I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  United States District Court

  FOR THE

  Southern District of Florida

  United States of America

  v.

  MEYER LANSKY

  To The United States Marshal or any other authorized agent or officer

  You are hereby commanded to arrest MEYER LANSKY and bring him forthwith before the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida in the city of Miami to answer to an Indictment charging him with

  Criminal Contempt, in that he refused to appear before the United States Grand Jury in the Southern District of Florida on March 10 and 11, 1971, pursuant to lawful subpoena and court order in violation of Title 18, U.S.C. Section 401

  Dated at Miami, Florida

  on March 24th 1971

  Bail fixed at $200,000 SURETY

  When he hadn’t returned, they’d revoked his U.S. passport. Extradite him, was the Department of Justice’s message to Israel. LANSKY, ACCORDING TO DE CARLO, HAS A “PIECE” OF VIRTUALLY EVERY CASINO IN LAS VEGAS DUE TO HIS EARLY ENTRY AS THE “PROTECTION” FOR JEWISH ELEMENT WHO ORGANIZED GAMBLING ELEMENT THERE. HE LISTED FLAMINGO, DESERT INN, STARDUST, SANDS, AND FREMONT AS HOTELS IN WHICH LANSKY HAS INTEREST. The Department of Justice had so much intelligence on him that they no longer knew what was fact and what was myth. Of course it was in his nature that they would never know.

  Later, Uri Dan would write that even before he met Lansky he was opposed to those Israeli authorities who wanted to send him back to the U.S. He would write, “On principle I defended his right as a Jew to come and live in the land of his ancestors.” He would go further: “Israelis had been molded by blood, violence, and a struggle for survival and power in the sands of the Middle East.” Lansky had used his connections to help arm the Haganah during Israel’s fight for independence. He and his men had broken up Nazi rallies in Yorkville in the 1930s. “He fascinated me,” Dan wrote. “Meyer Lansky has that type of personality.”

  The allure of power, the allure even of its excesses. Of course it is the excesses that account for the allure. Some negative force everywhere present but never seen. The black-and-white photographs of murdered gangsters. Meyer Lansky walking his shih tzu near the beach on Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Promenade.

  He uncapped the Pernod, listening to Gila translate the article from the Hebrew. It was the usual life summary. He tried to listen, displeased even by the facts once they’d been presented in the funhouse mirror of someone else’s language. No serious criminal convictions—was it because he was innocent, or because of his shrewd invisibility? He had spent the last forty years not commenting on these things. He looked Gila in the eye when she got to the murders of Ben Siegel and Albert Anastasia. He sipped his drink and waited for her to start reading again and then he turned away and listened, staring at the wall.

  “I liked Dan all right,” he finally said. “The more I talked to him, the more I did. Very smart. Very close with Ariel Sharon. He’s covered Sharon for fifteen years.”

  “Sabras,” she said. Her voice was distant, somewhere between a hiss and a sigh. “Big balls like an ox, at least that’s what they think. They spit on people like me. Refugees.”

  She was still contemplating the story. It had become more interesting than he was. He stood by the window and looked out at the beach, crowded even at sunset. The coolness of the Pernod on his tongue, the herbal sweetness. He fished for his cigarettes in the pocket of his robe.

  “I guess they taught you pretty good English at that DP camp,” he said.

  “English. Dressmaking. Lots of things.”

  “A real finishing school. Dressmaking.”

  “We made dresses and the boys made watches. Useful Jews. We loved the Americans, they were very patient with us. Then we come here and there’s no work, nothing to eat. Lentils, a few cucumbers.”

  He exhaled the cigarette and started coughing. Gila folded up the newspaper and laid it on the bed.

