DAUGHTER OF THE KING
Copyright © 2014 by Sandra Lansky Lombardo
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ISBN: 978-1-60286-216-6 (e-book)
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First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of Daddy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction, Nick Pileggi
1The Unclehood
2American Princess
3Make Believe Ballroom
4Homeland Insecurity
5The Man in the Coonskin Cap
6Teenage Wedding
7The Honeymooners
8That’s Amore
9Girl Gone Wild
10Notorious
11I Married a Gangster
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the wonderful support of the following people: Dick Cami and Nick Pileggi, who always believed that I had a story to tell. Vince Lombardo, Gary Rapoport, and Aaron and Kaley Lombardo, who have always encouraged me. And especially my Daddy, Meyer Lansky, who never gave up on me; without him I wouldn’t have a story to tell. To Rusty Goodman and Micki Marlo, who have been there for me forever. To my brother Paul and my nephew Meyer Lansky II, for keeping the family name alive. Special thanks to Bill Stadiem for his skill, help, and patience in helping me tell my story; to Dan Strone for selling it; and to Weinstein Books for publishing it.
INTRODUCTION
BY NICK PILEGGI
I had known Sandi Lansky for about twenty years before I could get her to even think about writing a book. She was smart and charming and she and her husband of many years, Vincent Lombardo, were great company, but she had no interest in writing about growing up as Meyer Lansky’s daughter. It was clear that she loved her father and enjoyed travelling the world with him and was clearly pained by what she saw as his harassment by the government, especially toward the end of his life when the Justice Department exerted extraordinary political pressure on Israel to extradite him on bogus charges that were quickly dismissed.
When I first laid eyes on Sandi, I saw her father. The slight build and dark piercing eyes were unmistakable. While I had never met Meyer Lansky, I had seen him on several occasions having dinner with his pal and partner, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, at Frankie and Johnny’s Steakhouse, on East 45th street, in Manhattan’s theater district. (It’s still there and still good.) Lansky’s and Alo’s presence was not only fascinating to a young police reporter like me, but the restaurant’s usually disagreeable waiters, long bored by Broadway’s biggest stars, were suddenly transformed. “He’s here.” “Did you see him?” “Where?” “Table six?” Their excitement was palpable in the room. They were so in awe of him that the usually surly waiters were giddy with excitement.
The irony, of course, was that many of the waiters excited by Lansky’s presence had also been his victims. Some of the older waiters, still hefting dishes on bad feet, often lamented they were only working because they were in hock to their bookmakers. These were the men who had lost their cars, lost their houses, even lost their wives because of the quiet unpretentious man at table six sawing away at his steak. Somehow, it did not seem to matter to them. They were simply in awe of the man who had turned their vice into a national pastime and made illegal betting routine. Because of Lansky, they could place their bets and collect their winnings as reliably as Wall Street—maybe more so. It was Lansky who created and presided over the guys and dolls America that did not exist until he started putting it together during the Prohibition years.
However, while I always knew that Meyer Lansky was one of the most intriguing of organized crime’s founding fathers, he was probably the least known. Oh, there had been articles and books and television documentaries and movies about him, but somehow the “Little Man” was always missing. In Godfather II, Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola came close with their fictional “Hyman Roth,” a part played by the great Lee Strasberg, but all it did was make me want to know more about the real man himself.
I wanted to know, for instance, how a slight, five-foot-five-inch, Lower East Side youngster, born in Grodno, in 1902, survived growing up on some of the most dangerous streets in America. How did an impoverished eighteen-year-old maneuver his way through the Roaring Twenties and murderous gang wars of Prohibition to emerge a multimillionaire and one of the key men responsible for organizing organized crime? And, of course, how could an elementary school dropout create a multibillion-dollar, nationwide illegal gambling empire without an office, a secretary, or even an untapped phone? Today, math whiz casino executives go to MIT, the Harvard Business School, and Wharton to try and master the gambling algorithms that Meyer Lansky carried around in his head.
We know, according to the Kefauver Senate Hearings in 1951, that Lansky prospered not only because he knew how to count, but because he was adept at bribing the sheriffs, judges, and county officials wherever he opened a speakeasy or an illegal casino. He even put the off-duty deputy sheriffs on the payroll as valet parkers to dampen any potential for whistleblowing in the ranks. In 1933, when Prohibition ended, Lansky was thirty-one years old and had earned the trust of some of the least trusting men in America. With the support of his boyhood pal, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, he convinced the syndicate bootleggers to convert their speakeasies into roadhouses and nightclub-casinos catering to illegal gambling just as they had catered to illegal booze. The local politicians and sheriffs were now happy to go along and continue to take bribes to “overlook” the new illegal casinos just as they had “overlooked” speakeasies.
