Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  I came far closer to fainting than I had when Gabby held my hand to teach me how to use chopsticks. “Sandi,” Gabby said, trying to be familiar and formal at the same time. “Are you okay?”

  “No. Okay? Are you kidding?” I was flabbergasted. “I thought you were . . . my . . .” I couldn’t get out the phrase.

  “We’d like you to help us,” Gabby said “We’d like you to help your country.”

  “Your country,” I wanted to snap back, but I was way too frightened. I had never had a run-in with the law before. The closest I had come was getting a speeding ticket in Miami, coming home at dawn very drunk the previous winter. I should have lost my license, on the spot. When the cop asked for my license and saw my name, he tore the ticket up. We ended up having a pancake breakfast together. He asked me out, but I was leaving too soon. No such luck this time. These guys meant business.

  Gabby laid out what they were there for. The FBI, together with the IRS, was conducting an investigation into “skimming” in the Las Vegas casinos, whereby a huge amount of the take was not accounted for but “skimmed” off in cash, like the cream on top of milk, and never declared. That skim was where organized crime made its fortune, tax free. “I haven’t been to Las Vegas since my honeymoon in 1954,” I said, recalling but never mentioning the endless fat envelopes Marvin and I collected from my uncles. I guess that was the “skim.”

  “It’s not you. It’s your father,” Gabby came right to the point.

  “I don’t think Daddy goes to Las Vegas anymore. He’s been in Miami, Havana . . .”

  “He doesn’t have to be there,” Gabby said. “Your father is a brilliant man.”

  Gee. Thanks for the compliment. “Daddy has been sick,” I almost pleaded with them. “He almost died. He’s been in and out of hospitals.”

  “We’re not after your father, Miss Lansky,” the nerd interrupted me with what surely was one of the biggest lies I had ever heard. We’re looking into his associates, who do go to Las Vegas, whom you may know.” The accountant pulled a thick notebook out of his briefcase and began reading names. “Benjamin Sigelbaum, Edward Levinson, Irving Devine, Jack Entratter, Vincent Alo, Jacob Lansky . . .” Ah, Uncle Jack. Was that what they were up to? Gabby knew I was on the outs with Jack and Anna over the wedding. Did they think a social slight would cause me to rat out my family?

  Gabby broke in. “Sandi. I know these are your family, friends of your family. But do you really think they care that much about you? That they have your interests in mind? Just look at the facts . . .” I guess they did expect me to rat them out. People must have turned informants for less. “If your dad is innocent, if he’s not involved, you can help him . . .” By informing on everyone else, I thought to myself. Nice girl. Family girl.

  I thought about the names on the list. Of course I knew them. With so many of Daddy’s old friends and allies either murdered, dying, or deported, this was the new Lansky generation. Bennie Sigelbaum, a Miami hardware magnate, was no Bennie Siegel in looks. But he had a huge personality, was a great storyteller, and Daddy liked him. Eddie Levinson, who ran the Fremont casino hotel in downtown Las Vegas, had worked for Daddy in Havana. Irving Devine, another “Niggy” because of his tan, had a huge meat company that supplied all Daddy’s hotels. Niggy’s wife, Ida, was supposedly the successor to Virginia Hill, the mob moll who carried fortunes in the linings of her many mink coats. The tall, courtly, cigar-smoking Jack Entratter was like a godfather to me. He used to run the Copa; now he had been sent to Las Vegas to run the Sands, which he had put on the map as the home of the Rat Pack. Dean Martin loved him.

  All of these people had been kind to me. All had amazing stories, “true crime” stories that may have appealed to Buddy. But I hadn’t had the slightest interest. Were they skimming? What difference did it make to me, or to anyone except these creeps from the FBI? Who were they hurting? J. Edgar Hoover, whom Daddy had told me was one the biggest gamblers of them all? I had my own true crime stories, my drugs and how to get them. That was the only crime I was obsessed with. “I’ve heard of them,” was all I would give Gabby.

  “You don’t know them?” he looked at me skeptically.

  “Maybe. Maybe I met them. I’ve met so many . . . I don’t remember.”

