chapter 3
EL JUDIO MARAVILLOSO (THE MARVELOUS JEW)
IN THE LONG HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN UNDERWORLD, there had never been anyone quite like little Maier Suchowljansky. He was a Jew surrounded by Italians, an interloper in the House of Rome. Although he partnered with some of the most murderous individuals in the history of organized crime, he is not known to have killed anyone with his own hands, and he achieved what was an uncommon distinction for gangsters of his vintage: he lived into his golden years and died of old age.
Born in 1902 in Grodno at a time when Poland was occupied by czarist Russia, he was ten years old when his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews and headed for New York City. There were tens of thousands of immigrant Jewish families in the big city, and the Suchowljanskys were just one of them. It was in America that the family name was changed to Lansky. Meyer, three years older than his brother Jake, was an exemplary student. He loved arithmetic, geography, and science, and he always toed the line in the classroom. “Our teachers were strict,” he remembered years later. “They didn’t tolerate nonsense. I loved school.”
All his life, Lansky professed to have a great appreciation for formal learning. He claimed that he had been taught to recite the Gettysburg Address by memory and had learned “history from Roman to American.” He also studied and memorized Shakespeare, especially The Merchant of Venice. Lansky’s lifelong fascination with the play might have had something to do with the character of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who would have his “pound of flesh.” In the American underworld, the term shylock—derived from The Merchant of Venice—was interchangeable with loanshark, a person who lends money at usurious rates. In his lifetime, Lansky would come to know and do business with many shylocks. For a lover of Shakespeare, the irony was inescapable.
The classroom was a sacred place to Lansky, but life outside the classroom had a way of rearranging a kid’s priorities. Like many in the neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, and later the Lower East Side, where the Lanskys lived in a crowded tenement, life was a struggle. Throughout his existence, Lansky remembered the day when his father learned that his parents, who he believed were wealthy, had died and left nothing behind. “This disappointment on top of our present poverty was a terrible blow,” recalled Lansky. His father went into a state of depression from which he never recovered.
On the Lower East Side, poverty meant a lack of food and clothing. It meant freezing cold winters with no heat, and stifling, humid summers surrounded by concrete, garbage, and open sewers. Disease, especially tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments, was common. At night, rats the size of small dogs scurried through the streets while people rummaged in garbage bins for something to eat. The Lanskys were not among the poorest of the poor; every Sabbath they gathered together and ate cholent, a traditional meal of meat and potato stew. But the penny-pinching and anxiety over lack of money for rent, electricity, and running water were enough to crush the hardiest of pilgrims.
Little Meyer felt as though he had lost his father to the harsh realities of life, and he resolved never to let poverty overtake him. “Even as a little boy I remember swearing to myself that when I grew up, I’d be very rich,” he said years later.
His last level of formal education was the eighth grade. The desire to create financial opportunities for himself and his family drove the boy out of the classroom he loved and into the streets of the Lower East Side. At the time, the neighborhood was teeming with immigrants living beside and on top of one another in what was the most densely populated piece of real estate in the United States.
In the streets, a kid had to be smart or tough, preferably both. Lansky was small for his age—“skinny as a matchstick,” according to one neighborhood friend—but he knew that in the world beyond school, sooner or later a boy had to stand up and show what he was made of. For Meyer, that day came when he was walking home with a plate of food for his family and was stopped by a gang of Irish hooligans. One of them pulled a knife and demanded that Lansky take down his pants so they could see if he was circumcised. Acting on instinct, Lansky smashed the plate of food into the face of the gang’s leader. He was set upon by the gang and beaten badly, but he defended himself valiantly. Lansky’s willingness to show toughness on this and other occasions would eventually convince the Irish and Italian hoodlums in his neighborhood that he was no pushover.
Soon the little Jewish kid would come to be known more for his cunning than his physical fortitude. The activity that would stimulate Meyer’s imagination and eventually prove to be his salvation was gambling.
