Maybe all Daddy did in Hot Springs was relax, swim, ride, take the federally protected radioactive waters, but there was a sinister undercurrent in Daddy’s very presence in Hot Springs. The water was just about the only thing that was legal there, and my parents sent the family postcards from the Arlington Hotel, where they stayed, which had been Al Capone’s southern headquarters. Owney Madden wasn’t exactly an uncle, but he went way back with Daddy. He was born in England, came to New York, and led a Hell’s Kitchen gang called the Gophers. He went to Sing Sing for killing a number of his rivals. With a background like that you would think he’d be doomed for life, but Prohibition could turn abject notoriety into success and celebrity. Madden, paroled from Sing Sing, became an overlord of New York nightlife. His driver was the future movie star George Raft, or Uncle George, who didn’t have to act when he played a gangster.
In addition to the Cotton Club, Madden was the money behind the Stork Club, where the most famous and powerful of all gossip columnists, Walter Winchell, held court in the Cub Room. Over two-thirds of all Americans listened to Winchell’s radio show or read his column. And Winchell, arguably the most powerful man in the media, was Daddy’s friend. Winchell lived in the art deco tower called the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West, where my parents had lived before they moved nine blocks north to the Beresford. Theirs was a small world, and after Prohibition, apart from movie stars and show people, no one could have been more high profile than my uncles, who seemed to be sitting on top of the world and making it spin.
After the Prohibition laws were repealed in 1933, Madden got into trouble in New York with still another murder, that of gangster Mad Dog Coll, and decided to bring his nightclub skills to the sunny South in Hot Springs, a spa town with a long history of corruption. President Clinton grew up there with a stepfather who had a gambling addiction that seemed to come from the town’s supposedly magic waters.
In the twenties, a young Tennessee minister’s son came to Hot Springs to coach football and teach math. He was so appalled by the decadence of this American Sodom that he fled north to Yale Law School, the first step on what would become a crusade against organized crime whose prime target was my father. Estes Kefauver was the man, who more than anyone else, demonized Meyer Lansky and my uncles. His “war on crime” in 1951 would upend my seemingly perfect teenage life and Daddy’s life as well. Owney Madden’s Deep South empire was headquartered at the Southern Club in Hot Springs, a fancy pre-Vegas casino-nightclub that became famous as the spot where Daddy’s great friend and mentor Uncle Charlie Luciano was apprehended in 1935 in what became a love-hate affair with the American government. Uncle Charlie, who would host me in his exile in Naples on a European trip in 1955, had been the king of New York before Uncle Frank Costello. New York’s wildly ambitious district attorney, Tom Dewey, saw his road to the White House paved with the scalps of my uncles.
Dewey couldn’t have gotten a bigger one than Uncle Charlie, whom he sent to Dannemora prison for fifty years, not for murder, which he couldn’t prove, but for promoting prostitution, which my uncles considered a joke. Prostitution was chump change for Gotham’s Mister Big, but despite the best criminal defense lawyer money could buy, Uncle Charlie lost his fight with Dewey. Even though America sent him to prison, Uncle Charlie turned the other cheek and wouldn’t turn his back on America during the war. As a kid, World War II terrified me. The air raid sirens for the drills made me think we were being invaded. The blackouts were even worse, because I thought the enemy had taken over and was going to kill us all. I was afraid to sleep in my room. I had to sleep in my parents’ big bed, in Daddy’s strong arms. He was fearless. He always reassured me. “Don’t worry, darling, we’re going to win.” One thing we didn’t have to endure during the war was rationing. Everybody else, even the rich people in the Majestic and the Beresford, complained about food shortages, clothing shortages, medicine shortages. The Lanskys had no shortages. It paid to be connected. Even as a kid, I sensed we were extra-special.
Daddy quietly put his money where his mouth was, though he refused to brag about it, or any of his accomplishments. First, even before I was born in 1937, he used some of his old Lower East Side Bugs-Meyer musclemen to break up Nazi rallies in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side. There were a lot of Germans in New York then, and a lot of them were loyal to the Fatherland. If they could be true to their roots, Daddy had to be true to his. If Daddy had a special nostalgia for his young life, he never showed it to me. Daddy never discussed the past and didn’t dwell on the present. What inspired him was the future. What I learned of the past I got from Buddy. Daddy’s youth was a time of bootleg booze and bullets and danger, cracking skulls and shoot-outs that I still can’t imagine my buttoned-up banker-like father being a part of.
