A mafia boss spent his final years in Miami Beach. See what his life was like
Meyer Lansky, gray eminence of organized crime, died of lung cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, in 1983.
By popular belief, never proved legally, Lansky taught the Mafia's crude leadership of the 1920s and 1930s, showing them the subtleties of financial manipulation, concealment and investment of the proceeds of bootlegging and gambling.
Publicly, Lansky ridiculed such notions. He was a small, thin, bowlegged, mild-mannered, grandfatherly man who looked like anyone else his age, playing out life's closing years in Miami Beach. He was spotted walking the streets of South Beach and having a corned beef sandwich at Wolfie's deli.
Let's take a look at Lansky through the words and pictures from the Miami Herald archives:
The faces of mob boss Meyer Lanksy
Obituary: Meyer Lansky dies, eluding law a final time
Published Jan. 16, 1983
By Miami Herald staff writer Arnold Markowitz
Meyer Lansky, gray eminence of organized crime, died of lung cancer at 6 a.m. Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. He was 80 years old, a legend who laughed off a near- lifetime of determined but futile investigations.
Lansky, attended around the clock by private nurses, died in his sleep. Funeral and burial arrangements were described only as private. A hospital spokeswoman said the staff was under strict orders to reveal no other details.
In Lansky's Jewish faith, it is customary to bury the dead as quickly as possible. For years, he and his wife Thelma have had gravesites reserved in Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem, where Lansky's Russian parents lie.
What FBI, police, state and congressional investigators consistently failed to accomplish, the ailments of old age achieved.
Lansky endured several hospital confinements in recent years, all at Mount Sinai. A tumor was removed from his left lung in February 1980. Last November, he returned for treatment of a stomach ailment. On New Year's Eve he was admitted again, for dehydration.
By popular belief, never proved legally, Lansky sophisticated the Mafia's crude leadership of the 1920s and 1930s -- showing them the subtleties of financial manipulation, concealment and investment of the proceeds of bootlegging and gambling.
Lansky, whose Russian-Jewish heritage disqualified him for official membership in the Mafia, was its leading nonmember associate. Most investigators were convinced that he was more influential than any family boss. As he grew old and his health deteriorated, he is believed to have assumed the role of an elder statesman-consultant on gambling and finance.
Publicly, Lansky ridiculed such notions. He was a small, thin, bowlegged, mild-mannered, grandfatherly man who looked like anyone else his age, playing out life's closing years in Miami Beach.
In his old age, he acquired a light-hearted manner and sense of humor that further belied his gory legend, full of tales of ancient gangland rivalries settled in bullets, blood, garrotes and cement galoshes. How much of the legend is true and whether it truly disturbed Lansky seem unlikely ever to be known publicly.
Lansky married Anna Citron in 1929. They had three children, Paul, Bernard and Sandra, before Lansky divorced Anna and married Thelma Schwartz in 1948.
Lansky and 'Teddy' were together until he died. They lived unobtrusively among other retired condominium dwellers in Imperial House at 5255 Collins Ave., Miami Beach. For years they dined out frequently. More recently, they employed a live-in chef, neighbors said Saturday.
Federal law enforcement agencies made extraordinary efforts to convict him. Once in 1973 they succeeded -- for contempt of court for ignoring a grand jury summons.
A judge sentenced him to a year and a day. While Lanksy remained free on a $200,000 bond, an appeals court studied the record. Then it overturned the verdict, ruling that the timing of the summons had made it virtually impossible for Lansky to appear.
In 1972, they got him deported from Israel, where he had lived for two years and had hoped to finish his life.
Once the U.S. Justice Department created an organized crime strike force with a single mission: Get Lansky. The project flopped.
In June 1980, the Israeli government agreed, after numerous refusals, to grant Lansky a tourist visa. When Israeli legislators complained that Lansky probably planned to consort with the local underworld, the government changed its mind and rejected his application.
'I'm not a threat to Jews or society,' Lansky complained when Israel's Interior Ministry called him one of the most dangerous men in the world. 'I'm a Jew, and I want to go to Israel just as any other Jew would.'
