The Money and the Power (Electronic book text)

Chapter 1
1. Meyer Lansky
The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland
possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United
States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say
much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at
Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the
Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called
his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice.
In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky
was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a
reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked
home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of
older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to
take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the
little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a
weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china,
though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gang
before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned
for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one
who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve
of brutality.
He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and
back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America,
ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and
prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics,
legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately,
always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their
distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy
money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the
promise, remained bleak and uncertain.
A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was
naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in
his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an
indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a
lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are
those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would
say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be
the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and
corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of
his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding,
too, tilted the odds in his favor.
By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already
commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and
wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants,
Benjamin Siegel, called "Bugsy"-though not to his face-for being
"crazy as a bedbug." Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the Bugs
and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their services to
the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon notorious
throughout the city as "the most efficient arm in the business." Li