Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  As happy as he was to have me near him in Florida, Daddy wanted to start a new life as well. Could life begin at sixty-three? He wanted to try. Besides, his beloved country wasn’t giving him much of a choice. The Daddy in Miami in the sixties was a denatured version of the old lion of New York. Instead of power dinners at Dinty Moore’s with Mayor O’Dwyer and Prime Minister Costello, he’d have lean corned beef sandwiches at the Rascal House with his buddy Hymie Siegel, a retired dress manufacturer about whom Teddy joked, “If I have to get a divorce, I’m naming him as correspondent.”

  Daddy’s main exercise was no longer in gyms but on the palm-shaded pavements, walking Tiger, Teddy’s Shih Tzu. When Tiger died, Teddy replaced him with another, named Bruiser. This one Daddy somehow grew to love, like Vince, whom he began calling “Vinnie Boy.” Daddy got Vince a good job as a manager at the posh Eden Roc Hotel. Maybe somebody in the family would be the next Conrad Hilton after all. I discovered a passion for breeding Italian greyhounds.

  Miami got too hot for Daddy. In 1970, he came home from a trip to Mexico, having been tailed the entire time by the FBI, who suspected that he was going to some international crime lord conclave in Acapulco. But Daddy was only there to lie in a winter sun that was warmer than the surprisingly chilly one that year in Florida. However, at Miami airport, agents confiscated a bottle of Donnatal, an antispasmodic Daddy had taken for his digestive troubles. His pharmacist had sold the medication to him without a new prescription. You couldn’t have too many digestive drugs when you went to Mexico in those days. I knew all about friendly druggists. There was nothing sinister there, but the agents jumped at the chance to make a federal case over it.

  “Lansky Jailed on Drug Counts” screamed one Miami headline. “Mob Boss in Drug Sting!” screamed another. Daddy’s Miami lawyer, Joe Varon, posted Daddy’s bail. When the case went to trial in June, the judge basically laughed it out of court, dismissing all charges. Still, another bad impression had been made in the press, accentuated by two damning major articles about him that had appeared in May. The first was in Reader’s Digest: “The Shocking Success Story of Public Enemy Number One.” The other was in the Atlantic Monthly: “The Little Big Man Who Laughs at the Law.” The Nixon administration had made Daddy’s being brought to justice one of its highest priorities. Nixon knew it would be one of the great publicity coups.

  Before the 1960 presidential election, Daddy had told me that Joseph Kennedy wasn’t the only person who had sought his support. He had also had a visit from Donald Nixon, Richard Nixon’s brother, seeking to get Daddy on the Republican bandwagon. Having chosen to stand with his old Prohibition mate, Daddy now faced the wrath of a vindictive Nixon, who blamed him for keeping him out of office and for the long eight years he had to wander in the political wilderness, seething for redemption.

  Nixon had another axe to grind. Biding his time until he could run again, Nixon was a big Wall Street lawyer and had gotten a taste of what New York money could buy. He learned through his best friend, Key Biscayne magnate Bebe Rebozo, that Daddy might be turning the Bahamas into the next Cuba, the new gaming paradise. Nixon wanted to get in on the ground floor and watch his stock in Meyer Lansky Resorts, or whatever the enterprise would be called, explode.

  Already famous, Nixon wanted to be rich, Kennedy rich, and he believed it took connections to a Meyer Lansky to get to that level. Because Daddy didn’t trust any politician, particularly Tricky Dick, he wouldn’t take his money. I’m not sure how much skin Daddy had in the new Bahamas game, but like the rest of the world, Nixon saw Daddy as the mastermind behind all things gaming and blamed Daddy accordingly for one more slight to his hair-trigger ego.

  Now, having such a vengeful enemy in the White House pushed Daddy out of America. Taking a cue from one of his oldest friends, Uncle Doc Stacher, who dealt with a heavy IRS pursuit by moving to Israel, Daddy, with Bruiser and Teddy in tow, flew off to Tel Aviv in July, never expecting to return. For a girl who grew up with Christmas trees and barely knew a bar mitzvah from an Irish bar, I couldn’t believe that my father was going to live in Israel, of all places. Rio was one famous place that master criminals used to escape to in those days because Brazil had no extradition treaty with America. But Israel?