His medical records, often presented in courts as proof that Lansky could not possibly endure legal proceedings, read like coroners' reports, not descriptions of a living man. According to the doctors' documents, Lansky suffered from heart attacks, stroke, coronary artery thrombosis, angina pectoris, duodenal ulcers, osteoarthritis, vertigo, chronic bronchitis, percarditis, lipoma, bursitis and cerebral and vascular diseases.
Death, for years a faint-hearted adversary, threatened more aggressively in February 1980. Lansky went to Mount Sinai with a tumor on his left lung and was in critical condition after surgeons removed the growth. He bounced back, as he had after open heart surgery in 1973.
He seemed a man of endless durability. Despite the succession of diseases, he eventually would turn up in public chipper, full of wisecracks.
'Thanks, you look well yourself,' he would say. 'Gained some weight, did you?'
Most of those public appearances were before grand juries. Lansky was a popular guest even though it was a waste of time to send him a summons. Once, a state prosecutor who questioned him at a grand jury session said afterward that Lansky had been 'generally affable.' Had the witness been evasive? The prosecutor admitted he wasn't sure.
'There's no such thing as organized crime,' Lansky said with a straight face during a 1978 interview. 'Instead of constantly talking about organized crime, why don't the authorities do something about all the crime in the streets?'
Lansky was born in 1902 in Grodno, Russia. The exact date is unknown, but when he and his parents arrived in the United States on April 4, 1911, immigration officers assigned him July 4 as a birthday.
Meyer Sucholjansky, his true name, ended his formal education in 1917 when he graduated from the eighth grade at New York Public School 34. He was trained as a tool and die maker.
In spite of his reputation as an important figure in organized crime, he was rarely arrested and spent less than three months of his life in jails.
His first arrest, Oct. 24, 1918, was for felonious assault. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct. Lansky paid a $2 fine.
In 1921, he is believed to have joined forces with Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel to form the Bugs and Meyer Mob. The gang specialized in hijacking cars and guarding bootleg liquor shipments for other hoodlums during the Prohibition era.
In 1928, the year he became a U.S. citizen, Lansky was charged with attempted homicide in the shooting of a gangster, John Barrett, in New York. Barrett recovered and refused to testify against Lansky.
During the same year, Lansky joined Mafia hoodlum Joe Adonis in the operation of a major bootleg liquor operation in New York, apparently his first close association with the Mafia.
Intermittent power struggles occupied the Mafia in the 1930s and 1940s. In September 1931, gunmen supposedly working for Lansky killed Salvatore Maranzano, then the Mafia 'boss of all bosses.'
In 1932 Chicago police raided an apparent summit meeting of gangsters, and arrested Lansky and five others on vagrancy charges. In a police photograph, Lansky stood next to racketeer Charles (Lucky) Luciano.
When Lansky asked for citizenship 40 years later, Israel used the same picture as evidence that he was a gangster and a threat to the state. Citizenship was denied.
Although Lansky usually diverted questions about his career with a joke and a warning against tobacco, he made a rare confession in Lansky, Mogul of the Mob, a book written by three Israeli journalists to whom he granted limited cooperation.
'I admit quite frankly that I made a fortune from bootlegging,' he said.
Lansky is believed to have moved into the lucrative gambling field during 1934-40, setting up and operating illegal gambling casinos in South Florida, New Orleans, Havana and Saratoga, N.Y.
During World War II, Lansky worked with the U.S. Navy in secret wartime projects, bargaining for Luciano's release from prison in exchange for organized crime's help in protecting the New York waterfront from saboteurs. Some stories say Sicilian- born Mafiosi provided information used in planning the invasion of Sicily.
After the war, Lansky expanded his casino network. His partner Siegel extended operations to California and then Las Vegas. With mob money he built the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, harbinger of a new age of gambling opulence. After a disagreement with Luciano over the operation of the casino, Siegel was shot to death in 1947.
Lansky left Havana, site of one of his gambling operations, during the Fidel Castro takeover in 1959.
Lansky's influence apparently was at its height during the 1950s and early 1960s. Testimony before U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver's committee investigating organized crime indicated tht Lansky was adept at combining gambling with corruption so his casinos could operate at high profits in Florida, Cuba, Las Vegas, the Caribbean, London and Europe.