  “I couldn’t save my friend Ben Siegel,” he said, still facing the window. “He had that kind of temperament—he liked a fight. He thought he could cheat people, even the goddamn Italians, and they would back down. I never backed down, but I always used my head. It’s easy to blow yourself up. It happened to Ben, it happened to a lot of people I worked with in those days. The wheel turned, they lost. Not that they were animals, but they were characters, personalities. I used to take a lot of crap for being quiet. I was quiet. I wasn’t any better than they were, but I was quiet.”

  He looked at the newspaper on the bed. In English, the title was Meyer Lansky Breaks His Silence. Some kind of raffish joke, a stereotype from an old movie. FLAMINGO, DESERT INN, STARDUST, SANDS, AND FREMONT. Useful Jews. Everything secret, everything always at risk. Now Ben was long dead, he himself was sixty-nine. If they made him leave, he didn’t know where he’d go.

  He walked with his two lawyers through the crowd past the concrete planters full of weeds. The Palace of Justice was in a shabby part of modern Jerusalem near some defunct railroad tracks, the sidewalks hemmed in by dented chain-link fence. Amid the fans and the dark wooden beams, he tried to follow the rhetoric. His Israeli lawyer, Alroy, made an argument in Hebrew, then the State of Israel’s lawyer, Gavriel Bach, made a counterargument in Hebrew. For once, he was not asked to speak. He sat beside his American lawyer, Rosen, and the two of them read along as an interpreter translated on a yellow pad with a ballpoint pen. The five supreme court justices listened to the contradictions. He was the head of the Mafia and had a fortune of three hundred million dollars. He was a retired hotel operator and had practically no money at all. It was theater—the robed judges, the lawyers rising and sitting back down. If he was the kind of outlaw they alleged he was, then the only legitimate response would be silence. Either he was guilty of everything and it couldn’t be proved, or he was guilty of nothing and it couldn’t be proved.

  The State of Israel in its twenty-four years had taken in hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims in the service of ending forever the saga of Jewish victimhood. He had ended his own victimhood a long time ago, before Israel existed. There were Israelis, many of whom had fought in wars, who believed that the end justified the means. There were others, many of whom had fought in wars, who believed otherwise.

  He had attracted a large following now. The cameras would be there waiting for the next recess, Lansky out smoking in the courtyard with its scraggly palm trees, surrounded by young men who had come to see him. He would sit on a bench or on the steps and look at the restaurant sign across the street with its two red Coca-Cola logos, and he could have been in Miami facing trial there.

  Mr. Lansky, what is the Jewish Mafia?

  Mr. Lansky, have you ever committed a violent crime?

  Mr. Lansky, are you a religious Jew?

  Mr. Lansky, who killed Bugsy Siegel?

  He didn’t answer—sometimes he made a joke. After five days, the hearings were over. Fate, luck, whatever. Whatever happened was out of his hands.

  Gila wondered sometimes if she wanted him to be worse than he was. As if to be worse was also to be stronger, and somehow by association for her to be stronger.

  She had brought her sketches to show a man named Gelb—he mostly did swimwear—and he muttered about which factories could make the stitch, private labels, things she already knew, industry talk. He had some acquaintance on Seventh Avenue who did knockoffs of big couture lines, maybe he could put her in touch. The offer was not so much mechanical as scornful. Swimwear, when she designed women’s clothes. Seventh Avenue, when she was in Tel Aviv.

  Her mother napped in the reclining chair, hands like wax, her head covered by a bright orange scarf like some Orthodox housewife. If you had the choice between illness and death, you chose illness. Radiation and chemo, hope and despair. Her mother was younger than Meyer.

  She watched him on TV. He looked terrible, weak, except for his eyes, standing in a slouch outside the Palace of Justice, cigarette in hand. Just from looking at him you co
uld tell he had lost the case—he would have to leave Israel now. When he spoke, he reminded people that only a week ago, in Munich, terrorists had kidnapped and murdered eleven athletes from Israel’s Olympic team. He spoke of it in a strangely poetic way. Young branches cut down, were the words he chose. Young branches: by comparison his loss meant very little. He was an old man with a weak chin and a sunken mouth. She tried to see him that way.

