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.
His son writes that construction of the Flamingo began in November of 1945 and that “nearly a third” of the hotel and casino were completed by the time Wilkerson ran into financial problems two months later, in January 1946. Wilkerson gambled $150,000 of his remaining $200,000 and lost all of it. “A businessman from the east coast,” G. Harry Rothberg, learned of this predicament and offered to help, Wilkerson III recounts. G. Harry Rothberg was in fact a front for Meyer Lansky, whom Billy Wilkerson would never meet and whose connection to Rothberg he may have never known.
A month later, two other Lansky associates, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, came to visit the construction site to check on Wilkerson’s progress. “They brought with them a loudly-dressed character who enthusiastically presented himself to the publisher as his new partner,” Wilkerson III writes. “This man was Ben Siegel,” who was no longer just Wilkerson’s colorful acquaintance but now the co-manager of his hotel and casino.
STATELESS
It was legal—Las Vegas was like Cuba in this way. Among other things, Las Vegas and Cuba would have seemed like safe havens, places of refuge. They all would have seen that the same thing that had just happened to Luciano could happen to any of them. At any time they could be sent to jail or back where they’d come from.
In September of 1946, Lansky sent Luciano a telegram in Sicily that said, “December—Hotel Nacional.” It meant they were to meet in Havana at that time. The plan was for Luciano’s exile to take place not in Italy but in Havana, just a short plane or boat ride away from the U.S., the only place he had ever felt at home.
From Cuban author Enrique Cirules, T. J. English passes on to us this portrait of the first night of the “Havana Conference,” which reunited Lansky with Luciano and their cohort of Jewish and Italian gangsters, the uneasy alliance of men who had invested millions in the casinos of Las Vegas and Cuba:
There were crab and queen conch enchiladas brought from the southern archipelago. For the main course, there was a choice of roast breast of flamingo, tortoise stew, roast tortoise with lemon and garlic, and crayfish, oysters, and grilled swordfish from the nearby fishing village of Cojímar. There was also grilled venison sent by a government minister from Camagüey who owned livestock and, the most obscure delicacy of all, grilled manatee. The guests drank añejo rum and smoked Montecristo cigars.
Later, the visiting delegates were encouraged to make the most of their inaugural night in Havana. A fleet of fifty cars with chauffeurs was at the ready. Dancers and showgirls from the city’s three main nightclubs—the Tropicana, the Montmartre, and the Sans Souci—w
ere selected and paid for their services, as were prostitutes from Casa Marina, the classiest and most renowned bordello in the city.
One reads this passage and fails to connect it in any way to what one knows about the silent, inward Lansky. What would he have ordered from that preposterous menu? What would he have done after dinner but gone to his room?
It’s finally quiet when the girl arrives, only a faint sound of music coming in through the partly opened window. She’s young and speaks no English, and he makes her a drink with a cube of ice from the bucket and they sit on the bed in the dim light and he looks down at his hands. After a while, he touches her chin and slowly turns her face and looks at her with something like mild rebuke or even pain in his eyes. He takes her glass back in his hands and she stands up and turns away and steps out of her shoes, then she reaches behind her for the zipper of her dress.
CLASS
“Class, that’s the only thing that counts in life. Class. Without class and style a man’s a bum, he might as well be dead.”
—Ben Siegel
Ben Siegel, son of Ukrainian peasants, could now look at a room and see what was really there—what kind of marble was on the floor, if the drapes were silk or gabardine. He could discern these subtle differences, or at least he told people he could.
He had once watched Billy Wilkerson speaking to Cary Grant and some blond tomboyish starlet in a picture hat, and it had been the movie star who was trying to charm Wilkerson, not the other way around, the actor holding an invisible box in his hands to signal the joke, Wilkerson in his cream-colored suit already smiling, his knuckle raised impatiently to rap the table in response. Night after night, Billy Wilkerson would move from table to table in his Beverly Hills restaurants—Ciro’s, Café Trocadero—crouching for five or ten minutes at a stretch rather than pulling up a chair, always smoking, offering some strong opinion about who was going to do what next and who was finished. He never ate before midnight and even then he just cut into his steak to assess how done it was, maybe taking a few bites with a glass of gin. He never quoted movies or told set jokes and when he used profanity, which was seldom, it was dirtier than anyone else’s.
“As time went on,” Wilkerson III writes of his father’s relationship with his partner Ben Siegel, “the gangster’s respectful admiration disintegrated into an insane, all-consuming jealousy.”
Arguments between the ostensible partners escalated. Siegel and his mistress, an ex-dancer named Virginia Hill, began revising the plans—building, tearing down, rebuilding, each time with more extravagance. Every bathroom in the guest suites was fitted with its own “private plumbing and sewer system. Cost: $1,150,000,” Wilkerson III writes.
“This is my fucking hotel,” Siegel is quoted as saying to the journalist Westbrook Pegler. “My idea! Wilkerson has nothing to do with it!”
In fear of his life, Billy Wilkerson finally fled to Paris. He “rarely went outside,” his son comments. “Every Sunday, he made a single major excursion. He took a cab to Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral.”
STYLE
Anne Lansky in photographs is sometimes dreamy, leaning forward with a nearly finished cigarette between her fingertips, dressed like an actress in a tailored suit with white fleece collar and cuffs, a string of pearls, a corsage made from a large flower, perhaps a chrysanthemum. But even in those expensive clothes, her accent would have given her away. There would have been signs of wrongness, signs that she could only guess at but never fully perceive because she herself was distorted.