Gambling produced Lansky's only Florida conviction. He and his brother Jake pleaded guilty in Broward County to keeping a gambling house and were fined $2,000 each. In 1953, Meyer pleaded guilty to five charges of illegal gambling in the racetrack town of Saratoga, N.Y. He served 2 1/2 months of a three-month sentence.
In 1970 he was arrested as he returned to Miami from a secret meeting in Acapulco. The charge was having no prescription for the indigestion pills he carried. The verdict: not guilty.
In March 1971, a U.S. grand jury in Miami ordered Lansky to testify about 'skimming,' or removing profits of the Flamingo Casino for distribution without payment of taxes. When he failed to respond, he was indicted in Miami and New York on tax evasion charges.
Others indicted were gambler Dino Cellini and Miami Beach hotelmen Morris Lansburgh and Sam Cohen. Legal maneuvers, centered on Lansky's medical condition, won him postponement after postponement.
In the fall of 1976 in Nevada, U.S. District Judge Roger D. Foley dismissed the final federal charge against Lansky. Foley ruled, after hearing uncontested medical evidence, that Lansky would never be well enough to stand trial. He lived another six years.
Lansky fought attempts by the Israeli Interior Ministry to oust him from the country as an undesirable. The case dragged on until September 1972, when the Israeli high court denied him citizenship. His tourist visa had expired and the United States Embassy had revoked his passport.
He left Israel that November and spent two days flying more than 13,000 miles in search of asylum. He visited Switzerland, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, but none would accept him. Lansky was arrested when the long flight ended at Miami International Airport.
Kenneth Whitaker, then agent in charge of the FBI's Miami office, boarded the airplane, at about 5:30 a.m. Only one passenger was asleep. Whitaker woke him up.
'Meyer?' the agent said. 'Ken Whitaker, FBI.'
'I guess I'm home,' Lansky said, dryly.
A corps of FBI agents escorted Lansky through the Customs and Immigration routines. In Customs, he took a container of pills for his heart condition from a pocket and bent over a water fountain. A uniformed policeman grabbed and stopped him. Whitaker stopped the officer.
Whitaker, realizing what the medication was for, told the officer to let him 'go ahead and take the pill.'
'You're a smart one, Whitaker,' Lansky said.
Whitaker recalls another encounter with Lansky, about 18 months after the airport arrest. Whitaker was walking through a hotel lobby after making a speech to a Kiwanis Club when he saw Lansky sitting in a chair. Lansky nodded, and Whitaker began walking toward him when he found his path blocked by a large, tough-looking man.
'Oh, no. No, no,' Lansky told the human barricade. 'Let Mr. Whitaker say hello. I'm not on an airplane.'
The Miami and New York income tax evasion charges were consolidated, and Lansky was tried in Miami in July 1973. He and associate Dino Cellini, who could not be found to be tried, were accused of conspiring with New England Mafia leaders to hide income they received from The Colony Club in London, fronted by former actor George Raft, during 1967 and 1968.
Lansky was accused of setting up the casino and collecting large payments from its profits without reporting the income on his tax returns. He was acquitted after a week-long trial. The jury believed his wife's testimony that he was with her when the major prosecution witness, confessed Mafioso Vincent (Big Vinnie) Teresa, said Lansky was accepting payments.
The Lansky legend, more by speculation than by proof, linked him indirectly to many a mob killing. Indeed, he was involved in dangerously competitive illegal activities and associated with men known for violent business methods. Most of the time, though, the gory environment missed Lansky directly.
Once, in 1977, it came very close.
Lansky's stepson Richard Schwartz, one of Thelma Lansky's children by a prior marriage, was in a fancy Miami Beach restaurant, The Forge. On the next barstool sat Craig Teriaca, a younger man with strong family connections of his own.
Each man took the affirmative in a debate over ownership of a $10 bill on the bar between them. Schwartz won by shooting Teriaca dead.
On a Wednesday morning 3 1/2 months later, as Schwartz was about to open the restaurant he ran, a shotgun stopped him.
