Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  Daddy didn’t want a job with anyone. Once my parents were married, Daddy charmed his way into a partnership with Grandpa Citron, forming, along with future Uncle Moe Dalitz, an enterprising bootlegger who would “own” Cleveland and be a major force in Las Vegas, a giant corporation called Molaska, Inc., which would manufacture molasses out of which the soon-to-be-legal-again liquor could be distilled. Grandpa Citron invested what today what would be millions of dollars in Molaska, which had huge plants in New Jersey and Ohio. The idea was that, with Citron backing, Meyer Lansky could become a Joe Kennedy–style big businessman, even without the Harvard degree. Molaska had all the potential to become the next Seagram’s and make the Lansky-Citrons the American version of the Canadian Bronfmans.

  But Daddy must have had a gambling gene that even the loftiest ambitions to respectability could not overcome. You don’t run the casinos in Las Vegas, Havana, and London without that inner high roller. Instead of playing it totally legit, totally Wall Street, with the Molaska Corporation and making legal whisky, Daddy and Moe Dalitz decided to make illegal whiskey, so they wouldn’t have to pay the government’s new heavy “pleasure” tax. They thought they could get away with it, just like they had gotten away with it during Prohibition. But they didn’t.

  By 1935, the taxmen had descended, raiding the plants, serving subpoenas, looking for ways to “get” Daddy and Uncle Moe. But Daddy was as elusive as Harry Houdini. He had Molaska declare bankruptcy and hid behind an impenetrable maze of shell corporations that made the credit default swaps that nearly bankrupted America in 2008 look like a kid’s game. But the price he paid was losing his big chance to go straight. He also cost Grandpa Citron a fortune, which surely didn’t sit well with Mommy, who had enough stress with Buddy’s illness.

  When the Molaska dream turned to ashes, Daddy embarked on what became his great trademark skill, casino gambling. Alas, this was before casino gambling had been legalized, so you could say Daddy was way ahead of his time. He had cut his casino teeth during Prohibition in minor gambling operations, from numbers running to crap games to bookmaking. Once liquor became legal, he quickly became a nightclub impresario—the clubs, filled with stars, becoming the lure and the front for the back-room gambling that was where the serious money lay. These clubs were called “carpet joints,” because carpets were a shorthand for the lavish luxury that awaited the high rollers.

  Daddy was involved with such clubs all over the country, usually outside the limits of big cities whose upright fathers could look the other way once the fun went to an adjacent county, places like the Riviera, just over the new George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, where Frank Sinatra spilled the ice on me. Daddy, who had a “piece” of the Riviera, had similar pieces of most of America’s prime nightclubs. His main operations were in Saratoga Springs, the horse racing mecca in upstate New York, and Broward County, just above Miami and its American Riviera. But he was also the mastermind, if not on the masthead, of similar operations near New Orleans, Cincinnati, Council Bluffs, Dallas, and Phoenix—all of which were joint ventures with uncles all over the country. I had a huge family. Daddy was always on the road, which caused Mommy endless loneliness that the money that was pouring in couldn’t compensate for.

  Mommy’s best friend, Esther Krakower, who married Uncle Benny Siegel, was from a much poorer family. Esther had a brother, Whitey, who was a genuine gangster of the old brass knuckle school, a charter member of the Jewish gang known as Murder Incorporated. Whitey was shot to death in a gangland assassination on Delancey Street in New York in 1941. Such violence was never even referred to or even whispered about when I was growing up, unfit for my ladylike ears. Despite Mommy’s friendship with Esther, in the eyes of her parents, people like the Krakowers and the Lanskys were “not our kind.”

  Mommy, probably in reaction to her mother’s behemoth weight, was extremely skinny and stylish. She had a beautiful, cultured voice, not at all a harsh Brooklyn accent. Then again, her parents weren’t New Yorkers. They were transplanted Californians, and Mommy and her siblings sounded neutral and very American. With her slinky dresses and her Pall Mall cigarette always in hand, she gave off a sultry Hollywood glamour, a little like Rita Hayworth in Gilda, except Mommy couldn’t sing.