It was an era that provided still more uncles, Uncle Red Levine, Uncle Doc Stacher, and my real uncle, Jack Lansky, Daddy’s younger brother, all a little rougher than the Dinty Moore elite. Unlike the others from “the old days,” Uncle Jack Lansky seemed weak and timid, lucky to have a fearless big brother to protect him. The others seemed rough because they were, tough Jews to a man, living and laughing refutations of the brainy, nerdy, meek, rabbinical stereotype. These were Jews who could kill. Notwithstanding our Christmas trees, our liver and bacon, my brothers not being bar mitzvah’ed, Daddy would not abandon his pride in the faith of his parents and of his oldest friends, and he certainly would not give up his pride in being an American.
New York was in real danger. Those air raid drills weren’t just for caution. The enemy was right here. This was brought home to me when the famous French luxury liner Normandie was sabotaged at the West Side docks and set ablaze. We could see the cataclysmic black clouds of smoke all the way uptown at the Beresford. If the blackouts were bad, this was worse. The sirens wouldn’t end, and I thought the city had been bombed and that worse was coming.
Days later, on our way to dinner, Daddy drove his Oldsmobile (he refused anything show-offy like a Cadillac or Packard) down 10th Avenue to show me the wreck of the ship. The Normandie, he explained, couldn’t sail the seas anymore with passengers, because the German submarines would sink it. So the French had given it to us to use as a troop ship and we renamed it the Lafayette, after the French general who helped us win the Revolutionary War against the British. For a guy who never got to high school, Daddy was a whiz on American history. Whatever we called it, the ship was finished, destroyed. It looked like a giant beached whale, lying on its side, its innards burnt out, smoke still billowing from its ruined carcass.
Why would Daddy take a five-year-old to Dinty Moore’s during wartime? Because I was too scared to stay at home without him. Plus I loved to go out with him. That night we had dinner with Uncle Joe, who was the big boss of the Fulton Fish Market downtown and as the head of the seafood workers’ union, one of most powerful men on the waterfront. His name was Joseph Lanza, but everyone called him “Socks,” I guess because he must have socked a lot of tough guys in the nose on his way to the top of this super-tough field.
You’d think Uncle Joe would have been a big fish eater, but I never saw him touch anything but big steaks. At dinner, Daddy was even more serious than usual, and he and Uncle Joe kept talking about “Salvatore” who turned out to be the famous uncle Charlie I was yet to meet, because he was otherwise engaged at Dannemora prison. Uncle Joe and Uncle Charlie had both been born in Sicily, and Uncle Joe, who had a heavy accent, stuck to the Old World lingo. Of all my uncles, Uncle Joe was one of the rare ones who didn’t affect the custom-tailored style of a Wall Street banker. Somehow his bullish presence made me feel even safer during wartime.
What Daddy and Uncle Joe cooked up at Moore’s was a patriotic Irish stew crafted by a Jew and an Italian. Uncle Charlie would use his still-massive influence, which no prison bars could contain, to mobilize dockworkers up and down the East Coast to root out the kind of sabotage that had sunk the Normandie and that conceivably could sink America. Of the thousands of Italian longshoremen, many might
be as loyal to our enemy Mussolini as some of the Yorkville Germans could be to Hitler, and Uncle Charlie had the immense power to find out who the traitors were and stop them before more harm was done. But Meyer Lansky and Socks Lanza had an ulterior motive, which was to free Salvatore Luciano from Dannemora. Daddy was all about deals, and this was a big one, involving naval intelligence and Governor Dewey, who agreed to pardon Uncle Charlie in return for his inside information, his vast influence, and his high-level detective work. Although Daddy dreamed up the deal, it was brokered by Daddy’s lawyer, Moses Polakoff, a grand and scholarly man I would call “the Professor.” As with most of Daddy’s deals, all the parties—Governor Dewey, the new New York district attorney, Frank Hogan, the navy, the entire war effort—got what they needed and wanted. Many Axis agents on the waterfront and beyond were identified and arrested. No more ships were sunk. Plus Uncle Charlie provided valuable intelligence to the Allies for their invasion of Sicily.
