Meyer Lansky
Shortly after The Godfather Part II reached theaters in 1974, Meyer Lansky picked up the telephone and called the actor Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had played Hyman Roth, a gangster based on Lansky, and had earned an Oscar nomination for it. Lansky congratulated him on a fine performance. Then he added a note of criticism: "You could've made me more sympathetic."
The man on the other end of that call was born Maier Suchowljansky in the Russian Empire. He became a central figure in American organized crime, tied to gambling in the United States, Cuba, and the Caribbean. The Federal Bureau of Investigation watched him for nearly fifty years. Yet he was convicted only of illegal gambling offenses.
How did an immigrant boy from Grodno come to link Jewish and Italian-American gangs? What did his casinos in Florida, Cuba, and Las Vegas actually earn him? And why do historians now warn that his legend grew larger than the documented facts?
In 1911, a boy named Maier Suchowljansky crossed the ocean with his mother and his brother Jacob, leaving by way of the port of Odessa. He had been born on the 4th of July 1902 in Grodno, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Belarus. His family was Polish-Jewish, and when anyone later asked his native country, Lansky always answered "Poland".
His father had made the same journey in 1909. The reunited family settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York.
Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel met Lansky when both were children, and the two stayed friends for life. As young men they went into the bootlegging trade together. They ran the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which had a reputation as one of the roughest crews of the Prohibition years.
The other great friendship of Lansky's life began with a threat. Charles "Lucky" Luciano, then a teenager, tried to extort protection money from Lansky on his walk home from school. Lansky answered with defiance, and Luciano respected the younger boy for it. Instead of enemies, the two became lasting partners.
Both men also associated with the veteran gangster Arnold Rothstein, until Rothstein was murdered in 1928. The following year, Lansky and Luciano would sit down at a conference in Atlantic City with far bigger plans.
In May 1929, Luciano, Lansky, Johnny Torrio, and Frank Costello organized a conference in Atlantic City. Luciano's vision was a national syndicate in which Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs would pool their resources. Organized crime would become a profitable business for all of them. That meeting is the founding moment of the network later called the National Crime Syndicate.
Lansky was already thinking about where to hide the proceeds. As early as 1932, he moved money from illegal activity in New Orleans into Swiss offshore accounts. A Swiss secrecy law of 1934 then gave that practice legal cover, even though bankers knew well whose money they were handling.
By 1936, Lansky had gambling operations running in Florida and Cuba. They rested on two innovations. The first was expertise: Lansky understood the mathematical odds of the most popular wagering games, and so could run the houses efficiently. The second was protection. Mob connections and bribed law enforcement kept the establishments safe from rival criminals and from the police.
The houses also followed a strict rule of integrity about the games and the wagers. Lansky's "carpet joints" in Florida and elsewhere were never "clip joints", where gamblers could not be sure the games were honest. He made certain that the staff who ran the tables were people of high integrity.
In 1938, Lansky set the gambling business aside for a very different kind of fight.
On the 20th of April 1938, Lansky and 14 associates walked into a rally in Yorkville, a German neighborhood of Manhattan. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazi influence had spread to America, mostly among German immigrants. They formed the Friends of New Germany, which in 1936 was succeeded by the German American Bund. The Bund staged rallies, marches, and demonstrations.
New York Judge and former Congressman Nathan Perlman asked Lansky to break up those gatherings. Lansky recalled that the stage in Yorkville was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. His crew threw some of the speakers out of the windows and chased the rest into the street. In his words: "We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."
Perlman offered to pay for the work. Lansky refused with a single sentence: "I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering. They are my brothers".
Once the United States was at war, Lansky helped the Office of Naval Intelligence with Operation Underworld. The government recruited criminals to watch for German infiltrators and saboteurs arriving by submarine. German submarines were sinking Allied ships in great numbers along the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean coast, and fear of sabotage was high.
Lansky arranged a deal through a high-ranking Navy official that secured Luciano's release from prison. In exchange, the Mafia provided security for the warships being built along the docks of New York Harbor. Lansky connected the Navy with Luciano, who reportedly instructed Joseph Lanza to prevent sabotage on the waterfront. Lansky also received an ONI contact code number. He introduced the service to John M. Dunn and Jeremiah Sullivan of the International Longshoremen's Association.
After Lansky's death, a Medal of Freedom was found among his possessions. It may have been secretly awarded for his deal with naval intelligence.
In 1946, Lansky persuaded the Italian-American Mafia to put Bugsy Siegel in charge of Las Vegas, and he became a major investor in Siegel's Flamingo Hotel. Lansky was mindful that Al Capone had gone to prison on tax evasion and prostitution charges. To avoid that fate, he eventually bought an offshore bank in Switzerland and laundered his casino empire's illegal earnings through a network of shell and holding companies.