  Mommy was about five three, a few inches shorter than Daddy. She was taller than he was when she wore high heels, so she kept the heels low, as Daddy didn’t want anyone to think he was weak enough to fall for some big showgirl, as the foolish rich men in his nightclubs and casinos were wont to do. That was for suckers. Above all, Daddy was dead serious and wanted to be regarded as such. Mommy loved beautiful clothes and jewels and had closets and closets of them. She seemed to live at beauty salons. Before the kids were born, I don’t know where she found time for Daddy between all her shopping and her styling. They were lucky he travelled so much.

  So this was the world I was born into in 1937. The Citrons had one son-in-law, the husband of my mother’s sister, Sadie, in the very legitimate produce business, and another, my father, in the very illegitimate gambling business. But they didn’t judge Daddy for it, or if they did, given their patrician background, they suspended that judgment. They loved their daughter, and what was good for her was good for them. The Lanskys, on the other hand, were mystified that their son had become a criminal, no matter how much money he was making and how much of it he lavished upon them. Plus Meyer had brought his younger, weaker brother Jacob, Uncle Jack, along for this illegal joy ride. Grandpa Lansky, whom I never knew, was a cautious man like his son Jack and would have been happier if Daddy had stayed in the tool and die factory where he had held his first and last conventional job. Grandma Lansky, on the other hand, gave Daddy unconditional love, and he gave it back. The real shame, or shonda, as the Lanskys might wail in Yiddish, was that none of their grandchildren were being raised as Jews. They could call the Christmas trees Chanukah bushes until they were blue in the face, but they were still Christmas trees. Grandpa Max Lansky died in 1939, a very sad and unfulfilled man. Grandma Yetta would go on and on and help raise me when no one else was able to.

  Daddy, having moved the family to Boston for Buddy’s health, was impatient at his slow progress and, I later learned, a little depressed over the loss of his best friend in Boston, Charlie Solomon, who had given him aid and comfort when Buddy was born and made the connections to Dr. Carruthers. Before I was born, Solomon, who was known as King Solomon, owned Boston the same way Charlie Luciano owned New York. He had made his fortune in bootlegging alongside Joe Kennedy and owned Boston’s grandest nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove. But Solomon had been shot to death by rivals from another club. I had no idea until years later that murder could be an undercurrent in the business-y world of Daddy and my uncles. That was the key difference between Wall Street and the Vegas Strip. Big shots on Wall Street were rarely assassinated.

  Uncle Hy Abrams took over King Solomon’s vacant, bloody throne. He and Daddy would take long walks along the Charles River Esplanade. I used to watch them from our windows, or when I was playing in the park by the Charles with Nanny Minnie and my one friend, Wendy, whom I named my very first doll after. Wendy was always my favorite name, long before I even knew about Peter Pan.

  Notwithstanding Buddy’s daily therapy with Dr. Carruthers, we seemed to be travelling all the time. In family scrapbooks, I have pictures of myself as a very little girl in Florida, Arizona, California, and Cuba, all hot spots to escape the icy Boston winters and, more important, for Daddy to do his endless deals. He understood how much Americans loved betting, and he was betting his own career on it. I remember fondly one train trip to Phoenix, where we visited Daddy’s dog track there. He had chimpanzees dressed as jockeys riding the dogs on their backs. That made a huge impression on me. I also had a wonderful trip to Cuba, my first international journey. Mommy made a scrapbook with a bunch of press clippings of me in 1940 at the legendary Hotel Nacional in Havana, where the Cuban daily El País wrote that the Lanskys were in residence there for ten wee
ks. A world war was erupting. Europe was freezing and dying. Most of America was still getting over the Depression. And here we were amidst the palms and the hibiscus, the happiest kids on earth. Charmed lives.

  Even with Daddy’s philosophy of staying under the radar, he was front-page news and a VIP all the way. There were pictures of me with my curly blonde hair in a white bonnet and white sundress confidently pushing my own stroller, the little golden girl. And there was my brother Paul at the racetrack, dashing in a rep tie and white Bermudas, a pair of binoculars around his neck so he could see the precise result at the finish line. But for all the copy about Daddy, he and my mother and Buddy were never photographed for the paper.