There was no sign of robbery. Motive revenge, the police deduced. Some speculated that it meant the start of mob war. No war materialized, so there was more speculation:
No gangster would have dared to kill Lansky's stepson, the speculators said. Not without the old man's consent.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ukrainian woman searches for husband lost in action two years ago
By Tom Balmforth CHERNIHIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -When gaunt Ukrainian soldiers dismount from buses as part of prisoner swaps with Russia, Mariia Pylnyk tries to find out anything she can about her missing husband from the freed men, and hopes, just maybe, that he will be among them. Holding up a photograph of Dmytro Pylnyk, lost in action in early 2023, she has many questions. What happened to his unit when it was ambushed by Russian forces? Was he captured by Russia? Could he eventually be released? The mass prisoner swap last month was an opportunity for people like her to ask troops just out of Russian captivity about missing loved ones who they believe, or simply hope, are prisoners of war. The alternative is unthinkable. "I hold out great hope that someone has heard something, seen something," Pylnyk, 29, told Reuters at a recent exchange in May, flanked by other relatives of those missing in action. "My son and I are waiting for (his) dad to come home. Hope dies last. God willing, it'll all be okay and dad will come back." Precise numbers for soldiers missing in action are not made public. For Ukrainians, and for Russians on the other side of the conflict, it can be hard to find out even basic information. Pylnyk says she has written to government agencies and Russian authorities and learned almost nothing. Ukrainian officials say more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been registered missing since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The majority are from the military but the figure also includes civilians. Another 12,000 have been removed from the list after being identified among the dead or returned in exchanges. Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for the Coordination Council that arranges prisoner swaps from the Ukrainian side, said Russia had never notified Kyiv which soldiers it is holding prisoner. Ukraine collects that data by other means as best it can, he said. Pylnyk and others like her share information in online chat groups and use it to try to piece together what happened. "Misfortune brought us together," she said. "After two years of this, we're like a family." LAST PHONE CALL Dmytro Pylnyk, an electrician by trade, was drafted into the army in late 2022. He phoned home often so that his wife did not worry but last called on their son Artem's third birthday on Feb. 27, 2023. He was deployed from Kharkiv region towards Bakhmut, a small city that later fell to Russian forces after fierce fighting. His unit's convoy was caught in a Russian ambush, Mariia Pylnyk said she had learned. "The guys ran any which way," she said, citing conversations with commanders who told her 41 soldiers were missing in action. Two were captured and have since been released. One, who was freed in an exchange at Easter and had lost both his arms, was unable to share any valuable information, she said. The second refused to talk. The pace of prisoner swaps has increased in the last month. Ukraine and Russia each released 1,000 prisoners in a three-day exchange last month, the only tangible outcome of direct talks in Istanbul. A prisoner swap of under-25s on Monday was the first in a series of exchanges also expected to include each side repatriating the remains of thousands. Mariia Pylnyk has given her son's DNA to the authorities so that if Dmytro is confirmed killed in action they will be notified. "We all understand that this is war and anything is possible. But to this day, I don't believe it and I don't feel that he is dead. I feel like he's alive and God willing he'll return," she said. NO SIGNAL TO CALL She lives with Artem, now five, in Pakul, a village in the northern Chernihiv region that was briefly occupied by Russians. She has not told Artem his father is missing in action. "He knows that dad is a soldier, dad is a good man, dad is at work and just doesn't have any signal to call," she said. She takes comfort from seeing families reunited and never allows herself to cry in front of her son. She used to work in a shop, but Artem has often been ill. The angst of the last two years have taken their toll on her health too. She receives state support. Pylnyk has vowed to find her husband but has often not had time to attend prisoner swaps while looking after their son. "Only a weakling can give up, you know, throw up their hands and say that's it, he's not there," she said, adding that she was very emotional when she attended last month's big exchange. "When I was there, the fighting spirit awoke in me that I needed. I have to do this. Who else will do it but me?"