  All I was willing to give these guys was coffee. After an hour or so, they decided to leave. I knew they’d be back. I had never been so hurt. Gabby could see it. He let his partner go ahead. He said he’d meet him downstairs in a minute.

  “I thought we were . . . friends,” I told him. Tears came to my eyes. I had tried to be strong. I couldn’t hold it anymore.

  “We are,” Gabby said.

  “This was all a trick, a set-up. Those meals, the times we had . . .”

  Suddenly he took my hands. He squeezed them as if he meant it. “Believe me. I do care about you. This is my job.”

  “You’re a spy. An undercover spy. How could you?” I cried.

  “I liked you the minute I saw you at the Thayer. I liked you the minute I saw you at the Harwyn. I like you every time I see you. I like you now.”

  “I hate you. Get out of here!” I opened the door to the hallway. He let go of my hand, worried that someone might see him. He had used me, yet something about him remained conflicted. I sensed there was some altar boy left within him.

  I was a wreck. I couldn’t tell anyone what happened. I thought about telling Daddy, but I was scared. He would have blamed me. Why did you get involved with this spy to begin with? I couldn’t explain. There would have been no use trying. A week later, Gabby surprised me with a call. I worried the phone was tapped. He asked me to meet him, just to talk, and not for the FBI, not for the record, but about us. I had liked him so much, I couldn’t let it go, a moth to his very dangerous flame.

  I had Gabby meet me at Gitlitz, a decrepit deli on Broadway around the corner from me. Gitlitz was to meat what Steinberg’s was to dairy, somewhere all-American people like Edward Patrick Hartnett would never, ever go. Gitlitz was very fluorescent, the least flattering light in New York, filled, like Steinberg’s, with aging European émigrés and Holocaust survivors. In lesser clothes, Daddy could have fit right in. I wanted to take Gabby out of his element, make him look at these poor people, who the Lanskys and my uncles would have been just like if they hadn’t been successful, and make him feel guilty for picking on the old and infirm.

  Without his partner, Gabby was a different person, the person before, the person I was falling in love with. With no idea what to order in this alien environment, he had nothing but a cup of tea. He was all remorse, totally conflicted. He told me how he had grown up dirt poor, how he was in debt to the FBI, who had sent him to language school, to law school. West Point was a free ride as well. He genuinely loved his country for giving him a chance to make something of himself.

  “My father loves his country, too. As much as you do,” I said, proudly enumerating how he had attacked the Brownshirts in Yorkville, how he had saved the docks from the Nazis during the war.

  Gabby knew all that. He knew more about my family than I did, a lot more, though he had never met anyone but me and had only seen Paul. However, he had been drilled in J. Edgar Hoover’s party line, that Daddy was the wizard of American crime. “Is that the right way to thank your country?” Gabby asked.

  “Who did he hurt?” I asked “Who?”

  “Bugsy Siegel, Willie Moretti, Albert Anastasia, Longy Zwillman, Augie Pisano,” Gabby reeled off the names in a way that left me reeling as well.

  “These were his best friends. You’re crazy. Where do you get this?”

  “There but for the grace of God,” Gabby said, looking around at the old Jewish men shuffling in and out, eating their pastrami sandwiches as if they might be their last supper. Gabby cited chapter and verse on how Daddy may have been involved in the hits on my uncles. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he may have given the nod, if only to stay alive himself, to keep his power. Like a thoughtful teacher, like Daddy could be when he had
the time, Gabby outlined a pitched battle going on in the “LCN,” La Cosa Nostra, which was the official name the FBI was giving to what the public was calling the Mafia. Daddy was right in the middle of it, between Frank Costello on one side and Vito Genovese on the other. The winner was a sly fox named Carlo Gambino, who got Costello to retire and sent Genovese to prison for life. Meyer Lansky, a brilliant logical Jew caught between two crazy mobs of Italians, had to do what he had to do in order to survive, even if that meant that his dearest friends did not survive.

  “Sauve qui peut.” Gabby summed it all up in the French expression that he may have learned in law school, but that I had never learned at Calhoun. “Every man for himself.” All he was doing, he said, was accepting the hard reality of Daddy’s life. “It doesn’t have to be your reality,” he told me. I didn’t believe him anymore than I believed those awful books during the Kefauver Hearings or the vicious broadcasts of Robert Montgomery. But he made the case not like a rabble-rousing demagogue but rather like a calm lawyer—facts, facts, facts.

