The salient facts of Meyer Lansky’s life can be crammed onto a matchbook cover. But the myths could fill a filing cabinet. The Jewish Godfather, the reputed chairman of the board of a vast and highly organized criminal empire, he was said to be worth more than $300 million when he died in 1983. From the ’20s to the ’70s, in every racket from bootlegging to gambling to Murder Inc., it was supposedly Lansky who pulled the strings, rigged the dice and ordered the hits. He was, both gangsters and G-men agreed, the brains behind the Mafia for half a century.
The only problem, as biographer Robert Lacey discovered when he began researching Lansky’s life, was that almost none of the legends were true. The harder Lacey looked, the less he found. His digging left him convinced that Lansky “was a crook, that he made his living on the wrong side of the law, that he knowingly consorted with men of violence-that he was a gangster. But here was no Satan,” no drug dealer, no pimp, no thief, no murderer. There was nothing in the testimony of his associates or in the files of the government that worked so diligently and futilely to indict him “to sustain the notion of Lansky as king of all evil, the brains, the secret mover, the inspirer and controller of American organized crime–the man whom I had set out to write a book about.”
Lacey, author of the splendid “Ford: The Men and the Machine,” discovered that it was easier to say what Lansky was not than to say what he was. Unlike his pals and partners Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel, he abhorred publicity. Furtive and mistrustful, he came and went by the back door and he never put anything in writing. In his whole life he granted only one interview, and the one famous quote attributed to him–“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel”-turned out to be a not entirely accurate paraphrase of something he muttered to his wife in a hotel room bugged by the FBI.
“Americans cherish their gangsters,” Lacey observes. “They delight in the myths of cleverness, power and wealth which they wreath around these defective outlaws.” Lansky’s ties with powerful, dangerous men bred the illusion that he too was powerful and dangerous, when in fact his chief assets seemed to have been an impeccable reputation for fair dealing and a way with numbers o remarkable he could sit at a baseball game and recompute batting averages in his head as the innings went by. Although an FBI agent once claimed that Lansky “would have been chairman of the board of General Motors if he’d gone into legitimate business,” he in fact failed at every legal enterprise he undertook and a surprising number of the crooked ones as well.
One of Lansky’s casino employees described him as “seriously small,” and Lacey takes pains to show that the description fit more than just Lansky’s height. He uses the minutiae of Lansky’s existence–what he ate, what he wore, the inscription on his dog’s tombstone–not to bring the legend to life but to show that behind the myths there wasn’t much life there to start with. Dour and wittily deflating, “Little Man” is a scrupulous, scathing indictment of the gangster life.