From the beginning, Lansky understood that games of chance hit some men where they could not breathe. “Gambling pulls at the core of a man,” he once famously uttered. Most of his life would be spent profiting from the truth of this maxim. It started on Delancey Street with crap games, which Meyer organized and controlled. The rules of the jungle were such that a percentage of all proceeds went to the neighborhood bosses—mostly Italians, and some Jews. The Irish were represented by the local cops, who also got their cut. Among the most prominent of underworld financiers was a prince among men who would become perhaps the only mentor Meyer Lansky ever had.
Arnold Rothstein was a Jew, like Lansky. He had established his reputation in and around the Lower East Side, where he seemed to be politically connected as well as popular among the gamblers and the kibitzers. He dressed like a star in custom-made wool suits, with monogrammed cuff links, polka-dot bow ties, shiny spats, and a felt fedora. Although Rothstein first made a name for himself in the political clubhouses and dance halls along the Bowery, he soon took his act uptown to Broadway. It was there that he cultivated a relationship with young Meyer Lansky and became the inspiration for a criminal career that would reach across the United States and all the way to Cuba.
Rothstein was smart, and he was smooth. He was variously known as “the Man Uptown,” “the Brain,” and “the Big Bankroll.” The newspapers described him as “a sportsman,” “a gambler,” and “the man who fixed the 1919 World Series,” but he was much more than that. A bootlegger, labor racketeer, shylock, and dope peddler, Rothstein virtually invented the process by which illegal profits found their way back into the system to generate more illegal profits. He was the underworld’s central banking system, a man who financed the careers of numerous gangsters and received a return on investment ranging from 75 to 90 percent. He was a stock swindler and scam artist at the highest levels, but he was never convicted of committing a single crime.
Not only that, but Rothstein was a mythmaker. He understood the allure of the dark side for the average schnook. Having come from modest means on the Lower East Side, he knew that part of making the crime world irresistible—an arena to which young men would be drawn like moths to a flame—involved creating an environment, part reality, part fiction, that everyone wanted to be in. Rothstein hung out at Lindy’s Restaurant in Times Square and schmoozed with reporters, song-and-dance men, and famous athletes. He knew the writer Damon Runyon and became the basis for the character Nathan Detroit in the Runyon-inspired Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls. F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have used Rothstein as the basis for Meyer Wolfsheim, the sleek gangster immortalized in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Rothstein was conversant with both gutter life and café society. He fostered the illusion that all of these universes—crime, entertainment, and a celebrity-filled nightlife—were part and parcel of the American underworld.
According to Lansky, he and Rothstein met initially at a bar mitzvah in Brooklyn. The attraction was instantaneous. The young aspiring bootlegger told the older, more experienced racketeer that he admired the way he had penetrated high society and operated as an equal among the city’s most powerful businessmen and politicians. Rothstein listened, and in a notepad he wrote, “Meyer Lansky.” He invited the young kid to dinner and told him that in Lansky’s youthful ambition and “hunger” he saw something of himself. They became like father and son. Years later, when describ
ing why Rothstein had become such an inspiration to him, Lansky could have been talking about himself:
Like me he was a gambler from the cradle. It was in the blood with both of us. Rothstein seems to have had a gift with figures too, and he used to practice by asking his friends to fire off random numbers at him. He would multiply, divide, add, or subtract these numbers and produce the answers instantaneously. He had an ice-cold nerve when playing for the highest stakes; with hundreds of thousands of dollars at risk, he never lost his head.
From Rothstein, Lansky learned about diversification, the channeling of criminal proceeds into a vast array of rackets. Lansky would put this lesson into practice by parlaying his bootlegging money into the garment trade, jukeboxes, molasses, labor racketeering, real estate, and, most especially, every facet of the casino-gambling business. The most important lesson Lansky learned from the Brain, however, was the importance of bribing and cultivating powerful politicians. With Rothstein, it had been his financial investment in Tammany Hall, the political organization that spawned the mobster-friendly New York mayor Jimmy Walker. With Lansky, it would be his bribing and betting on Fulgencio Batista.
