Money and the Power The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America

Chapter 1 1. Meyer Lansky The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice. In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gang before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve of brutality. He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America, ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics, legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately, always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the promise, remained bleak and uncertain. A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding, too, tilted the odds in his favor. By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants, Benjamin Siegel, called "Bugsy"-though not to his face-for being "crazy as a bedbug." Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the Bugs and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their services to the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon notorious throughout the city as "the most efficient arm in the business." Like other criminals then and later, and with epic consequences in the corruption of both labor and corporate management, they also hired out their thuggery first to companies, and then to unions-most decisively the Longshoremen and Teamsters-in the bloody war between capitalists and workers. Some employers "gave their hoodlums carte blanche," as one account put it, which they took with "such enthusiasm that many union organizers were murdered or crippled for life." Lansky and Siegel woDenton, Sally is the author of 'Money and the Power The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375701269 and ISBN 0375701265.