  Why not Israel? Aside for his admiration for Colonel Mickey Marcus, Daddy never talked Jewish politics or Jewish identity. For all his superficial ethnic neutrality and his remarkable ability to get along with, and even make peace among, all the Italians and Irish in gangland, Daddy was in his own way a Super Jew. His financial and military support was a cornerstone of this new state. His own grandparents, who had fled to Palestine from the Russian pogroms, were buried there. He had called out Estes Kefauver for his anti-Semitism. Israel was a logical safe harbor for Meyer Lansky. Israel had something called the Law of Return, which granted automatic citizenship to any Jew who wanted to emigrate to Israel. Doc Stacher had used it to seek asylum in Israel, and now Daddy would as well.

  Not so fast! That’s what Israel said once Richard Nixon began strong-arming Prime Minister Golda Meir. Nixon wasn’t about to let Lansky pull another fast one on him. What Israel needed now, and always needed, were more weapons. Daddy had discovered in 1948 that weapons were the way into the heart of Israel. In 1970, the weapons that Israel wanted were fighter planes, and Nixon held that trump card in his presidential hand. Want our jets? Give us Lansky!

  Daddy arrived with his wife and his dog in the Holy Land in July 1970. He spent the next two years and an endless fortune in legal fees trying to assert what seemed like his God-given right to live in the land where his oppressed Jewish forebears were interred. An amendment to the Law of Return stated that Israel could exclude a Jew “with a criminal past likely to endanger public welfare.” Daddy had that one minor gambling conviction in Saratoga, but he would be hard-pressed to deny that his past was full of criminals. His whole life was one criminal past. On the other hand, Doc Stacher’s past was far worse, and they let him in.

  What Doc Stacher did not have was Richard Nixon leaning on Golda Meir. Having grown up in Milwaukee on the eve of Prohibition, Meir had an American’s knee-jerk revulsion to the notions “Mafia” and “gangsters.” Meyer Lansky sounded bad enough. She did not want Israel to be flooded with his associates and an army of Italian wiseguys at the Wailing Wall. She was concerned about the image of her country and about the future goodwill of America’s president, which would have turned to ill will had she said “welcome” to Daddy.

  I visited Israel once with Gary while Daddy was there, in the summer of 1971. Vince stayed home. Because I had had no Jewish upbringing, much of Israel was lost on me. On the surface, the country seemed like Florida, hot and full of Jews, but with mountains and history. Jerusalem was ancient, but Tel Aviv was quite similar to Miami, a very twentieth-century white deco city on the beach.

  Despite all the efforts of this master string puller, nothing Daddy could do would soothe the hard hoodlum-fearing heart of Israel’s supreme court, which declared him non grata in what he thought was his own country. Still, not about to go back to America and, if Nixon had his way, spend the rest of his life behind bars, Daddy made a deal to go to Paraguay, which was notorious for welcoming fleeing Nazi war criminals. After he left Israel, tailed by American agents, he spent close to two days on jets, zigzagging around the world, looking for refuge. I think of the Rolling Stones’ song Gimme Shelter.

  Daddy’s odyssey took him from Tel Aviv to Zurich to Rio to Buenos Aires and finally to Asunción, Paraguay, where he had reputedly bribed the corrupt Stroessner dictatorship with millions of dollars to take him in. But the country that had offered its hospitality to the likes of Joseph Mengele and Martin Bormann out of nowhere got religion and rejected Daddy at the airport as an “undesirable.” With a suitcase of money, and accompanied by only one Israeli advance man/bodyguard, Daddy made last-ditch tries in Lima and Panama City before giving up the ghost. Where was George Wood to fix things when he needed him?

  Daddy’s heart w
as doing flips. His stomach spasms were excruciating. It was amazing he survived the airborne ordeal at all. In the fusillade of a thousand news cameras, he arrived at Miami airport where an ambulance was waiting to take him straight to the hospital. It was preferable to a squad car to jail, though this was a homecoming Daddy never expected to have. Miami’s Mt. Sinai Hospital was as close to Mt. Sinai and the promised land as Daddy was going to get in this lifetime. That promised land was, like Nixon’s America, the land of broken promises.

  Remarkably enough, Meyer Lansky, and not Richard Nixon, was the last man standing. While Nixon imploded in Watergate, Daddy was able to defeat, one by one, the barrage of criminal actions the Nixonians launched at him, mostly variations on the theme of contempt of court and tax evasion. One of the government’s biggest cases went up in smoke after the key witness, a Boston hoodlum named Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa testified that he was a bag man for Daddy. He described his job collecting the gambling debts of American tourists in Lansky-controlled London casinos, like the Colony, which had George Raft as its front man.