  He stared at the Old City of Jerusalem from a window of the King David Hotel. It would be a maze of narrow alleys this late at night—Armenian restaurants, souks, cracked buildings where everyone lived in a different century. From his room he could see the crenellated wall lit up like a theme park, the Tower of David with its parapets and flag. Egypt would come from the west, Syria from the north—everyone knew it was just a matter of time. You waited for the city to explode, but it didn’t. It glowed like something in a nightmare.

  They ate in a café up the beach from the Dan Hotel, rows of tables and wicker chairs, oil lamps in glass boxes. Hummus, olives, tabouleh, labneh, baba ghanoush. The moon shone on the water. It was still a shock to have people’s eyes on her when she was with him. She tilted her head back to sip the cold beer from the large glass. He was watching her eat, sitting back a little from the table, smoking.

  “I remember when you first came into the lobby,” she said. “People talked about you already. Who is he, he’s someone famous. You would just sit by yourself, drinking coffee, very quiet. Very calm.”

  “No one special.”

  “Like you owned the world.”

  He bowed his head, turning the cigarette slowly in his fingers. “We could go to Caesarea for a couple days. Or maybe just stay here, relax.”

  “I like Caesarea.”

  She smiled down at her food, but the quiet way she said it was a way of saying no. They never spoke about her mother or her illness. She wondered how he was able to come and go so easily when he lived with his wife.

  The room was blue in the dark and he lay on his back with his fists against his temples, waiting for it to pass. There were times when he couldn’t do much of anything and it made him pound the bed in anger and shame. It was their last time together. He let his hand rest on her thigh and she held it there.

  “I’m going to make a Pernod,” she said. “Would you like one too?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Just one ice cube to make it turn milky.”

  They sipped their drinks and didn’t speak. Afterward, he lay with his head on her bare stomach. He was clean and he smelled like cologne, and he moved himself up and they stayed that way for a long time. She had to concentrate—he was concentrating too—they went slowly. His body was not unpleasant. It was a yearning body, and she held him closely in her arms.

  They slept late the next morning and then they said goodbye.

  She was a cocktail waitress. Businessmen, scotch and gin, some stale pastries in a glass case, no music in the background. One night, after Meyer had left Israel, the journalist Uri Dan came in with a group from the embassies, and he half stood and pointed at each of them with his cigarette, relaying their orders, not seeing her. Of course, he could not have known who she was. Of course, she was nobody. She bent at the knees, serving, back straight, focused on the glasses, the table. The inventedness of Israel as a country seemed completely transparent at such moments, everything too new to be convincing, but she realized that this was a refugee’s thinking. The real problem was that she had never gotten used to the newness, had never taken her position in the country seriously enough.

  She was smoking at the bar in her uniform one day when Meyer’s driver walked into the lobby in his jeans and sunglasses. He had come to check on her and also to give her something—he would explain it to her in the car if she had a few minutes to go for a drive. She remembered him, they had met a few times before.

  They left the hotel driveway and started up Frishman Street, past Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, the sudden open space of Kings of Israel Square—pigeons and litter, discount stores fronted by cafés with white tables. They kept east until it got quieter, a neighborhood of modern apartment buildings, flowering trees, benches in the shade. The lantana grew in hedges, its pink and orange petals dusting the sidewalks like scraps of bright plastic.

  “This is where he lived,” the driver said. “Here and in Ramat Gan. He lived in a lot of places.”

  She stared at his turned face.

  “He said the rent would be taken care of. I told him I would take you here and give you the keys. You can do whatever you want after that.”

  She sat there looking at it through the window, the narrow walkway up to the glass door beside the post boxes. It was a gray building like a thousand others in Tel Aviv, built on concrete stilts so cars could be parked beneath it. Inside, there was a tiny elevator with a brass gate that you had to pull back by hand before the door would close. There was barely enough room for the two of them. On the third floor, they exited into a dim hallway with a linoleum floor, mezuzahs on the identical doorframes, a smell of cabbage. It was smaller than her own hallway. It looked like a place to die.