On November 4, 1928, Rothstein was found shot in the stomach following a high-stakes card game at the Park Central Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He died in a hospital shortly thereafter. Lansky was just twenty-six at the time; he had years to absorb the lessons learned from the Big Bankroll. For one thing, although he would always be a gambler, following Rothstein’s death Meyer stopped being a bettor. He was rarely seen sitting in on a game of cards, spinning a wheel, or tossing dice. He was not going to be shot down like a dog following a high-stakes game like his mentor.
Another skill that Lansky would inherit, and in time further perfect, was Rothstein’s criminal vision. The Man Uptown had been the most grandiose criminal financier of his day, but his reach did not stretch much beyond New York City. Meyer Lansky had bigger fish to fry.
IN LATE 1947 and on into 1948, in the wake of Lucky Luciano’s highly publicized deportation from Cuba, Lansky did what he had always done following a major crisis: he retrenched and focused on rackets that were currently generating income. Under the tutelage of his brother Jake, Lansky’s casinos in South Florida were doing better than ever. In Broward County, just across the city line from Miami Beach, Lansky fine-tuned the method by which he would later become known in Havana. In some quarters it was referred to as “the fix,” in others “the share-out”: a series of payoffs to high-ranking law enforcement officials and selected government legislators that made it possible for Lansky and his people to operate without undue harassment.
In Broward County, the fix was in. Each night, the Lansky brothers sat down in the counting room in one of three carpet joints—the Colonial Inn, the Plantation, and Club Bohème—and personally counted “the drop,” i.e., that night’s winnings, until they exceeded “the handle,” the amount of cash necessary to meet daily expenses. Anything over the handle went into the pockets of Lansky and his partners, and much of that was used to finance the fix.
Lansky’s casinos in South Florida were highly profitable. In the postwar years of the late 1940s, they became a major draw for the local elite and were also popular venues for top entertainers, singers and stand-up comedians alike. Lansky’s notoriety grew along with his bank account. In later years, one biographer would place his annual earnings from the Colonial Inn alone at one to three million dollars. But the money from his Broward County carpet joints was not enough to satisfy Lansky. According to Bernard Frank, the local Miami Beach attorney who knew Lansky during these years, “He seemed restless.”
Each night, with his brother, Lansky counted the stacks of cash and made the necessary payoffs, all the while keeping one eye on his dream for the future—Havana—just a stone’s throw across the Straits of Florida on the northwestern shore of Cuba.
If Lansky was restless, it might have had as much to do with loneliness as anything else. His divorce had left him in a mood of self-recrimination. “Maybe it was my fault,” he told his oldest son, Buddy, after his marriage fell apart.
Buddy was another problem. Handicapped from birth with what would later be diagnosed as cerebral palsy, he was confined to a wheelchair and often in physical pain. Lansky had a hard time dealing with his son’s condition, which required constant and costly medical attention. He had another son, Paul, and also a ten-year-old daughter, Sandra, who had begun to exhibit behavioral problems. Lansky would become estranged from his children, leaving them mostly in the care of his sister in New York.
Unlike his pals Luciano and the late Bugsy Siegel, Lansky had never been much of a ladies’ man. He was even more reserved with women than he was with his children, who later referred to him as “distant,” or his business associates, who revered his brains and coolheadedness but would never look to Lansky for a swinging good time. He tended to be all business all the time. The word people used most often when describing Lansky was gentleman; some people interpreted this courteousness as a kind of standoffishness. The fact that much of his life was spent engaged in criminal activity may have had something to do with his general air of circumspection. Whatever the reasons for his temperament, Lansky was ill suited to intimate or even casual dalliances with the opposite sex—which is why, in the fall of 1948, those who knew the Little Man were pleasantly surprised when he fell wholeheartedly in love with a manicurist and divorcée named Thelma “Teddy” Schwartz.