For Lansky and company, the timing could not have been better. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the nation was in the middle of its worst depression. Banks were closed. CEOs were selling apples on the street. Stockbrokers were going out Wall Street windows, while Lansky and his bootlegger pals were one of the only sources of major capital in the country. They were sitting on suitcases of cash, and it was Lansky who began investing their money in the illegal casinos, sports books, and telegraph wires that have kept the bookmakers around the country busy until the present day.
With Lansky’s death I had given up even getting the details of his life, but as my conversations with Sandi continued over the years, I realized that her life would make an incredible book. Here was the story of a willful adolescent daughter who could not be controlled by one of the most powerful and feared men in the country. In many ways, I came to realize, she was too much like him.
Sandi’s was a rich life. She grew up in a vast apartment at the Beresford on 81st Street and Central Park West and later in a huge suite at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South and Sixth Avenue. The Beresford apartment had a terrace so large she could ice skate on it all winter. There were piano, singing, and ballet lessons at which she was not very good, but she had a horse and she loved to ride. She rode and took lessons in Central Park and was good enough to show at Madison Square Garden. Her father was so proud he would follow her around
from one horse show to the other when he wasn’t out of town. He was her biggest fan.
When you grow up in her father’s world, you rarely had any friends from the outside. Sandi had Joe Adonis’ daughter, Benny Siegel’s two daughters, Abner “Longy” Zwillman’s son, among other mob princes and princesses down at the Jersey Shore, which was known as the Gangster Riviera. These children lived lives almost as insular as their parents. They weren’t encouraged to bring strangers into the house. Looking back there’s no question that Sandi and the other progeny of the men who created organized crime were terribly isolated.
As a twelve-year-old, Sandy walked around with far more money than she does today. She always had $20 bills stuffed in her pockets and she was always instructed to take taxis, which were considered a luxury back then. Sandy had been repeatedly told never to take a bus or public transportation because her mother was worried that she’d be kidnapped. The children of wealthy mobsters like Lansky were often the subject of kidnappings because it was impossible for men like her father to go to the FBI or police for protection. If their kids were kidnapped, Lansky and his cohort would be forced to pay the ransom and straighten things out later.
As Meyer Lansky’s daughter she moved about town like some sort of a “Mob Deb.” She had her own table at night clubs like the Harwyn, the Embers, El Morocco, and the Copacabana before she was even old enough to legally enter such places. Sandi’s mother, who was often institutionalized for nervous breakdowns, was not a disciplinary force. Marriage to the mob had taken her as its toll. Lansky, who was travelling around the country, Cuba, and Europe setting up casinos and clubs, would hear about Sandi’s precocious exploits, but there wasn’t much even he could do about his own daughter. He had thought about barring her from the places he controled, but then he was afraid she’d go to the kinds of deadfalls that would be even more dangerous. In the end he tolerated Sandi’s frequenting the places he controled because at least he could have some very tough guys keeping an eye on her.
Lansky tried to exert some parental control over his fun-loving daughter by insisting she travel with him. Because of his schedule, however, Sandi’s schools pretty much followed the racing seasons. She’d start her school year at the toney Birch Wathen School in New York and move her schooling to and equally posh Miami Beach academy during the winter racing season. In the spring, she and her dad would move back north and she’d be re-enrolled in her New York school. This didn’t make for stability or scholarship.
This school-hopping went on until her fifteenth year when Sandi decided to get married to a twenty-three-year-old dashing playboy who later turned out to be a gay fortune hunter. While her father tried to dissuade Sandi from getting married, the headstrong and independent Sandi was determined. Eventually he relented when some of his friends convinced him that it was better for her to get married rather than continue to live her rootless life. Once she was married, they reasoned to Lansky, her husband would be responsible for her and Lansky could relax. Concentrate on the business at hand.
Of course, Sandi’s marriage soon ended in divorce, when Lansky found out that Sandi’s husband was basically a con man. By then, however, she had given birth to a son, Gary, Meyer Lansky’s first grandchild. Freed from the marriage while still a teen, Sandy went back to the club life on the New York–Miami dating circuit, going out with guys like Dean Martin, Gary Crosby (Bing’s son), and Charles Revson, who ran the Revlon cosmetics empire.
When my wife, a screenwriter and Hollywood director, met Sandi, she was both charmed and intrigued. Nora wasn’t as interested in the Meyer Lansky organized crime story as she was in a young woman’s coming of age in her father’s world. As the years passed, however, and after turning down countless offers from newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and movie producers looking for the story about her dad, Sandi began to change her mind. Just about every one of her father’s friends was dead, and Sandi finally began to maybe feel free enough to tell her story.
It wasn’t until Bill Stadiem came along, however, that things began to come together. Bill has an amazing gift for relaxing people and unlocking their great stories. He did it with Marilyn Monroe’s maid, with Frank Sinatra’s valet, with Strom Thurmond’s secret black daughter. And now he has done it with Meyer Lansky’s daughter.
Bill Stadiem has written a wonderful book I never thought would be written. But she told it, he wrote it, and we get an inside look into a world only Sandi Lansky could show us. I’m delighted.
