Naturally, we was pretty damn depressed about what happened in Vegas, and nobody felt like talkin’ much to nobody else that night. By this time it was four o’clock in the mornin’. I started to leave, but Vito stopped me and asked could I come up to his suite on the top floor…. Just as sure as I was alive it meant that Vito had tipped off Washington about my bein’ in Havana and probably made it sound like I was handlin’ junk…. So I done somethin’ that I never done before, and it was against all the rules that I myself set up. I pushed him up against the wall and I beat the livin’ daylights out of him…. I didn’t hit him in the face — I didn’t want to mark him up. I just belted him in the guts and in the kidneys, and when he fell down I just started to kick him in the belly…. I beat him up so bad he couldn’t get out of his room for three days.
But the coup had begun, Vito Genovese’s coup. The Havana Conference had hardly been discreet — the fleet of fifty cars with chauffeurs at the ready, the dancers and showgirls and prostitutes from Casa Marina. The U.S. had indeed been tipped off that Luciano was in Cuba, and soon, bowing to American pressure, Batista’s government would deport Luciano back to Italy, where he would eventually die. His fall, along with Ben Siegel’s murder that June, would leave Lansky defenseless.
“When I walk the streets,” Lansky would later tell an FBI agent, “I never know when I might get it.” Robert Lacey writes, “There were too many ‘nuts’ running around — and, Meyer noted, ‘he no longer has friends he can trust among the Italians.’ ”
The Luciano family had become the Genovese family. What Vito Genovese started, Fidel Castro would continue later when he nationalized Cuba’s casinos. “His troops smashed hundreds of slot machines, dice and roulette tables and other gaming devices in the Havana tourist hotels,” the New York Times wrote in their obituary of Lansky. Castro’s revolution “ended a multi-million-dollar industry and Mr. Lansky’s substantial interests in it.” He never recovered from these multi-million-dollar losses.
It turned out there were no safe havens, no places of refuge.
From the flyleaf of Hank Messick’s 1971 biography:
LANSKY owns some of the Bahamas, more of Las Vegas and most of Miami.
LANSKY has a personal fortune of $300,000,000.
LANSKY has beaten six murder charges and survived many of his closest associates — Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Fulgencio Batista.
LANSKY is the mystery man behind organized crime in America.
These are some of the myths that chased him out of Israel.
TABLOID
Safe havens, places of refuge. Places willing to accept even people like them — Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano.
On June 20, 1947, Ben Siegel arrived at the Sunset House in Beverly Hills on the morning of his murder and presumably got the best shave, facial, haircut, and manicure of the day from the head barber, Harry Drucker. The hotel at the Flamingo was finally completed. It had reopened and by June, six months after its closing, it had even begun turning a profit. Siegel went with a friend named Alan Smiley to his mistress Virginia Hill’s house on North Linden Drive, where upstairs Hill’s brother Chris was in one of the bedrooms with his girlfriend. In photographs you can see a bronze figurine of a dancing girl on the coffee table in the living room where Siegel and Smiley sat, Siegel reading the Los Angeles Times, Smiley perhaps sharing it with him. No one has ever offered an explanation of the casually strange assortment of people in that house — the lovers upstairs, the two men idly wasting time below. Virginia Hill wasn’t there. She was in Paris. “The assassin was found to have rested the carbine on the latticework of a rose-covered pergola just outside the window,” Lacey writes, “close enough to smash in Benny’s left eye, crush the bridge of his nose, and shatter a vertebra at the back of his neck. His right eye was blown out completely, and was later found fifteen feet away from his body.”
In his book on his father, Billy Wilkerson, W. R. Wilkerson III presents a photograph of an invitation to the Flamingo’s grand opening and writes:
… Siegel’s underlings had finally summoned the courage to tell their boss that all the matchbooks cited Wilkerson as the manager. In Las Vegas, “managers” were also proprietors and owners. Thousands of these books had been printed. In a rage, Siegel ordered everything with Wilkerson’s name on it destroyed. Because there wasn’t enough time to reprint the matchbooks, some brave soul suggested a number be saved for the opening. Siegel hired a squad of women with black grease pencils to strike out the publisher’s name wherever it appeared.
Wilkerson III provides photographs of the matchbooks. Of his father, he writes, “He is the quintessential victim of myth…. For three decades, practically everyone in Hollywood knew him, or of him. Yet a mere thirty years after his death Billy Wilkerson is practically unknown.”
His name was not on the matchbooks. In a sense, you could say that Ben Siegel was murdered by his fellow gangsters because he cared too much about whose name was on the matchbooks.
DIASPORA
Meyer woke up thinking he was in Florida, but gradually realizing he didn’t know where he was — he could feel the orientation of the room except that everything was backwards, the door to his left instead of his right, the hallway behind him instead of in front. It was very dark and he lay there for a long time in thick half-sleep, anxious, still not knowing. His stomach burned and swelled like a drum beneath the muscle. It burned all the way to his throat, which was raw as if from screaming. He wanted to switch on the lamp and take something, but it was hard to move in the dark, so he lay there. He sometimes thought of words in Polish or Yiddish and couldn’t remember them. Zołądek. Zołądek podchodził mi do gardła. S’tut vey der mogen. My stomach hurts. He thought he was at his sister’s apartment — Brooklyn, Ocean Parkway. He was on Hibiscus Drive in Hallandale, Florida. He was on Central Park West, in Kansas City, Atlantic City, Key West. He didn’t know where he was. His stomach was turning to acid inside him.
KING
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works ye mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
HIGH AGAIN
The bag is gone and my son Eliav is feeling crazy now, a burning pain in his knee from all the walking he’s done, trying to get somewhere, following the broken sidewalk past the men in their huddled groups, laughing at something, perhaps laughing at him. He’s trying to get across town to meet his friend at some spot near the bus station, but he is higher than he’d thought, throat dry with the need for heroin, cocaine, all the marijuana in the world not enough to relax, burning his fingers on the lighter. He’s walked maybe four miles by now and there’s no more cigarettes, no more drugs, the street rising and dipping beneath him, and he’s trying not to think about it, focused to the point of perplexity, everything swirling in at him at once, his face and hands covered in grime, the same clothes he’s had on for two days. He crosses beneath the viaduct and heads for the vacant lot, cars sliding above him along the globe’s groove, cars arcing back toward him down the bend, curved arcs of silver and blue. He remembers something about a sign that says PAZ — blue letters on a yellow background, PAZ — but what he no longer knows is if this sign was part of his friend’s directions or whether its vivid colors and letters have only made it seem that it was part of those directions. He keeps walking down the broken pavement, faster now, looking at the sign glowing there significantly past the chain-link fence, yellow and blue, yellow and blue, then fading into a small dirty piece of tin with painted letters: PAZ. He gets himself through the hole in the chain-link fence, then starts across the vacant lot, thinking that this is right, this is what his friend had said — PAZ — prisms of light coming at him from all sides now, dust everywhere, bricks beneath his feet, a yard full of weeds. They are pale green stalks with bulging sacs beneath their flower parts, monstrous weeds velveted with tiny white hairs, and he can feel his heart pounding, a bruised ache behind the bulbs of his closed eyes, and he isn’t sure anymore if this is the right vacant lot, and then in a terrible moment he is absolutely certain that his friend had never said anything about PAZ or a vacant lot at all.