Knowledge was power and also a gambling chip. Once the war was won, Governor Dewey kept his word and pardoned Charlie in 1946. And Daddy was key in concluding the deal in which Luciano, in return for his liberty, had to agree to be deported back to Italy. It may have seemed like a raw deal for a would-be patriot who had helped America win the war. But it was freedom, and better to dress in the elegant silks of the Via Veneto than in the rough prison stripes of Dannemora. “You always have a friend in Italy,” Daddy told me many times, once I was old enough to figure out where and what Italy was.
Did I really want friends like that? As a little girl, as Daddy’s girl, I had no idea what Daddy and my uncles were really up to. Whatever it was, they seemed great at it, and I was living like a little queen.
The Unclehood had seized a golden opportunity in Prohibition, a law that very few Americans liked or respected. In fact most Americans liked the people who broke the Prohibition laws way more than those who tried, in vain, to enforce them. And when America gave up its crazy dry experiment in 1933 Daddy and my uncles leapt into this void, turning the speakeasies—that for the prior decade had sold their bootleg liquor—into legitimate nightclubs. Illegal gambling still went on in the secret rooms of these glamorous roadhouses and talent emporia across America. The gambling was where the big money was, because Americans liked to gamble just about as much as they liked to drink.
Just as Washington, D.C., had foolishly tried to keep people from drinking, now the legislators’ puritan efforts were focused on gambling, which, as time as shown, has become as American a pastime as baseball. Daddy and my uncles were just as puritan as the men in Washington. They hated drugs. They hated prostitution. But the Washington party line was that if you had liquor and if you had gambling, then drugs and whores were sure to follow, and Tom Sawyer’s America would turn into Owney Madden’s Hot Springs. As we have seen from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, the puritan doomsday has been a false alarm.
The Unclehood was in the entertainment business, giving the people what they wanted, up to a point. There were other elements in gangland who might have catered to “true crime,” but not the Unclehood. As one of my uncles, Uncle Doc Stacher, often said, the main difference between Meyer Lansky and his old Prohibition friend Joe Kennedy was Kennedy’s rosary and his Harvard degree. If Daddy and my uncles had had those degrees (forget the rosaries), they probably would have ended up on Wall Street. Without them, they ended up in Havana and Las Vegas. But what really is Wall Street, anyway, but a fancy casino whose croupiers have MBAs?
None of my uncles had gone to Harvard, or anywhere near it other than maybe to pull some heist in Cambridge or Arlington. They hadn’t gone to any college. In fact, I think my father’s eighth-grade education was the equivalent of a Ph.D. in the Unclehood. He was the scholar of the group, the wise man. But look how far they had come with nothing but their brains and their fists. It was all a matter of perspective, a matter of opportunity, a matter of respect. Whether Kennedy or Lansky, the key to success was all about taking risks. Daddy wanted his children to be armed with degrees, rather than the pistols and brickbats that he and Uncle Benny and all the others were armed with. That Buddy and I, true to the Unclehood, never finished high school, that we were millionaire dropouts, was one of the great tragedies and heartbreaks in the life of a man who never displayed his emotions. But I can guarantee you that no daughter of Wall Street had as privileged a girlhood as the one Daddy arranged for me. That I blew it has always haunted me, the thought that maybe there was a Lansky curse, that we were all genetically programmed to take the wrong turn, to miss the yellow brick road, and to choose the dark highway to oblivion.
CHAPTER TWO
AMERICAN PRINCESS
For a girl whom many assumed to be a Jewish American Princess, I had absolutely nothing Jewish in my upbringing. It started with my birth, on December 6, 1937, at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, where a Catholic priest my mother had befriended—later the famed Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston—blessed the event. I was raised by an Irish nanny named Minnie Mullins and a Filipino butler/chauffeur named Tommy, who was a devout Catholic. My mother made a big deal of celebrating Christmas, with a huge tree and more gifts than any Santa could handle, and an even bigger one of celebrating Easter, with Easter egg hunts and baked hams and custom-made hand-painted dresses for me that I could have worn in the Easter Parade if Daddy had only let me.