CHAPTER ONE
THE UNGLEHOOD
I opened my big mouth, and I thought Daddy was going to kill me. We were at the Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street in April 1945. He had taken me to Carousel, which was the hottest ticket on Broadway. It was a huge treat. Daddy loved Broadway musicals, and so did I. Two years before, when I was just six, he had taken me to my first one, Oklahoma! I don’t know why Mommy didn’t come. She hadn’t come to On the Town or Mexican Hayride, either. I know she loved the music, and I know she loved dressing up and dressing me up in the beautiful clothes she bought me in the children’s department of Saks Fifth Avenue. Maybe she went to matinees with her girlfriends. Whatever, I was thrilled to be one of the youngest people at the show. I felt so grown up. I had Daddy all to myself. I adored being his little princess.
We had the best seats in the house, five rows back, right in the middle. What was really unusual was that, even though the house was packed—the show had sold out months in advance—no one was sitting in any of the seats in front of us. Had all of these people somehow gotten sick? I later learned that Daddy had bought all the seats so nothing would block our view. He seemed like a giant to me, but he wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot four or five, in a stretch, so those empty seats were a real luxury. And no luxury was too much for my father. He had the nicest clothes, custom-made dark suits made of the softest cashmere, custom shirts, custom shoes, custom hats. My older brother Buddy told me Daddy got all his clothes made because he was too little to fit into ready-to-wear. Buddy was a wiseguy, a big tease. Daddy dressed this way because he could. He looked rich. He was rich.
People at the theatre seemed to know him. We got a lot of looks, not stares, because nobody seemed to dare look at us for too long, but people were definitely noticing us in a very respectful way. That made me feel important, and I liked it. One usher greeted us. “Good evening, Mr. Lansky.” My father gave the usher a chilling look. When his eyes twinkled, Daddy was full of joy, but when those eyes turned dark, it was like a devastating gamma ray, some kind of secret weapon that had been used in the horrible war that had just ended. The usher shriveled. Then I saw why. When a couple near us heard his name, they cut quick glances to each other as if to say, we’re in the presence of someone special. Special for what, I did not know, but maybe it wasn’t good. The moral seemed to be that the Lanskys should be seen but not heard. Low-key was the rule.
And then I blew it. I was loving the play, the dance numbers, the great Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, like “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” But then, in the second act, things turned dark, as dark as Daddy’s look when the usher dared speak his name. The romantic hero, Billy Bigelow, turns into a criminal. Apprehended by the police, Billy falls onto his knife and dies. Dies! I was devastated. I already loved him, and he was dead. “Daddy, they killed him!” I gasped at the stage. Suddenly, the silent theatre somehow became even more silent. All eyes were upon us. And Daddy gave me one of those “if looks could kill” terminal stares. It only lasted a moment, but it seemed like an eternity. And then he took my hand and gave it a loving squeeze. The twinkle came back to his eyes, and he stroked my hair. All was forgiven.
The show went on, though I cried my eight-year-old eyes out before it was over. My little outburst had given at least a few people in the theatre who knew who Daddy was the scary thrill of a lifetime. “They killed him.” I had no idea, but Daddy had surely heard that accusation before, just as he would hear it again. As America’s Gangster Number One, the architect of
Murder Incorporated, and a million other deep and dark rumors, Meyer Lansky was one of the most feared men in a fearsome city. If I said “Daddy, they killed him,” there were a lot of people who believed that my father had arranged it.
Daddy took me to Times Square a lot to have dinners with my “uncles.” They weren’t really uncles, but they certainly felt like family to me. Again, Mommy never seemed to come, just Daddy and me. The place we went to most was Dinty Moore’s on West 46th Street. The actors may have gone to Sardi’s, and the Damon Runyon “guys and dolls” may have gone to Lindy’s, but everybody who was anybody went to Dinty Moore’s—the big politicians, the big Broadway impresarios, the big newspapermen, and my uncles. It was a favorite of all the New York legends: Florenz Ziegfeld, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Meyer Lansky. With its gleaming white tiles and polished brass, white tablecloths, white starched napkins, you almost needed sunglasses to go into the place. It was as brightly lit as a Broadway stage, a place to see and be seen. Moore’s was very masculine, with an endless mahogany bar. The tinkling of ice cubes in the ocean of scotch that the men drank could sound as loud as wind chimes. I was pretty much the only kid there. The only other girls were basically arm candy, beautiful actresses and models less than half the age of their big-shot consorts. It wasn’t a wife place. Maybe that’s why Mommy stayed home.
Daddy always had the seat of honor, the top table, the first one on the left as you entered the dining room. The waiters treated him like a pasha and made a great display of cutting up my food for me. At age eight I still had no clue how to cut up my food, particularly the steak or chicken that called for a knife. It would take me years to learn. I had no need. Maybe the idea was that knives were for hoodlums, not for little ladies like me. Maybe young royalty weren’t supposed to cut their own food.
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