  Even when we were in the Cuban paradise, education always took precedence for Daddy. He sent Buddy and Paul to the American School in Havana, figuring a few months of lessons were better than none at all. For all his limitations, Buddy could still use his hands a bit. He spoke beautifully. And he walked by holding on to you. Under the circumstances, he had amazing poise.

  What was Daddy doing in Cuba? In his travels, Daddy had become good friends with Cuba’s military ruler, Colonel Fulgencio Batista. Batista, impressed with Daddy’s success in the carpet joints across America, offered him a plum contract to renovate and manage Havana’s famed Oriental Park racetrack and its two casinos. Oriental Park had been a haven for American millionaires in the Roaring Twenties. But the Yankee millionaires had gone home in the Depression, and Batista wanted them back. Daddy brought in a New England friend named Lou Smith, one of the disciples of King Solomon, who ran horse and dog tracks in the Boston area, to run the racetrack at Oriental Park for him.

  Daddy was like a business consultant, the McKinsey of the Mob. However, where gambling was legal, there was no Mob stigma to running a casino, only the huge prestige that got Daddy written up in the papers. The respect must have felt good, so good that he took his family to Havana for the whole season to bask in it. The millionaires started coming back: the Vanderbilts, the ice-skating star Sonja Henie, who had been the obsession of Adolf Hitler and had rejected him cold. But she liked my father, who wore a white dinner jacket and ran the places just like Humphrey Bogart did as Rick in Casablanca. Being the patrón of Oriental Park was a dry run for creating Vegas a decade hence and for turning Havana into the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, another decade after that. Meyer Lansky would soon own the Nacional, where we were staying. That was like owning the Waldorf in New York.

  In 1941, we faced the reality that medical miracles were not going to happen in Boston. We moved back to New York City, to a grand art deco high-rise at 411 West End Avenue. The feature I remember most was the sunken living room, like the dance floor on an ocean liner. I had to share a room with my brothers, who both liked to tease and torment me. But it didn’t last long. At the tender age of nine, Paul was sent away to boarding school at the New York Military Academy (NYMA), a “feeder” school for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, further up the Hudson, where Daddy’s friend, Philadelphia publisher and Racing Form owner Moe Annenberg, had sent one of his grandsons. A lot of Daddy’s friends, in the upper world as well as the underworld, were sending their sons and grandsons to military schools. That was the big thing in those days. Instead of preparing Paul for Harvard, Daddy had decided that West Point was the pinnacle of American education. It was wartime, and the military had way more prestige than big business, which had spotted its blotter in the 1929 crash.

  Moe Annenberg had just pled guilty to tax evasion to save his only son (he had seven daughters), Walter, Reagan’s future ambassador to England, who had also been indicted, from prison. NYMA would later be the alma mater of director Francis Coppola, mogul Donald Trump, and John Gotti, Jr., the son of the gangster. A number of my uncles’ sons ended up there as well. There was nothing like a military education to counter charges that a family was “un-American.”

  After Buddy was sent to a rehab school in Cockysville, Maryland, outside of Baltimore, under the care of another supposed miracle worker, Dr. Phelps, I was home alone in New York and had my parents all to myself. The problem was that they were never around. Daddy was always on the road, and Mommy was shopping on 57th Street, often with Flo Alo, Uncle Jimmy’s wife, and Aunt Esther Siegel, before she moved to Beverly Hills.

  She was shopping her lonely blues away at a store called Wilma’s, a more exclusive version of Bonwit Teller, just down the block. She bought hand-embroidered linens at an expensive place called Leron. If they had actually served breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mommy would have been there to eat it. One time her sister Sadie told Mommy to buy herself a “little” birthday present and send the bill to Sadie. Poor Sadie nearly had a heart attack when the bill came for over $200, which was a fortune for silk pajamas in the Depression. Mommy had expensive tastes; she couldn’t help herself.

  Mommy also was addicted to beauty salons. Elizabeth Arden, one of her favorites, was like something out of Marie Antoinette and the French court at Versailles. It was a long way from the men’s barbershop on the Lower East Side where she and Aunt Esther had gotten their hair cut as girls. I still can’t imagine what Mommy was doing there. Slumming, I guess. Taking a walk on the wild side. Maybe she wasn’t always so refined and proper. After all, she did marry Meyer Lansky.

