America and Cuba and Israel, Meyer Lansky remains appropriately difficult to pin down. We know what he did. We know who he knew. We know how he died.

What we may never know is how much of the legend was real.