Meyer Lansky: Biography of the Mob’s Accountant

Meyer Lansky: quick facts

Play the room where it happened · Dec 1946

The Flamingo escape room

Las Vegas, December 1946. Bugsy Siegel's casino is losing money. Walk the scene in 3D, read the real evidence and crack the padlock before the clock runs out.

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From Grodno to Grand Street

Maier Suchowljansky was born on 4 July 1902 in Grodno, then part of the Russian Empire, where Jewish families lived with the constant threat of pogroms. His father left for America in 1909, and in 1911 the rest of the family followed, sailing from Odessa and settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Their name was shortened to Lansky.

Meyer was small, quiet and very good at arithmetic. On the streets he worked out the odds of the dice games on the corners and saw that the only sure winner was the man running the game. According to the story both men told for the rest of their lives, a young Sicilian called Charlie Luciano once tried to shake him down for protection, and Lansky told him where to go. Luciano was impressed, and they became lifelong friends.

The Bugs and Meyer Mob

Lansky’s closest partner was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a fearless and hot-headed boy from the same streets. As teenagers they ran the Bugs and Meyer Mob, hiring out as muscle and protecting liquor shipments. When Prohibition began in 1920 they went into bootlegging with Luciano and Frank Costello, learning from the gambler Arnold Rothstein how to bribe officials, hide money and run crime as a business.

Siegel supplied the violence; Lansky supplied the planning. He kept the books, set up the deals and, unlike most of his partners, almost never appeared in the newspapers.

The National Crime Syndicate

In May 1929 Lansky helped organise a conference of gang leaders in Atlantic City, where bosses from across the country agreed to stop fighting and start cooperating. After Luciano took control of the New York Mafia in 1931 and set up the Commission, Lansky was his indispensable partner outside it: as a Jew he could never be a member of the Mafia, but he sat at the centre of the alliance of Italian, Jewish and Irish gangs known as the National Crime Syndicate. Read the full story in the Lucky Luciano biography.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Lansky moved the Syndicate’s money into gambling. He ran carpet joints, illegal but luxurious casinos, in Saratoga Springs, in Broward County, Florida, and with Costello and Carlos Marcello outside New Orleans. He was one of the first gangsters to hide money abroad, moving cash through Swiss bank accounts from the 1930s.

The war, Luciano and Las Vegas

During the Second World War, US Naval Intelligence feared sabotage on the New York waterfront. Lansky acted as a go-between in the deal that brought Luciano, then in prison, into the effort to keep the docks secure, a deal that helped win Luciano his release and deportation to Italy in 1946.

The same year, Lansky persuaded his partners to back Bugsy Siegel’s plan for a luxury casino resort in the Nevada desert. The Flamingo opened on 26 December 1946, wildly over budget, and lost money for months. On 20 June 1947 Siegel was shot dead in Beverly Hills, and men loyal to Lansky took over the Flamingo within minutes. The full story is in the Bugsy Siegel biography.

Havana

Lansky had been doing business in Cuba since the 1930s, when he struck a deal with the army strongman Fulgencio Batista. In December 1946 he and Luciano hosted a summit of American bosses at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. After Batista seized power again in 1952, he made Lansky his adviser on gambling reform, and Havana became the Las Vegas of the Caribbean.

Lansky’s masterpiece was the Havana Riviera, a 21-storey hotel and casino that opened on 10 December 1957, built with millions in Syndicate money while Lansky was officially listed as its kitchen manager. It lasted just over a year. On New Year’s Eve 1958 Batista fled the country, Fidel Castro’s rebels took Havana, and the casinos were looted and then closed. Lansky left Cuba in January 1959 with far less than he had put in. “I crapped out,” he said later.

Israel and the last trial

Through the 1960s the FBI became convinced that Lansky was secretly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1970, facing a federal tax evasion case, he moved to Israel and asked to stay under the Law of Return, which gives Jews the right to settle there. Israel refused, ruling that his past made him a danger to the public, and in 1972 he was forced to leave and flew back to the United States.

He was arrested on landing. But the government’s case depended on witnesses with criminal records of their own, and on 26 July 1973 a Miami jury acquitted him. In almost fifty years of investigation, Lansky was only ever convicted of illegal gambling.

Death and the missing millions

Lansky spent his last decade quietly in Miami Beach, walking his dog and meeting old friends for breakfast. He died of lung cancer on 15 January 1983, aged 80, and was buried at Mount Nebo Cemetery in Miami.

The fortune never surfaced. His estate was small, and his biographer Robert Lacey found that in old age he struggled to pay for his disabled son’s care. Whether the money was hidden too well to find or never existed on the scale the FBI imagined is still argued over. See Meyer Lansky’s net worth for the numbers.

Why Meyer Lansky matters

Lansky turned gangsters into investors. He showed the mob how to run casinos, launder money and hide it offshore, and his partnership with Luciano is the reason the Syndicate worked across ethnic lines. He was the model for Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II, and was played by Ben Kingsley in Bugsy and Harvey Keitel in Lansky. You can walk into his world in the Flamingo escape room, set on opening night in 1946.

See also: Meyer Lansky was born, 4 July 1902 · Meyer Lansky died, 15 January 1983 · 10 things you didn’t know about Meyer Lansky