  Please don’t get the idea that Mommy was selfish, sending my brothers away and shopping all the time. She shopped for me as much as she shopped for herself, buying me clothes at the Saks children’s shop, getting my hair cut at Best & Co., and spending more money on dolls at the enormous toy emporium FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue than any other customer in its history. I was the doll queen: my room was filled with at least fifty dolls. I had a whole set of Jane Austen dolls; a collection of Alice in Wonderland dolls; Red Cross war nurse dolls; Princess Elizabeth English royalty dolls; and Cinderella dolls, all from the famous doll designer Madame Alexander, who was to dolls what Chanel was to clothes.

  I thought Madame Alexander, with a fancy name like that, was royalty herself, but it turns out she was just a Jewish princess like my mother, although one who created a big business. She was born in the same part of Russia as Daddy. If I had known, I would have begged him to get out of the gambling business and into the doll business. I had dolls from other doll makers than Madame Alexander, boy dolls, too, General MacArthur dolls and Rhett Butler dolls to go with my Scarlett O’Hara dolls and a whole city of dollhouses, the nicest one fully lighted, an electric dollhouse. Plus I had enough big stuffed animals to fill the Central Park Zoo.

  Mommy bought me books, too, and lots of them. The first one I remember was “The Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants,” which she would read to me until I could read myself. Mommy was raising me as a little lady, and she wanted to be sure I behaved like one. Perfect manners were essential. As was generosity, at least from Daddy’s point of view. When Buddy was a therapy outpatient at Bellevue Hospital, Daddy thought it would be nice to give something to the kids on the children’s ward. “It’ll make them feel good, and it will make you feel even better,” he promised me.

  At first I didn’t want to give away my dolls. They were my friends, my only friends, and they were real to me. But you didn’t say no to Daddy. There were twenty-one kids, and I picked out twenty-one dolls, one for each. Daddy was right, that it was better to give than to receive. The smiles of those kids will stay with me forever. I wish I could have brought them all home to be my friends. I would have rather had real people than dolls to play with. For all the stuff I had, I couldn’t have been lonelier.

  One of the reasons Paul had been sent to military school, aside from Daddy’s West Point dreams for him and the fact that Daddy’s friends’ sons were being sent to such places, was that he was a little rambunctious. On a visit to the Citrons in New Jersey, Paul had broken some things in the tightly ordered house, a boy being a boy. That wouldn’t do. If he needed discipline, who better to instill it than a military school? Not wanting to get sent away myself, I took the
Goops to heart and memorized its illustrated etiquette rules as insurance against deportation. My little world was too good to lose.

  Nanny Minnie Mullins had stayed behind in Boston. So Mommy sent me to a French nursery school for four hours a day. Mommy wanted me to have European culture the same way Daddy wanted Paul to go to West Point and become a general. I hated French. At five proper English was hard enough. It was like being on Mars, and I didn’t last very long.

  The best part of the boys being gone, aside from having the room all to myself, was travelling whenever Daddy took Mommy with him, like the trip to California to see the Siegels. Until 1945 my childhood summers would be spent on the beach in Deal, New Jersey. Deal, and the neighboring towns of Long Branch and Elberon on the Jersey Shore were known as the Jewish Riviera, where many of the old German Jewish families who had become the pillars of Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century had imposing Victorian summer homes. From the post–Civil War days until the 1929 crash, this part of the Jersey Shore was as grand a resort as Newport, Rhode Island, frequented by seven presidents, from Ulysses S. Grant to Woodrow Wilson. There was even a Church of the Presidents in Long Branch, where all the chief executives worshipped.

  By the forties, the Jewish Riviera had become the Gangster Riviera. In addition to Daddy, many of my uncles owned or rented great estates there—Willie Moretti, Ben Siegel, Jerry Catena, Doc Stacher. These were the people who controlled the nightlife of the Garden State; it was only fitting that they summered in the state that was making them rich and not running up to Maine to cool off. They lived in homes that decades before had belonged to such important American families as the Hartfords of the A&P food stores, the Woolworths of those stores, and the Seligmans, one of the Jewish investment banking baronies of Wall Street who financed the railroads that we took out west to visit Uncle Benny Siegel.