Also in 1946, Lansky attended a secret meeting in Havana about Siegel's management of the Flamingo. The hotel was running far behind schedule and costing the Mafia's investors a great deal of money. The other bosses wanted to kill Siegel, but Lansky begged them to give his friend a second chance.
Siegel kept losing money, so a second meeting was called. By then the casino had turned a small profit, and with Luciano's support Lansky won Siegel more time. When the hotel began losing money again, the investors decided Siegel was finished. It is widely believed that Lansky had to give the final approval, because of his long friendship with Siegel and his stature in the organization.
On the 20th of June 1947, Siegel was shot and killed in Beverly Hills, California. Twenty minutes later, Lansky's associates Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway walked into the Flamingo and took control. According to the FBI, Lansky kept a substantial financial interest in the hotel for the next 20 years. Late in life he said that if it had been up to him, "Ben Siegel would be alive today".
Siegel's death shifted power in Las Vegas from New York's Five Families to the Chicago Outfit. Lansky is believed to have advised and aided the Chicago boss Tony Accardo as he established his hold, though in a far more restrained role.
As early as 1937, Lansky controlled the casino at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. He became part of a group of American mobsters who moved into Cuba's casino and hotel business in the 1940s and 1950s, and he established himself as the most powerful of them. His friendship and business relationship with the Cuban leader Batista lasted about a decade.
The terms were settled at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York in the late 1940s. In exchange for kickbacks, Batista would give Lansky and the Mafia control of the country's casinos and racetracks. Batista would open Havana to large-scale gambling, and his government would match hotel investment dollar for dollar.
In December 1946, Lansky co-hosted the Havana Conference with Luciano at the Hotel Nacional. Mafia families from across the United States attended, and the meeting set the policy, rules, and business interests of the National Crime Syndicate for the postwar era. That same year, Luciano's sentence had been commuted as thanks for his help during Operation Underworld. He was freed and deported, and made his way to Cuba hoping to use it as a base.
Lansky tried to keep Luciano on the island. He appealed personally to Batista and to his friend Alfred Pequeno, the Minister of the Interior. Luciano was deported anyway, under heavy pressure from the American government, which threatened an embargo on drug exports to Cuba if he stayed.
In 1952, Batista staged a coup that returned him to power. He wanted to clean up and revitalize the gambling industry, and he brought in Lansky as an advisor on gambling reform. In 1955, Batista changed the law so that any club or hotel worth $1 million or more could host a casino. Investment in Havana's hotels and clubs surged.
In 1956, Lansky began building the Havana Riviera hotel and supplied most of the $14 million it cost. It opened on the 10th of December 1957. For tax purposes, Lansky listed his position there as "kitchen manager".
He also ran the Montmartre Club, where he set up a gambling school to teach young Cubans to run blackjack, roulette, and other games. With his associates he held interests in the Sevilla Biltmore, the Internacional, the Commodore, and the Havana Hilton.
Batista's grip on the island would not last beyond the end of 1958.
On New Year's Eve 1958, Lansky was celebrating the $3 million he had made in the first year at the Habana Riviera, his 440-room palace that cost $8 million. Batista was preparing to flee to the Dominican Republic, before settling in Francoist Spain, where he died in exile in 1973. That night, many Havana casinos, including several of Lansky's, were looted and destroyed.
Lansky fled to the Bahamas on the 7th of January, where the Bay Street Boys were ruling Nassau. He escaped arrest by the new Cuban government and left $17 million in cash behind. His brother Jake Lansky was imprisoned in Triscornia. Lansky's businesses were nationalized and shut down. He later said, "I crapped out" in Cuba. Jake joked to Lansky's children: "Don't expect a lot of money. If your father died today, he's broke".
Plans for revenge followed. In 1975, the American mercenary Frank Sturgis testified under oath that an associate of Lansky offered him $1 million to assassinate Fidel Castro. Sturgis said he was willing, but that he never received "the go-ahead from his contacts in the American embassy". In August 1960, Lansky struck a deal in Miami with Tony Varona, a former Prime Minister of Cuba. Lansky would bankroll a government-in-exile and promised millions of dollars in return for reopening the hotels and casinos after Castro's fall. The deal fell through.
The Mafia migrated elsewhere in the Caribbean, and so did Lansky. He was suspected of secretly owning the Lucayan Beach Casino at Freeport, Grand Bahama, and he drew some income from it.
In 1970, Lansky fled to Herzliya Pituah, Israel, to escape federal tax evasion charges in the United States. He was a strong sympathizer with the country. In the 1940s he held a fundraiser for the Hagannah at his establishment, the Colonial Inn, and the evening raised $10,000. He also sent a $25,000 cheque to the Zionist American League for a Free Palestine. The Israel fundraiser Shepard Broad recalled that "You did not have to ask Meyer Lansky twice".
Lansky also used the New York waterfront to smuggle arms to Zionist paramilitaries, diverting shipments from their intended destination to Haifa. After the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, he gave to the Emergency Fund for Israel and urged his friends to do the same.
