I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  DECLINE AND FALL

  On December 26, 1946, the still-unfinished Flamingo had its disastrous grand opening with Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra, Jimmy Durante, Rose Marie, and a few other entertainers playing to a half-empty room of mostly local Nevadans in ranch clothes. Robert Lacey recounts:

  There were no bedrooms for guests. So on the night the Flamingo opened for business, it was the neighboring El Rancho Las Vegas and the Last Frontier which made the big money, as the guests from the Flamingo’s opening reception came back to their hotels, sent their wives off to bed, and decided to play for an hour or so with the winnings they had brought from the new casino down the road.

  The same pattern continued through the entire Christmas week of 1946 and through the New Year’s celebrations of 1947…. Late in January 1947, the new Flamingo Hotel Casino closed its doors, less than a month after it had opened.

  The week before this failed grand opening, Charlie Luciano’s lieutenant, Vito Genovese, had arrived at the Havana Conference four days early, as if already smelling blood. Genovese had been hiding in Italy, where during the war he’d allied himself with Benito Mussolini and begun smuggling narcotics. Before that, Genovese had murdered many people, including Joe “The Boss” Masseria, with the help of Luciano, Ben Siegel, Albert Anastasia, and Joe Adonis, all of whom, like Genovese, were now investors in Siegel and Lansky’s unfinished Flamingo. On the night of the failed grand opening, after the bad news came via a phone call from Las Vegas, Genovese demanded to speak in private with Luciano at their hotel in Havana. Luciano, via his biographer Martin Gosch, is made to recount the episode in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano:

  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.

  ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

  The drugs come into Israel from Lebanon—marijuana, hashish, heroin—most of the supply originating in Afghanistan, though some of it in Iraq or Turkey or in Lebanon itself. As a go-between, Hezbollah takes its cut and uses the money in its ongoing terror campaign against Israel. Once the drugs cross the border into the Golan Heights, they are funneled through a network of Israeli crime families where ultimately there is an invisible bridge between Arab and Jew. I saw some of the Jewish side growing up. Their earliest forerunners started in the black market in the first years after Independence, when food and everyday staples were scarce—bread, milk, cigarettes. In a nation of immigrants, they were war profiteers who later branched out into other illegal businesses. I used to be fascinated by the secret money kept hidden in its envelope beneath my father’s cash register. I used to be fascinated by the unfriendly boys who came each week to collect it. I was attracted and not repulsed. Everything I’ve learned since has taught me how false this romance is, but the romance still exists. Frequently it seems that the romance steers the world.

  QED

  At the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, there’s a plaque commemorating Bugsy Siegel, whose “original” structure, as the text describes it, stood from December 26, 1946, until December 14, 1993.

  Of course we know this is a myth—we know the hotel was Billy Wilkerson’s idea, that the Flamingo was stolen from him. Of course it doesn’t matter that we know this. It’s a fact that has no traction, in a place that has no memory.

  THIEF

  My son Eliav’s new girlfriend lives in a room with two folding chairs, some bedding on the floor, a naked sink jutting out of the wall, its porcelain surface rusted almost black in spots. When she answers the door, she wears a faded nightgown and a pair of old track shoes, a kerchief on her head. I offer to take her to a café but she says no, she can’t leave, what if he comes back? I realize she’s more concerned for my son’s safety than for hers. He has taken her money and disappeared, but he still has this power over her. The dark, bruised shadows that surround her eyes are not bruises but something more like a symptom of their shared illness.

  I look for causes. For example, I sent him to a university in the United States. Before that, he traveled in Asia for a year. Before that, he served thirty-six months in the intelligence division of the IDF. But it was only after he came back to Tel Aviv from all this that he disappeared.

  VCR

  I need to work on new poems but I can’t find anything that holds my attention. It’s 2004 and the fighting is general now—suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel, targeted assassinations and armored raids on Gaza and the West Bank. Operation Rainbow, Operation Days of Penitence—dead children, dead civilians, dead soldiers, dead terrorists. I can’t lie, I have nothing new to say about it. Perhaps that’s what my son is saying. I eat a dinner of bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, lime, some salt whose individual grains are so coarse I can taste them. A glass of Goldstar beer, some music. I listen to the music while I do the dishes and it mitigates my dread and the fact that I’m alone. At night, I watch gangster movies—The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, Goodfellas, Scarface. They somehow calm me, soothe me. I can’t explain it.