  Teresa claimed that he had flown from London to Miami to deliver the undeclared loot to Daddy in person. The problem was that on the days that Teresa specified, Daddy was in a Boston hospital, under the care of the august Dr. Seymour Gray. Dr. Gray testified on Daddy’s behalf. Guess who the jury believed, Fat Vinnie or Dr. Gray? I had never seen Daddy happier than he was the day he walked out of that courtroom in July 1973, free and vindicated. He was seventy-one. He looked great, with hardly a gray hair, notwithstanding the endless harassments of Richard Nixon.

  Daddy would live another decade. The only jail he would ever see was the prison of his own ill health. His next ordeal, in 1976, was heart bypass surgery, which was much riskier then than it is now, especially at his age. Again, Daddy was a cat with more than nine lives. After his long recovery, we began planning a big seventy-fifth birthday celebration for July 4, 1977. Paul, who was now divorced and working as a high-level American military adviser, often in the Far East, decided to join the festivities. After years of not speaking to me, he had seen I was on the straight and narrow path at long last. He forgave me for all my trespasses, and that meant everything to me. But the celebration we planned for Daddy got derailed when we had our immediate family’s first murder.

  Teddy had a son from her first marriage, Richard Schwartz, whom Daddy had set up in the restaurant business in Miami. Richard, then forty-eight, was Buddy’s age and a needed companion. Daddy did everything he could for him, loyally dining at Richard’s place, The Inside, once a week, often with his famous friends. Big names, even if they were crime names, were good for business. I’m not sure if it was symbolic, but Daddy always sat outside at The Inside.

  One night at The Forge, a Miami steak house that was once Al Capone’s favorite speakeasy, Richard got into a fight with a young golf pro named Craig Teriaca over a ten-dollar bill someone had left at the bar. Richard, who always carried a gun, shot and killed the man point blank. He killed the wrong man. Teriaca’s father was a big local bookmaker and a made man in the Mafia. The Miami press blew the matter up into a Jews-versus-Italians gang war. Footing the legal costs of Richard’s criminal defense, Daddy found his name was all over the front pages again: “Meyer Lansky’s Killer Son.” Richard was forever using the L-word, dropping Daddy’s name, creating the illusion of blood ties. Blood was the word. While awaiting trial, Richard was getting into his big Cadillac when someone with a sawed-off shotgun blasted a huge hole through the driver’s side window, killing Richard instantly. No witnesses came forward. Another Lansky-related murder was never solved.

  Buddy was getting sadder and sadder. He’d gotten divorced, losing Annette and his one chance of normalcy. He was living and working the switchboard in the Hawaiian Isle Motel, which belonged to Daddy’s developer friends, the Bloom brothers. Lapsing back into gambling, he had cashed in an insurance policy worth tens of thousands, bet it and lost it. Not only loan sharks, but the sharks of the IRS, who had a unique sense of smell for Lansky blood, had come after him. Overwhelmed, and deeply ashamed of letting Daddy down once again, Buddy took an overdose of sleeping pills. He managed to survive. He had those Lansky cat lives as well.

  Everyone’s luck has to run out at some point. Daddy’s did. In the spring of 1980 he began coughing up blood. He flew to Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic. He came back and told us he was fine. He was lying. After a lifetime of Benson and Hedges, he had lung cancer. He had several operations, but the cancer was more tenacious than Richard Nixon. In 1981 his beloved Bruiser died and was buried besides Teddy’s beloved Tiger in Miami’s Pet Heaven cemetery. Bruiser became a hot paparazzi item on his walks with Daddy, and the press used him as a symbol of how the mighty had fallen.

  Bruiser’s death seemed to sap Daddy of his will to go on. One night at dinner with Vince and me in the fall of 1982, he mentioned, casually in passing, “I only have a few more months.” It was as if he were talking about the weather. There was no fear, no self-pity. Just the facts of life and death. Always game for a fight, Daddy began outpatient radiation treatments in Miami. They made things worse, preventing him from swallowing. The last food I remember him enjoying was a box of pears from Harry & David’s Fruit of the Month Club. He loved their sweetness.