  “What do you really have against my father?” I tried to get to the heart of the matter.

  “Nothing personal,” Gabby said. “He works for bad people.”

  “So do lawyers,” I defended my father. “You’re a lawyer. If lawyers can give bad people their day in court, why can’t my father give them their day at the bank?”

  “This is more of a conspiracy, but . . . okay . . . fair question,” the lawyer conceded.

  “If you knew something about your father, something . . . something bad,” I asked Gabby. “Would you tell it . . . to someone . . . like yourself? Would you?”

  He thought for a long time. “Probably not.” He turned his eyes downward, as if in shame.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked him.

  “Forgive me. See me again.”

  I left Gabby and Gitlitz more mixed up than ever. I wandered in a daze up Broadway. I staggered past the happy crowds coming out of Zabar’s, their shopping bags bursting with delicacies. My appetite was gone forever. I could see how conflicted Gabby was, which made me all the more conflicted. I think he did like me, but how in the world could the daughter of a crime lord fall in love with the figurative son of J. Edgar Hoover? It was crazier than Romeo and Juliet.

  The whole situation reminded me of the old Hitchcock thriller Notorious, which I liked to watch when it came on the late show. In the movie Ingrid Bergman plays a girl with a wild past and an addiction to alcohol and men. I could relate. Her father has just been convicted of being a Nazi spy and has committed suicide in prison. Cary Grant plays an undercover American agent who seduces Bergman and convinces her to go to Rio and seduce and marry a powerful Nazi, played by Claude Rains, in order to infiltrate the Nazi cell for Cary Grant, and for America. Does Grant love her or is he using her? With those stars, you know how it ends. Still, the parallels to me were obvious, though in the movie, Bergman has a hot affair with Cary Grant, as opposed to my innocent hand holding with Gabby.

  A year or so later there was a hit song on the radio called “Mixed-Up, Shook-Up Girl.” Was that ever me right now. I had no choice. Blood was thicker than the gin at the Harwyn Club. If I had one real friend in the world, it was Daddy. Father knows best. So I convinced myself to let Daddy go crazy. It was like turbulence on a plane ride. It would eventually end. I knew that, no matter what, Daddy would forgive me.

  I just had to find him in New York, which was less and less likely. I couldn’t call. He had given up his suite at the Warwick when he found that it had been bugged. We could go for a walk, but I wanted to be in a public space, like a restaurant, for when he hit the roof at the mess I had gotten us into. He could only get so mad in a restaurant. Dinty Moore’s, the old reliable, would be the place. So I waited until he came to the city, after one of his increasingly frequent visits to Boston to see his famous gastroenterologist, Seymour Gray.

  I was so nervous, I can’t really recall how I broke the news to him, whether it was over the gefilte fish or the lamb chops, or at the end, with the apple pie. “Daddy. I’ve been seeing somebody.”

  “Really? Is he nice? Is he a regular guy?” That was code for “unlike Marvin.”

  “He went to West Point.”

  Daddy perked up. “Paul introduced you to someone?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You should make up.” He suggested without real hope.

  “I met him all by myself.”

  “Is he in the service?”

  “So to speak,” I hedged. “The secret service.” Daddy gave me a puzzled look. “Daddy, I didn’t know it, but he turned out to be in the FBI.”

  Daddy held his fork in midair as if he had been hit by lightning. For a second, I thought he had had a heart attack. But Daddy was as understanding as he was tough. To begin with, he refused to believe that any West Point man could be all bad. What a loyal alumnus he would have made! That got me off the hook for falling for Gabby. Second, my resourceful father, the master of playing all the angles, came up with his usual brainstorm. “Let’s turn a negative into a positive. We’ve got a man inside. Let’s use him.”

  The plan was to feed Gabby and the FBI disinformation to send them on wild goose chases. He gave me a list of names to drop, names and places, I can’t remember today and could barely remember then. The idea was to tantalize the FBI with the notion of laundered gambling money, in Switzerland, in Singapore, in Brazil, in the Bahamas, in the Cayman Islands. Those names of questionable bankers and questionable banks (Daddy was an encyclopedia of world banking) would give the FBI and the IRS enough false leads “to keep them off my back until I rest in peace.”

