Meyer Lansky

• Born: July 4, 1902
• Birthplace: Grodno, Poland, Russian Empire (now Hrodna, Belarus)
• Died: January 15, 1983
• Place of death: Miami Beach, Florida

Organized crime figure

Lansky actively promoted the Mafia’s involvement in gambling, in the United States and in Cuba.

Areas of achievement: Crime; entertainment; law

Early Life

Born in Poland in 1902, Meyer Lansky (MI-ur LAN-skee) immigrated with his family to the United States in 1911, and they settled in New York City. Growing up in the tough and poverty-stricken Five Points neighborhood, Lansky was in trouble at an early age and was associated with gangs by the time he was a teenager. According to legend, Lansky met his longtime associate, Lucky Luciano, at school when Luciano tried to bully Lansky for money. Instead of paying, Lansky brawled with Luciano, who, impressed with his mark’s bravery and toughness, became a close friend. While in high school, Lansky met Bugsy Siegel, who also became a close friend and a future partner in organized crime. The advent of Prohibition, which made the sale of alcohol illegal in the United States, provided the opportunity for the three criminals to make their fortune. In addition to bootlegging, the Luciano-Lansky gang was brazen about stealing illegal whiskey from other gangs and selling it, making a quick and pure profit. The gang also charged local businesses protection money, with Siegel administering the beatings or murders necessary to collect their fees. Compared to other New York gangs, however, the Luciano-Lansky gang was rather small and insignificant. That changed in 1931 when Luciano became estranged in his relationship with Joe Masseria, the head of the Masseria crime family. Luciano and Lansky took control of the Masseria crime family, fending off potential rivals, including Salvatore Maranzano, the head of a rival crime family. Luciano and Lansky killed Maranzano and established themselves as a powerhouse of New York organized crime. Content to let Luciano take the lead and become the face of the organization, Lansky preferred to be the decision-maker behind the scenes. Lansky, as a Jew, was also an outsider in the Italian Mafia, so he had to accept the role of secretive manipulator rather than that of direct controller.

Life’s Work

Lansky immediately began to change how organized crime operated. In 1931, the same year that Luciano and Lansky rose to power in the Mafia, the federal government convicted famed gangster Al Capone of tax evasion and sent him to prison. Recognizing that bootlegging was attracting too much attention and might soon end anyway (Prohibition ceased in 1933), Lansky began plans to diversify the Mafia’s business. In addition to its traditional sources of revenue, such as extortion and prostitution, Lansky envisioned a major commitment to legal gambling. Gambling offered organized crime several advantages. It was considered a nonviolent form of making money and therefore attracted less negative attention. Because most gambling was not legal in the United States, the mob’s major gambling operations would have to be located in other countries, again out of sight of most Americans. Because gambling in other countries was perfectly legal, crime families investing their money in operations there seemed to make them more “legitimate.” Lansky began by taking over localized illegal gambling in places such as New Orleans and by muscling in on the few forms of legalized gambling in America, especially horse racing. Lansky also persuaded several organized crime families to invest in a venture promoted by his friend Siegel. In 1931, the state of Nevada made gambling legal if local counties wished to make it so. Siegel proposed to create a lavish new hotel and casino, the Flamingo, in a dusty desert town called Las Vegas, where the mob could engage in gambling legally and openly. Siegel opened the Flamingo in 1946, much later than planned. Construction costs had skyrocketed, and Siegel did not keep good records of his expenses. At first, the Flamingo was a disaster and lost money, which alienated his backers. Although Lansky tried to protect his friend, the crime bosses held Siegel responsible for their losses. Siegel was killed by a mob assassin in 1947, and organized crime took over the Flamingo and other gambling ventures in Las Vegas that eventually brought in millions of dollars.

Stung by the financial failures in Las Vegas, Lansky turned his attention elsewhere. In 1946, he entered into an agreement with Cuba’s corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista to permit organized crime to expand its gambling operations into Cuba. Batista granted the mob full control of all casinos and horse racing in Cuba in exchange for regular kickbacks and bribes. Cuba had no laws against gambling and, with the Cuban government as its protector, organized crime would have a secure base of operations beyond the reach of American law, only ninety miles from Florida. Lansky and other mobsters soon refurbished the old casinos in Havana, Cuba’s capital, and began to construct new ones. Lansky invested large sums of his own money in the Montmartre Club and the Hotel Nacional, which became the most prestigious establishments in Havana. Cuba also became the main hub for heroin smuggling, which organized crime also promoted as a business after Prohibition ended. Lansky organized the entire operation, becoming one of the first criminals to take advantage of the secretive Swiss banking laws to hide the mob’s transactions.

Organized crime’s control of Cuba, however, proved to be short-lived. Batista’s corrupt rule generated considerable opposition, and in 1959 Communist rebel groups led by Fidel Castro toppled the Batista regime, and he fled into exile in Spain. The mobsters also had to flee when the Castro regime seized and nationalized the foreign-owned casinos. The Mafia lost massive amounts of money in the Cuban debacle; Lansky supposedly lost seven million dollars, most of his assets. Forced to rely again upon criminal activity, especially narcotics smuggling, in the United States, organized crime lost much of its power and prestige in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and Lansky’s standing as a leading figure in the Mafia diminished accordingly. He became so irrelevant that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stopped conducting surveillance on him in 1971. In 1973, Lansky gained some brief attention when he fled to Israel to avoid charges of tax evasion, but he was deported back to the United States. A jury acquitted him of the charges in 1974. The government believed that Lansky possessed and controlled vast sums of organized-crime money but could never prove it. Lansky lived in a small, quiet neighborhood in Florida, never giving any indication that he was wealthy or influential in the mob. When he died of lung cancer in 1983, the FBI still believed he had millions of dollars hidden in banks around the world, but he left only his modest home and a small amount of cash as his only legitimate assets.

Significance

Because of Lansky’s organizational skills, the Mafia enjoyed its most lucrative era. In the aftermath of Prohibition and government crackdowns, organized crime faced declining profits and internal warfare over territory and sources of income. Lansky managed to smooth over the internal dissent and to direct organized crime toward new sources of revenue that attracted less attention from law enforcement and the government. Without Lansky, the future of organized crime might have been substantially different. Warring among themselves for territory, the Mafia families would have invited unwanted scrutiny from the FBI, and organized crime might have faced a difficult or even diminished existence.

Bibliography

Eisenberg, Dennis. Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob. New York: Paddington Press, 1979. Written just before Lansky’s death, this biography is an excellent depiction of the gangster’s life, from his early years, his role in developing Las Vegas, and his subsequent downfall.

English, T. J. Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It in the Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 2007. A colorful history of organized crime’s investment in Cuba, the book emphasizes the personalities of the mobsters involved in the downfall of the criminal empire in Havana.

Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. An account of the Jewish mobsters who operated alongside their more famous Italian counterparts, placing Lansky into the context of his contemporaries.