Israel did not extradite its citizens, and under the Law of Return any Jew could settle and naturalize there. The government, however, reserved the right to exclude Jews with a criminal past. Two years after he arrived, Lansky was deported to the United States. Prosecutors built their trial case on the testimony of the loan shark Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa. Lansky was acquitted in 1973.
In 1929, Lansky married Anna Citron, and the couple had three children before divorcing in 1946. In 1948 he married Thelma Schwartz. They were officially married in Havana on the 16th of December 1948, in a private signing of papers in a lawyer's office. Lansky did not want his first wife or his children to know he had remarried.
Lansky retired to Miami and spent his last ten years quietly at his home in Miami Beach, Florida. He died of lung cancer on the 15th of January 1983, aged 80. He held few assets in his own name and left no substantial estate. American law-enforcement agencies long suspected he had access to undisclosed wealth. No verified cache of hidden assets was ever identified.
His biographer Robert Lacey describes Lansky's final decades as financially constrained, noting his difficulty paying medical expenses for his disabled son. Lacey concludes that Lansky's wealth and influence were often exaggerated. Journalists who followed him argue that his power rested less on owning assets than on long-standing relationships, informal partnerships, and trusted intermediaries. How much of that influence turned into personal wealth remains uncertain.
The mythology reached Hollywood anyway. Roth's line in The Godfather Part II, "We're bigger than U.S. Steel", echoes something an FBI surveillance operation picked up Lansky telling his wife as they watched a news story on the Mafia. Roth's right-hand man, Johnny Ola, was inspired by Lansky's associate Vincent Alo. The name of Moe Greene blends those of two Lansky associates, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum.
Ben Kingsley played Lansky in the 1991 film Bugsy and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Richard Dreyfuss took the role in a 1999 television film, and in the 2021 film Lansky, Harvey Keitel plays the older man while John Magaro plays him young.
The oddest credit may belong to the 1981 NBC miniseries The Gangster Chronicles. Because Lansky was still alive, its producers gave the character based on him the name Michael Lasker, to avoid legal complications.
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Common questions
Who was Meyer Lansky?
Meyer Lansky was an American organized crime figure born Maier Suchowljansky on the 4th of July 1902 in Grodno, in the Russian Empire. He was associated with gambling operations in the United States, Cuba, and the Caribbean, and he died on the 15th of January 1983.
What was Meyer Lansky convicted of?
Meyer Lansky was convicted only of illegal gambling offenses, despite nearly fifty years of investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was acquitted in 1973 at a tax evasion trial that relied on testimony from the loan shark Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa.
What role did Meyer Lansky play in Cuba?
Meyer Lansky became the most powerful mobster in Cuba, controlling the Hotel Nacional casino as early as 1937 and building the Havana Riviera, which opened on the 10th of December 1957. He supplied most of its $14 million cost and advised Batista on gambling reform.
How did Meyer Lansky help the Navy during World War II?
Meyer Lansky helped the Office of Naval Intelligence with Operation Underworld by connecting the Navy with Lucky Luciano. In exchange for Luciano's release from prison, the Mafia provided security for warships being built along the New York Harbor docks.
What happened to Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky's Flamingo Hotel?
Bugsy Siegel was shot and killed in Beverly Hills on the 20th of June 1947 after the Flamingo Hotel kept losing money. Twenty minutes later, Lansky associates Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway took control of the hotel.
How much money did Meyer Lansky leave when he died?
Meyer Lansky left no substantial estate when he died in 1983, and no verified hidden fortune was ever found. His biographer Robert Lacey concluded that Lansky's wealth was frequently exaggerated.
Which movie character was based on Meyer Lansky?
Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II (1974) was based on Meyer Lansky, and Lee Strasberg played the role. Lansky phoned Strasberg afterward and said he could have made the character more sympathetic.
All sources
54 references cited across the entry
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- 5BookHavana NocturneT. J. English — William Morrow — 2007
- 7BookLittle Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster LifeRobert Lacey — 1991
- 8NewsMeyer Lansky, underworld geniusNicholas Gage — November 15, 1971
- 9Meyer Lansky: The Shadowy Exploits of New York's Master Manipulator pp. 14–16, Art Montague – 2005
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- 12Ancestry.com. New York Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 database on-line. Provo, Utah, US: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Year: 1911; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm Roll: T715_1652; Line: 11; Page
- 13Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.
- 1580 years ago, the Mob came to Atlantic City for a little strategic planningPress of Atlantic City — 13 May 2009
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- 24U.S. Merchant Ships Sunk or Damaged in World War IIUsmm.org — 1945-06-13
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- 45NewsLANSKY ACQUITTED OF EVADING TAXES1973-07-26
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- 51MeyerJonathan Lang, Andrea Mutti & Shawn Martinbrough — Humanoids — September 24, 2019
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