THE “FAMILY”
A GENOVESE FAMILY TREE
JOE “THE BOSS” MASSERIA (1887–1931)
Sicilian-American crime boss. Killed by five bullets at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1931.
CHARLIE “LUCKY” LUCIANO (1897–1962)
Founder of the current Five Families of American organized crime. Imprisoned, 1936. Deported to Italy, 1946.
FRANK COSTELLO (1891–1973)
Acting head of the Luciano crime family, 1936–1957. Retired after being shot by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante on orders of Vito Genovese, 1957.
VITO GENOVESE (1897–1969)
Assumed control of the Luciano crime family under his own name after the retirement of Frank Costello and the murder of his other chief rival, Albert Anastasia, 1957.
* A note on the murder of Joe Masseria. The assassination took place after a long lunch meeting between Masseria and Charlie Luciano, who excused himself to go to the bathroom, whereupon four gunmen entered the restaurant and opened fire. The first, Ben Siegel, was murdered in 1947. The second, Albert Anastasia, was murdered in 1957. The third, Joe Adonis, was deported to Italy in 1956, where he died in 1971. The fourth, Vito Genovese, died in prison in 1969.
NO WAY HOME
As I said, the gangsters built their houses on pretense, hypocrisy, deception — the country in which they’d staked their claim was more like a kind of dreamland, bordered by prison, exile, and death.
On February 7, 1946, Meyer Lansky stood on the deck of the Ellis Island ferry with Frank Costello and a lawyer named Moses Polakoff, an excess of luster or glow about them even from a distance, despite their understated, impeccable clothes. They watched the Immigration Station emerge before them, the verdigris of its four turrets somehow Eastern European, circuslike, absurd. When the boat docked, they walked up the same gangway they had walked as children, Ellis Island in 1946 not a point of immigration but a point of deportation. Their friend Charlie Luciano was detained there, having spent the past ten years in Dannemora prison. They met him in the visiting room upstairs in the main building, which was eerily abandoned, its vast reception hall empty. Luciano slouched with his arms crossed over his knees, withered, pale, dressed like a custodian in gray pants and shirt. He was being sent back to the town of his birth, Lercara Friddi — some rubble on a hill in Sicily, the stink of sulfur, goats in the yellow grass. They entered the room with its big oak table and the guard closed the door, and before saying goodbye Luciano told them a story:
When they drove me through the city I asked the detectives to stop, just for a couple of minutes. I only wanted to get out and put my feet down on the street in Manhattan. I wanted to feel it under me. I wanted to know that I actually walked in New York…. But them guys said they couldn’t allow it. So we went right on through the ferry across the bay.3
CRIMINOPOLIS
The destination of this journey is home. Upon arrival, we will find, as we might have expected, that home is no longer there.
Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano. If I told you there was a parallel to be drawn between their founding of Las Vegas and the dream of Israel, would you give me enough time to explain? It first occurs to me in 2006. A visiting poet in a city not known for poetry, I am determined on my first visit to Las Vegas not to find the cliché that I expect, and perhaps for that reason I find something else. There is a university — that’s why I’ve come, to read at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Its urban campus spreads out in concrete, stone, glass, and palm trees in a way that can’t help but remind me of the universities in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa. I am staying not downtown but on the Strip, at the Bellagio with its famous fountains. The spectacle is at first disorienting, then lulling. Everything is brightly colored but the ambient sound, especially in the casinos, is hushed, a function of the rooms’ enormous size, the sound like gamelan music heard across a wide valley. I go for a long walk on the Strip one morning. There’s a point beyond the New York-New York Hotel and Casino where the massive resorts peter out and you see the illusion wither, the Strip just a road in the desert, a few convenience stores with slot machines and gas pumps. But that is what I expected to find. What I did not expect to find was the sheer scale of the Bellagio, the Paris, the MGM Grand, the Venetian. I did not expect the daydream to be so available and expansive and real. What I did not expect, above all, was that I would want to stay there.
PROMISED LAND
It was a harrowing journey. The temperature rose to 120 degrees, the wires in their Cadillac melting. “There were times when I thought I would die in that desert,” Lansky said. “Vegas was a horrible place, really just a small oasis town.”
— Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money
and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its
Hold on America, 1947–2000
Lansky and Ben Siegel saw it first from the highway at a distance, then closer, the angles changing, different contours and shadows revealing themselves, the hotel and its casino a massive abandoned hall standing with its wings at a diagonal to the road, set far back on cleared ground that had been scooped and plowed into berms, cut with sewage canals, scored with the wide tread of bulldozers. The half-finished Flamingo seemed already to have become a ruin of itself, as if they were viewing it not now but a thousand years from now. The work had stopped and so there were no people around, no trucks or heavy equipment, their only traces some deserted sheds and utility buildings and a few wooden power poles powdered with dust.
“I think you should come out here and keep an eye on it,” Lansky said.
Siegel turned to him with a half smile that was already fading and pointed out the emptiness of where they were.
DEFINITION
immigrate vi. to come into a new country, region or environment, esp. in order to settle there, as in the newborn entering the world, consciousness entering the brain, the corpse returning to the earth, silence on either side of the transit.
FOUNDING FATHER
“The Man Who Invented Las Vegas,” according to the book by that title written by the man’s son, W. R. Wilkerson III, was not Meyer Lansky or Ben Siegel but a publisher and restaurateur named Billy Wilkerson. Wilkerson had made his fortune from the famous newspaper he’d founded, the Hollywood Reporter, and then from a group of restaurants, including the iconic Ciro’s, in Beverly Hills. There is a photograph of Billy Wilkerson with Ben Siegel at Wilkerson’s Los Angeles barbershop and haberdashery, the Sunset House, where, Wilkerson III writes, Siegel enjoyed “close personal ties with the shop’s main barber, Harry Drucker,” who “always made sure that Siegel got the best shave, facial, haircut and manicure of the day.” In the photograph, Billy Wilkerson has a mustache like the actor William Powell’s. He liked French poodles and days at the track alone in the box with binoculars and cigarettes, a silk handkerchief in his jacket pocket. In February of 1945, he bought thirty-three acres of land outside of Las Vegas on what would eventually be called “the Strip,” and there began the construction of the casino and hotel he was going to call the Flamingo Club. It was going to be a new kind of casino for Las Vegas, modeled after Monte Carlo, with a dress code that would require black tie for men. It would be the first hotel in the United States to have central air-conditioning. In the casino, there would be no windows, no clocks, no way of knowing what time it was, just an unchanging half-light in which to get lost. Like some secret world behind a door in a dream, the casino would spin out a vision of opulence so potent in its details — the ebony-colored matchbook with the pink Flamingo emblem at its center — that you would miss it keenly if it weren’t for the knowledge that you could always go back. Wilkerson knew it would succeed, because he himself was a chronic gambler. He frequently lost twenty-five thousand dollars in a single day. This was why he wanted to build the Flamingo, because he thought that if he owned the house, he couldn’t lose.