  Then it got worse. In late 1982 Daddy went back into Mt. Sinai Hospital for the last time. I went every day. I had a hard time handling how tiny, frail, and weak my great hero had become. Daddy could barely speak. I tried to move him in the bed, trying to make him as comfortable as a man could be all trussed up with tubes and wires, a dying puppet dancing to the dirge of the doctors. His feet were like ice. I put two pairs of wool socks on them to keep him warm. He conducted no nostalgia sessions on his life. He just stared at me with longing in his eyes. I hated sharing his last days with Teddy. Maybe he did as well. Once when Teddy started to go out for a break, saying, “Will you be all right without me?” Daddy snapped back and out of his fog, “As long as my beautiful daughter is here. Go!”

  Daddy’s colleague Benny Sigelbaum was at Mt. Sinai at the same time. He told us how he could hear Daddy’s blood-curdling screams of pain down the corridor. I couldn’t imagine it. Daddy was the quietest, most controlled man who ever lived. Nothing could make him scream. Whatever they were doing had to be beyond torture. I wanted it to end. Finally it did. On January 15, 1983, Daddy’s last words to me were the simplest. “I love you.”

  At the funeral home I viewed Daddy in his casket. Teddy had dressed him. Terribly. The impeccable dresser had a stain on his tie. I also saw that she had not put on shoes and socks. His feet were as ice cold as they had been in the hospital. “Who’s gonna look?” she said. I couldn’t stand that. The bravest man in the world could not go out with cold feet. Vince went home to get a new tie, a new suit, the best shoes and socks in Daddy’s vast collection. Daddy always wanted to look his best. Now Vince and I saw to that.

  The burial was at Mt. Nebo Cemetery in Miami. There were probably ten times as many journalists and FBI agents at the burial than the forty or so mourners. Paul had flown in from Japan to see Daddy, but had gone home just before he died. Jewish burials are so fast, there was no time for Daddy’s pride and joy to come back and pay further last respects. The group of friends numbered a few of Daddy’s fellow “organized crime” suspects, Nig Rosen from Philadelphia, Niggy and Ida Devine from Las Vegas, the sunshine boys, the ones with the tans. Benny Sigelbaum got out of his Mt. Sinai sickbed to say goodbye.

  But the “big guys” who were still alive, like Daddy’s dearest pal, Jimmy Blue Eyes, followed tradition and did not show, even though Uncle Jimmy was right there in Miami. Charley Luciano was long gone, having died of a heart attack at the Naples airport in 1962. Frank Costello died in 1973, also of a heart attack, at the Majestic. Daddy didn’t go to either of their funerals. Daddy probably would have skipped Uncle Jimmy’s last rites if he had the chance. Call it the denial of death.

  Mommy died in New York, a year late
r. We brought her body down to Mt. Nebo, and buried her just one hundred yards or so from the man she loved and whom she could never get over. Buddy died in 1989. He was buried right next to Daddy. When Teddy passed away in 1996, she ended up in the Sigelbaum plot. She had an overwhelming phobia about being buried, and this was the only available spot for an above-ground mausoleum. Only after Teddy died did we install Daddy’s rose-colored marble headstone, which read simply “LANSKY.”

  The big question was the one the family never answered. Where was the money? Forbes had estimated that Daddy was worth three hundred million dollars. How could it have possibly disappeared? There was very little money in the will, barely enough to keep Buddy going as long as he did. Vince had gotten a new job through Daddy, in the restaurant supplies business. Daddy loved those restaurants, and the restaurants loved him. Vince was doing fine. His whole thing was never, ever to ask Daddy for money.

  Daddy had told us that if we ever needed anything, just go see Uncle Jack. With all the Nixon lawsuits threatening to take everything he had, Daddy had transferred that everything to his low-profile younger brother, who, while not the financial wizard Daddy was, had learned quite a bit from the master about moving money around. Where he moved it to, we didn’t know. Switzerland? The Bahamas? Buried in some mountains like in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? In the hands of some mystery uncle? It could have been anywhere. But it had to be somewhere. I pushed for it, for Gary, for D.J., whose medical maintenance was enormously expensive. Daddy wanted to care for him the way he cared for Buddy. So I dragged Vince to do the unmentionable: Ask Uncle Jack where the treasure was.

  Uncle Jack went crazy at the mere question of Daddy’s wealth. “I’m broke!” he screamed. “Broke! I have now idea what you’re talking about. Don’t do this to me. I have enough trouble with Teddy. She’s here every day hocking me for money.”