  Another war broke out—on Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked from the west and the north, in Sinai and the Golan Heights. It meant long weeks of sitting in the TV light, warming soup or just tea, bathing her mother, skeletal and bruised. The city would disappear, the country would disappear, bodies amid the shredded cars and buildings. She wanted to leave, to move to New York, but her mother kept living and so for a long time she forgot about her ambitions and her plans.

  The war ended. She read that in Miami, Meyer had been acquitted of all charges: contempt, conspiracy, tax evasion. She felt certain now that it was not because he was innocent but because his life had been lived so invisibly. No one knew who he was, neither had she. Every once in a while she went back to the apartment to see that it was still there, still waiting for her. Three empty rooms with marks on the bare white walls from where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung. Broken slats in the closet door. The water in the kitchen sink would sputter out brown until it ran clear. Such a strange, unwanted gift, as if he were finally telling her something crucial. The future will not be much different from now. Tsilya. Gila. Look at the odds.

  3

  Only Connect

  NEW YORK, 2012

  A memoir without a self. A memoir about someone other than “me.” An understanding that the story of other people connected to “me” might communicate more than the usual “me,” might show the cultural context of “me,” might even cast doubt on the viability of “me.”

  I remember being in Florida to cover a murder case you may have heard about because it involves the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The case had been tied up in court since 2005. When it went to trial, Abramoff was not expected to appear, though he had of course been convicted of other crimes for which he’d served forty-three months in federal prison. He’d appeared at his previous trial in a dark trench coat and fedora, like a gangster from decades ago. In news stories, he was sometimes likened to Meyer Lansky.

  When Gila first told me her story in the spring of 2010, I knew almost nothing about Meyer Lansky and wasn’t very interested in him or in the lore surrounding him. It was the women in his life, starting with Gila, that made me interested.

  From the New York Times, June of 1995:

  Hannah M. Groff, daughter of Lawrence H. Groff, of New York, NY, is to be married today to John V. Haynes, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Donald Haynes, of East Hampton, NY. The civil ceremony will take place at the Hayneses’ home in East Hampton with a reception to follow.

  Ms. Groff, 25, is a recent graduate of the journalism school at Columbia University. Mr. Haynes, 28, is a litigation associate at Byrons and Company, a New York law firm.

  I remember when I was young, hearing a song called “The Adultress,” about a woman, like Gila, who loses herself in secrets. The singer, Chrissie Hynde, seemed like the kind of woman I might be someday, the kind
of woman I thought I wanted to be someday—the song seemed autobiographical. Later, when I became something like that kind of woman, I had long since forgotten the model for the role I was playing, though by then it might have occurred to me that the song was less a boast than an indictment. The song had come out the year I first met Gila, 1981, though I didn’t hear it until much later. I had mostly forgotten Gila by then. I had forgotten how much she’d meant to me when I was young, though some shadow of her must have always been there.

  Nathanael West writes: It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh.

  Frankie Lymon asks, Why do fools fall in love?

  home n. a place of residence or refuge, as in the Promised Land, Tomorrowland, Never Never Land.

  I’ll tell you one more story about the women in Meyer Lansky’s life before I tell you about myself. One more story about a woman who loses herself in secrets.

  4

  Immigrants, Part 1

  NEW YORK, 1928–29

  I

  She touched up her lipstick in the powder room mirror, a girl who’d sewn her own dress from a Butterick pattern, a blue shift she wore with a brooch of fake pearls—Anne Citron, formerly Anna—the name change a hopeful step away from the past, a step toward here, the Park Central Hotel. The beige light settled behind her on a grouping of cane chairs on a pale carpet. Her face in the mirror seemed too long, the curves Semitic. The longer she stood taking in the room’s stillness, the more haughty and derisive it became.