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What will the Army 250th birthday parade look like? Here's what we know so far
WASHINGTON - The Army's 250th birthday parade will be hosted in the nation's capital this weekend, and it's expected to bring massive crowds of people to D.C., along with heightened security. The event coincides with the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump. Army officials estimate that around 200,000 people will attend the evening event. What we know The parade will go down Constitution Avenue, from 23rd Street to 15th Street, starting at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday. Fencing is up, and this is just the start of the security measures. "We're preparing for an enormous turnout," U.S. Secret Service Special Agent In Charge Matt McCool said. While Secret Service officials say they're expecting potentially hundreds of thousands of people, that's not all — SkyFox captured video over Jessup, Md., showing tanks headed to the nation's capital as well. The military parade has been designated a National Special Security Event — similar to a presidential inauguration or state funeral. That status is reserved for events that draw large crowds and potential mass protests. It calls for an enhanced degree of high-level coordination among D.C. officials, the FBI, Capitol Police and Washington's National Guard contingent — with the Secret Service taking the lead. The Army birthday celebration had already been planned for months but earlier this spring, Trump announced his intention to transform the event into a massive military parade complete with 60-ton M1 Abrams battle tanks and Paladin self-propelled howitzers rolling through the city streets. What they're saying "I cannot emphasize enough, your safety remains our number one priority," D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith said. Still, there are some security concerns. Just this past weekend, the day the WorldPride parade took place in D.C., police responded to a shooting and a double stabbing at Dupont Circle. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, there's been widespread unrest and violence as thousands have been on the streets to protest federal immigration crackdowns. "We are paying attention obviously to what is happening there, and we will be ready for that if it were to occur here," Special Agent McCool said. Agent Phillip Bates of the FBI's Washington Field office, which is tasked with counterterrorism and crisis management, said there were "no credible threats" to the event at the moment. Although federal, state, and local officials said Monday that they're not expecting it, their preparations include nearly 19 miles of anti-scale fencing, 17 miles of bike racks and concrete barriers, 175 magnetometers, officers from multiple agencies and drones. "Rest assured, all drones will be owned and operated by the Secret Service or our partners. So, please do not be alarmed," McCool said. What they're saying As for whether people who live in D.C. feel safe, some said yes. "I don't have any concern about safety, you know?" Northwest D.C. resident Onur told FOX 5. But others say they have some worries. "It seems kind of odd that they put up this 10 foot security fence all around if they don't expect something to happen or some kind of unrest or something," Joe Harper, Jr., said. There are also concerns regarding traffic and potential road damage if you've got all of those tanks down here. The Source This story includes information from the Associated Press and previous FOX 5 DC reporting.
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Russian attacks kill 7, injure 34 in Ukraine over past day
Russian attacks across Ukrainian regions killed at least seven civilians and injured at least 34 over the past day, regional authorities reported on June 10. Russia launched 315 Shahed-type attack drones and decoys against Ukraine overnight, as well as two North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles and five Iskander-K cruise missiles, primarily targeting Kyiv, the Air Force reported. Ukrainian air defenses shot down all seven missiles and 213 attack drones. According to the statement, 64 drones disappeared from radars or were intercepted by electronic warfare systems. At least four people were injured during the overnight attack on Kyiv, and fires broke out in multiple districts of the capital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported. The strike marked one of the heaviest attacks against Ukraine's capital city throughout the full-scale war. A drone attack on Odesa killed two men and injured eight other people, four of whom were hospitalized and are in moderate condition, Governor Oleh Kiper said. Medical facilities, including a maternity hospital, were damaged in the southern city. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian drone and artillery attacks against the Nikopol district killed one person and injured another on June 9, and wounded two other men overnight on June 10, Governor Serhii Lysak reported. In the Synelnykove district of the same region, Russian drone attacks set fire to a cultural center, "effectively destroying" it, the governor added. Russian attacks across Donetsk Oblast killed three people in Yarova, Pokrovsk, and Myrnohrad, and injured eight others, Governor Vadym Filashkin reported. Russia attacked eight settlements in Kharkiv Oblast with missiles, bombs, and drones, injuring a man in Kupiansk and another in Derhachi, according to Governor Oleh Syniehubov. In Kherson Oblast, one person was killed and eight injured during Russian attacks, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported. Five high-rise buildings and 15 houses were damaged. An elderly woman was injured during a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia, according to Governor Ivan Fedorov. Read also: Russian missile and drone barrage hits Kyiv, Odesa, killing 2 and injuring 12, damaging maternity hospital We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.