  INHERITANCE

  With no one to pay his bills, and with only his disability pension, Buddy Lansky was evicted from Arch Creek [a convalescent home]. His belongings—one battered suitcase, a few plastic bags of clothing, and an old television set—were packed up, and he was transported to a broken-down corner of North Miami that was noted for its tattoo parlors and for the thick wire mesh on storefront windows….

  “The basic trouble,” he said, looking calmly at his grubby and depressing surroundings, “is that I have lived too long.”

  —Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and

  the Gangster Life

  MOTEL, 1979

  Divorced, alone, Buddy Lansky was forty-nine, destined for a convalescent home called Arch Creek from which he would be evicted, but for now still here at the motel. When he woke up, the sunlight moved like pale, almost invisible clouds behind the pulled blind and he knew without looking at the clock that it was not even seven yet. He liked to sleep with the TV on, the sound turned off, sometimes not only at night but throughout the day and it was for this reason that he sometimes woke too early, like now, because he’d slept too much in the daytime. It would be at least two hours before his helper, Booker, came to undress him, the bathtub running, Booker taking the diaper off, not talking, spreading the two white towels on the bed and turning Buddy over with a low all right, Buddy’s naked body exposed like a baby’s, legs like spindled sticks, the cold air-conditioned air between his thighs. On TV there would be a game show, or there would be Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith playing golf, and Booker wouldn’t seem to notice or even hear it, and sometimes the incongruity of it would make Buddy giggle nervously, and that made Booker even more silent, made it easier for Booker to say later that it would be more money next week, not just the seventy but seventy-five. The motel was all the way up in North Miami Beach near Sunny Isles, a half hour from Booker’s uncle’s house in Overtown, and if he couldn’t borrow his uncle’s car then it was at least an hour and a half by a combination of buses. They had met here at the motel, a run-down place of fake tiki roofs and rampant banana trees fronting the traffic, Booker a porter, Buddy working the switchboard there for years, until a few weeks ago when he’d begun losing the sensation in his fingers.

  He lay flat in bed feeling damp, unable to move his arm for now, waiting for it to come back when he got the circulation going. With just one arm, he had trouble adjusting the twisted neck of his pajama shirt, and his breathing tightened, the perspiration rising on his face. The room smelled like cigarettes—all the rooms smelled like cigarettes and lemon disinfectant. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again, but his mind kept wisecracking along. You got so bored with your despondency. The boredom somehow called for further abasement, as if abasement could release you from the fear. He let himself urinate int
o the diaper and felt it spread over his testicles and down his legs. He was a boy, his ex-wife Annette would always tell him. The gambling, the prostitutes—somehow even these mistakes remained the mistakes of a boy. He tried to go back to sleep. Then he struggled to hoist himself into the chair that Booker had left by the bed last night. He fisted his hands on either side of his hips and pressed hard down into the bed and made an effort to swivel his legs around, but he started sweating again, suddenly very hot the moment he realized he wasn’t going to do it, his brow tense, the sweat running down his face, down his neck. It was really very funny if you thought about it for even a minute. The wheelchair had a little lever you pressed to make it move forward, make it move back, but now he couldn’t even do that, now the ridiculous stillness had spread farther out—arms and legs drifting free of the brain, the tide seeping up, always so slowly that you thought it might have stopped, but it never stopped, it had a patient sense of humor. You went from being unable to walk to being unable to move practically at all. They should wheel him off a bridge. Wheel him out of an airplane. He liked the cartoon image of himself laughing his embarrassed laugh as Booker wheeled him off the roof of the motel, the hysterical yodel of his scream, then Crash! Bang! Whop! He lay there daydreaming about it, then waiting for Booker to arrive, then waiting for The Price Is Right to start. Fifty dollars a day—that was what he was going to have to ask his father for. Not just seventy or seventy-five a week, but fifty a day. Three hundred and fifty a week. Eighteen thousand a year. That was the going rate for a full-time medical aide who could feed you and clothe you and bathe you when you could no longer do these things yourself.