We lived in one of the most expensive apartment houses in Boston, on Beacon Street in Back Bay, in the heart of the Mayflower aristocracy, with a view over the Charles River and the Esplanade where the Boston Pops Orchestra played their summer concerts. This was WASP country, Harvard country, the land of Cabots and Lodges. And Lanskys. Meyer Lansky was precisely the kind of man the Puritan New England preachers would have given angry sermons against. Yet here he was, the merchant of pleasure in the land of pain.
But pain was why we were in Boston, a pain that may have caused my parents to lose their Jewish faith. My brother Buddy was Meyer Lansky’s firstborn son, whom he hoped would become a Harvard man, a great man, a straight man. But Bernard Irving Lansky came into the world of the Depression in 1930 with the birth defect of spina bifida, which the doctors initially misdiagnosed as the even more limiting cerebral palsy. Spina bifida is a malformation of the spinal cord and vertebrae; cerebral palsy is a malady of the brain, just as it sounds. Buddy’s brain was fine. It was his body that had betrayed him, and with it, my parents’ big dreams for him. Mother spent a lot of time by herself in the great Reading Room of the gigantic Christian Science Church (Boston was the home of Christian Science) looking for answers she could never find, as to why God had let her down like this over Buddy.
Daddy had already made his first fortune in bootlegging, and he threw all of it at trying to cure his son, who could not walk and could barely use his arms. Daddy and Mommy took him to the best doctors in New York and all over the country, wherever there was a lead. They were the wandering Jews. They even tried the magic healing waters in Owney Madden’s Hot Springs. They would have travelled to Lourdes if they had thought there was a chance of a miracle. But when miracles did not appear, both of my parents seemed to give up on their own parents’ devout Judaism.
However, they didn’t give up on life. They tried again, and, two years later, in 1932, they hit the genetic jackpot with my brother Paul, who was not only the picture of his beautiful mother but also the picture of health. That same year, they also heard of a medical miracle worker at Boston’s Children’s Hospital who promised them that, like Jesus, he could make the lame walk. They kept their apartment at the Majestic and took a place in Boston. Daddy lived and breathed business, but it would still come second to Buddy. Daddy was on a mission. Mommy believed in the new doctor, Dr. Carruthers, and at the same time, with the support of Father Richard Cushing, she began believing in Jesus.
If anybody deserved the title of Jewish American Princess, it was my mother. Anna Citron had been a real catch for Daddy, who had definitely married “up” in 1929, from
his father Max’s grinding job pressing pants for slave wages. My parents had their honeymoon in Atlantic City, where Daddy characteristically mixed business and pleasure by attending a kind of summit conference of all my future Italian and Jewish uncles to plan the future of the liquor business while the end of Prohibition was in sight. It would be naïve to ignore the fact that part of Mommy’s allure to Daddy was that her family represented a way for Daddy to get out of bootlegging and go legit.
Mommy’s father, Moses Citron, was a major produce wholesaler in New York, who also had a chain of markets, Universal Fruit and Produce, in New Jersey. They lived on an estate in New Jersey near the Zwillmans in ritzy South Orange. Grandpa Citron looked very grand in his pinstripe suits. Daddy may have gotten some of his style ideas from him. Grandma Citron was enormously fat. She looked like she had devoured all of Grandpa’s produce.
Grandpa Citron had been born in Moldavian Romania to a fine family of produce barons. Romania was apparently something of a land of opportunity for Jews, at least compared to Russia and its pogroms, where the Lanskys didn’t have a fighting chance. He and Grandma Citron, whose first name was Shelma, had married into a world of culture, breeding, and wealth. They were not your typical immigrants.
Grandpa was a college graduate, and when he and Grandma came to America, they didn’t go to Ellis Island, like the Lanskys, but travelled by clipper ship to California, where they had purchased a big plot of land to create a vineyard. However, when they arrived, they found that the land they had bought in Europe was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Welcome to real estate in the New World. They quickly decamped to New York, where Grandpa Citron built his major produce business to mirror that of his family back in Romania.
Grandpa Citron had wanted my mother to go to college like he did. However, she was the baby in the family, the fourth of four children, and according to Old World tradition, she was expected to marry, and to do it as soon as possible. She was all of eighteen, and her parents always regretted that they had sacrificed her to those ancient traditions, rather than insisting that she get the higher education she clearly would have loved. Instead she married a “hoodlum.” Grandpa Citron didn’t care. He embraced his new son-in-law and gave him a job, so he would have a legitimate salary.
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