  The idea of Daddy’s mortality, even in slight jest, chilled me, when combined with how old he seemed to have gotten. However, his spirit and his “you can’t touch me” defiance was as young as ever. And what about all the awful things, the blood on his hands, the triggers pulled by others, that Gabby had implied? Daddy simply shook his head. For the last twenty years he had been a target for the FBI and the IRS, tapped, bugged, photographed, spied on, audited, reaudited, arrested, prosecuted, nearly deported, and, aside from the little plea bargain in Ballston Spa over the card games that politicians play, Daddy was as clean as a West Point honor guard.

  “If I had done something, darling, they would’ve gotten me, long, long ago,” he said, almost bored by the endless pursuit. “Flat feet,” he sighed, using his old Lower East Side slang for a lowly beat cop to dismiss everyone from Gabby to Kefauver to Hoover to the Supreme Court, none of whom had been able to “get” him. By the time Daddy and I left Dinty Moore’s to a ballet of bows and scrapes reserved for the true bosses of the town, I knew where I had to plight my troth. My heart belonged to Daddy. The difference between Notorious and real life was that Claude Rains was an evil Nazi; Meyer Lansky was a courageous Jew. The Cary Grant in my story turned out not to be Edward Patrick Hartnett, but my own father.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I MARRIED A GANGSTER

  My romance with Gabby Hartnett never got back on track, if it had ever been on track to begin with. We had a few more dinners, and numerous meetings that included his “accountant” as well as other FBI agents. Coached by my father, I shared vague recollections of hotel and casino operators and assorted fellow travellers that may have made them think they had struck some sort of mother lode. The bigger the names I dropped, names like Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, the producer Ray Stark in Hollywood, the banker Charles Allen in New York, the political boss Stafford Sands in the Bahamas, the more the FBI ears would prick up, like bulldogs to a scent.

  All I would say, basically, was that I had heard these names mentioned, or that there were supposed to be meetings, or there were phone messages. It was easy for me to play dumb, because I didn’t really know anything anyway. However, the FBI assumed, that as the daughter of the mastermind, I was leading them into a vast global conspiracy. Was its purpose world domination, or merely tax evasion? I had no idea. Their pa
ydirt was fool’s gold.

  Gabby remained the all-American boy that a normal girl should have married. I was not a normal girl. Besides, I could never really trust him, and I loved my father too much. Meanwhile, I met and fell for a guy who to Daddy may have been even worse for me than an FBI undercover agent—a real gangster. My father had wanted his children to have a different, better, safer life than his own. Paul had done it. Buddy had not, nor had I. I seemed to come close, but no cigar. First I married a rich handsome guy. He turned out to be gay. Then I had found a West Point guy, but he was a secret Fed. Now I found a nice guy, but he was from a major Mafia family. Poor Daddy. He couldn’t win.

  I first met Vince Lombardo on a blind date, but not with him. My date was a handsome aspiring actor named Nick, who actually was something of a gigolo. He had been the kept man of the actress-dancer Eleanor Powell, who had lit up the screen with Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940. She had married the actor Glenn Ford, but she had a thing for young studs, and Nick was that. Nick had worked as a bouncer at the Copa, as had Vince, who had “graduated” to managing a restaurant in Greenwich Village, a gay hangout called the Tropical Bar, on Eighth Street. Because Nick was always flat broke, he charmed his buddy Vince to “comp” his date meal with me.

  Expecting someplace romantic, I had gotten all glamored up in a fancy new silk dress. I was ready for El Morocco. What I got was El Homo. The front was all lesbians. The back was all fairies. I was highly insulted. After Marvin, I had developed a knee-jerk reaction to gay dives, and this was a prime one. I left Nick at the table and holed up in the phone booth, calling friends to find something else to do. Vince came to the booth, knocked on the glass door. He was holding a sizzling platter of steak. He was also very handsome, with deep blue eyes and sandy hair. He could have doubled for Paul Newman as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. “You’re gonna miss the best steaks in New York,” he said with a mesmerizing smile.