AMOUR FOU
From the roof of his new palace, David first encounters Bathsheba. And it happened at eventide that David arose from his bed and walked about on the roof of the king’s house, and he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.
He’d been dozing all that afternoon and perhaps he was as naked as she was when he traipsed outdoors in the fading light and saw her there.
FAREWELL
It was evening and Ben wore a dark suit and a dark tie and he had showered recently enough that his hair was still a little damp at the sideburns. He lit a match whose gold tip slowly erupted in a flame so high he had to hold it away from his body. His hair was not only damp, Meyer saw, but starting to thin a little. He reached the ashtray toward him and inhaled.
“You’re still with Anne,” Ben said. “Still married.”
“She’s ill. You know that.”
“I’m just saying you should think of yourself a little.”
“Like you.”
Though still unfinished, the Flamingo was two million dollars over budget. You wondered how Ben could put himself in such a position, and then you remembered that his whole life was full of mistakes and embarrassments that he endured out of necessity and then forgot.
“I came out here because you asked me to,” he said. “I got invested in it, I don’t know why. All the details.”
“It seems like you’ve had a lot of fun ideas out here.”
“Don’t give me that look. The sad shtetl in that look.”
Virginia came in holding a bottle of Coca-Cola with a long straw tilting out of its neck. She had pushed her sunglasses back over the front roll of her hair—without the sunglasses her eyes were hazel and without mystery. She handed the bottle to Ben and he put it down on the desk and spread his arms, and she hesitated for a moment, as if about to come sit in his lap, but then she turned and left the room without ever quite looking at Meyer. Maybe the lack of refinement and depth made her sexy in a frank, resolute way. Maybe he saw it and it made him like her less each time he was with her. You left someone in a different part of the world, even for just a year, and he changed in so many ways that you could only mourn the loss. It was that the new place brought out what had always been latent inside him. Distance revealed his flaws.
THE OLD COUNTRY
Safe havens, places of refuge. Of course in Lansky’s case there was no such analogy as Lercara Friddi—there was no place to be sent back to. The place he had come from had disappeared, become judenrein. They’d taken his part of Grodno and deported it to Auschwitz and Treblinka.
BASEBALL
Buddy Lansky was at his usual table with the sports pages when the woman sat down across from him, her shoulders slanted a little to one side. His friend Sam had been watching from the bar, but when she came over Sam walked back toward his office. The woman wore dark lipstick and had faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the collar of her yellow blouse jutting out over the lapel of her jacket. Not drunk, but drinking. The electric fans rattling in their cages at the corners of the room. She told him her name and he was about to tell her his, but she would have known, he was sure, there was no point. He looked back down at the blurred league standings, anchored there with the side of his swollen hand. The waiter brought the woman a beer and asked Buddy if he wanted anything and Buddy said no, he was fine. He went there almost every day—everyone knew whose son he was. Sometimes they played cards, sometimes he just listened to them talk.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” the woman said.
“Good at what?”
“Good at chatting people up. Making them feel at ease. Letting them know what you want.”
She brought two fingers and her thumb to her glass of beer, then took a meditative sip, barely tipping the glass, holding it in that delicate way, but when she put it down, it hit the table harder than she expected.
“A baseball fan,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? I never understood a thing about baseball.”
She extended her hand across the table, a lazy form of beckoning, waiting for him to understand: he was supposed to clasp it. It was a dry, slender hand, the insides of the fingers lined and creased, but it was long, well formed. Her age was terrifying and alluring at the same time. Sam had made him a standing offer of the use of his apartment. That was the joke Sam always made.
They took a cab across town. At the entrance to the cement-fronted building on Lexington Avenue, a doorman stood i
nside the opened glass, nothing on his face. He mentioned the apartment number and gave Buddy an envelope with the key, and Buddy and the woman took the elevator to the fifth floor, not talking anymore. There were some old chairs and a yellow cloth couch and a radio, a kitchenette off to the side. She poured herself a drink at the little makeshift bar and Buddy stood there looking out the windows at the white sunlight between the buildings.
“We’ll just take it easy,” she said. “Go ahead and lie down. Do you like music or is it just baseball? I used to sing, believe it or not. Lee Sherman’s band. What I liked best, though, was to sing with just a piano, that intimacy. I never had a big voice. I wasn’t good for singing with a band.”
She switched on the radio, an ad for Lux soap, then she reached back and took the pins out of her hair, shaking it loose. She took off her jacket, then her blouse. He didn’t experience any of this as quite real. Not the sight of her in her brassiere, nor the sight of her stepping out of her heels and taking off her skirt. The brassiere and the girdle left lines in her flesh, and the sheer black stockings made her hips and thighs seem unusually broad. When she sat next to him, he was overwhelmed by the sudden fact of her warmth, the air she exhaled, the thin gold strand around her neck. Her touch made it clearer. The hard fact of her experience made it clearer. He tried to kiss her and she moved away with such professional skill that he felt his body recede into vagueness. She took off the brassiere, reaching behind her back for the clasp like an athletic girl, one foot tucked behind her on the couch. He saw her breasts swing free and for a minute or two he was no longer Buddy.
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