It was a whirlwind courtship. Teddy was all personality, the perfect complement to Meyer’s more austere nature. She was pert, brassy, and short—three inches shorter than Lansky. She had a teenage son from a previous marriage and rented an apartment in Hollywood, Florida. Originally from New York, where she had once been part owner of a failed nightclub, she was familiar with Lansky’s reputation and smart enough not to ask too many questions.
In December 1948, just four months after they first met, Meyer and Teddy flew to Cuba to get married. The ceremony was a low-key affair; it took place at a lawyer’s office in Vedado, Havana’s central business district. There were few guests. One who did attend was Fulgencio Batista. Many years later, in an unpublished autobiography, Teddy Lansky wrote, “Batista, who was a senator at the time, came to the office to meet me, Meyer’s wife. He seemed like a fine man.”
The fact that Batista was there to honor Lansky was no accident. For fifteen years now, these two men had sought to curry favor with one another. Their relationship, which had been inaugurated with a cash bribe delivered to Batista by Lansky and his friend Doc Stacher, had languished through a sustained period of historical coitus interruptus. The original plan was for Lansky and Batista to spearhead the development of a major casino-gambling empire in Cuba. Then came a series of intrusions—political instability on the island, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. For more than a decade, Cuba’s tourist prospects had lain dormant. But now the war was over and people had money to spend. The mobster conference at the Hotel Nacional was a signal to Batista and others that the American gangsters were looking to invest. The time had come for Lansky and Batista to reignite their underworld mambo.
It was a strange relationship. Over the years, the two men would rarely be seen together. Doc Stacher, Teddy Lansky, and others would attest to the fact that Meyer and Fulgencio knew and did business with one another, but the two power brokers were smart enough to leave no paper trail. There is no known photo of Lansky and Batista together, or any documents signed jointly by them. Their partnership seems to have existed on a near mystical plane, with each man knowing intuitively what the other required to manipulate the levers of power and create opportunities for personal remuneration. The two men would help make each other rich while hardly ever meeting face-to-face, and their enigmatic alliance would eventually form the core of the Havana Mob.
FULGENCIO BATISTA grew up in the shadow of the United Fruit Company. In the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, no U.S. corporation held a more dominant economic
and political position than El Coloso, as the company was known in the six countries where it operated massive banana plantations. In Cuba the company had more or less given birth to the town where Batista was born and raised—Banes—located in Oriente Province on the eastern fringe of the island. By the time of Batista’s birth in January 1901, United Fruit had decided to forgo banana production in the Banes region in favor of cultivating sugar, the island’s main export. United Fruit constructed a huge sugar processing plant, and over the next few years it built a fence around its properties in Banes, imported managers from the United States, and created entire neighborhoods for its workers, with separate security, shops, and schools.
The east side of town was divided into several neighborhoods based on the social status of the residents. North American employees—identified in the company literature as “first-class Anglo-Saxon employees”—were provided free housing and maid services. There was a less prestigious neighborhood for lower-ranking Cuban managers and technicians, and an even worse neighborhood for workers. It was here that Batista was born of mixed-race (mestizo) parents and raised around the corner from a street called simply Callejón del Negro (the Black Man’s Street).
Batista’s father worked for United Fruit cutting sugarcane. It was backbreaking work. During the zafra (sugarcane harvest), typically from February to August, the workdays were long, usually ten or twelve hours. Batista’s father was not employed directly by United Fruit but rather by a contractor hired by the company to organize and pay the work crews. The contractors were often free to exploit the workers by cheating them out of wages. To supplement the family income in the off-season, the Batistas grew bananas and sold them alongside their home. By the age of eight, young Fulgencio was forced to abandon his primary-school education and join his father as a cane cutter.
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