How Tough a Jew?
Meyer Lansky, by most accounts, could hold his own with the hardest of criminals. But in HBO's new film biography, he mostly dishes out servings of kosher nostra wisdom. Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
HE KEPT A PROFILE SO LOW that Congressional investigators had to spend an entire year issuing subpoenas to organized crime figures before they could establish that he even existed. Once he became known, he had the image of a walking calculator with cold eyes and somewhat cleaner hands than his comrades. But as depicted by actor Richard Dreyfuss in HBO's new biopic, Meyer Lansky comes across more like an amiable Jackie Mason than the inspiration for Murder Incorporated. Whether sweating out, at the King David Hotel, an Israeli Supreme Court decision on his request for citizenship, fighting heartburn in first class en route to Panama, or defending his son's right to attend West Point before an irate pol, this Lansky's quite the tummler, always good for a joke, a homily or a pearl of kosher nostra wisdom.
"After the Second War," Lansky quips to the hapless lawyer forced to accompany him during his futile bid for refuge from a vindictive Justice Department in the early 1970s, "three Jews meet in the DP camp to discuss plans where they'll go. First Jew says, 'I'm going to England.' Second Jew says, 'Uh-unh, I'm going to Canada.' Third Jew says, 'I'm going to Australia.' First Jew says, 'Isn't that a long way?' Third Jew says, 'From where?'''
"Lansky," the picture, as scripted by David Mamet and directed by John McNaughton, starts with a couple of klops, first as Meyer watches his grandfather face the wrong end of an axe in a Russian pogrom and, later, as he wreaks vengeance against Jew-baiting Irish thugs in New York. Next comes the kop - a Yiddishe kop - as Meyer deftly brings his quintessentially Jewish brains to bear upon the business problems of an increasingly appreciative Italian underworld that christened him their "Golden Jew."
Next we get the "whack," as Lansky reluctantly orders the hit on lifelong bosom buddy Benny "Bugsy" Siegel. We proceed to the kvetching and shrying as Lansky bemoans being hounded by the FBI and besmirched by a Jew-hating Congress, having his fortune heisted by Castro, and finding himself left to hang in the wind by a Jewish state that suspends the Law of Return for fear of losing a shipment of American jets. Everyone's an anti-Semite, Lansky complains, even the Jews. And one country is pretty much like the next, Israel too.
And finally, we get down to some serious fressing, as the septuagenarian zeide shares wistful memories and keen social insights with appreciative Israeli journalist Uri Dan (see box) over breakfast at Wolfie's deli in Miami Beach. Here, Meyer pulls the ultimate Jackie Mason.
"You were a soldier," he tells Dan when asked whether he regrets the violence he was associated with. "Do you talk about it? We did what we had to do. Have another piece of cake."
"Lansky," it becomes quickly apparent, is not so much about what it was like to be in the Mob as it is about what it might have been like being a tough Jew once upon a time in America. More than that, it reflects how the progeny of those immigrant masses continue to nurse grudges over their grandparents' mistreatment and exclusion at the hands of the gentile establishment, grudges it is not even certain their grandparents ever really held.
MEYER LANSKY, N_ Maier Suchowljansky, was born in 1902 in Grodno, Russia, into a family of Polish Jews who emigrated to New York's Lower East Side when the boy was 9. Running a floating crap game with Bugsy Siegel when he was 16, Lansky eventually segued into a partnership with Lucky Luciano that extended to car theft, burglary and bootlegging.
The founder of a hit squad that set the pattern for Louis "Lepke" Buchalter's Murder Inc., Lansky is believed to have prodded Luciano into killing crime boss Giuseppe Masseria and assuming control of his empire in 1931. With Luciano, Johnny Torrio and others, Lansky brokered the creation of a national crime syndicate.
For David Mamet and executive producer Frederick Zollo, two hyper-successful Jews from Chicago, the grudges of the past remain a source of enduring pain and rage. In Lansky, they found the ideal mouthpiece for the venting of their ire.
"Lansky," Zollo ("Mississippi Burning," "Quiz Show") told The Report, "was the Jew who refused to be immolated. Mr. Mamet is fascinated by these people who came from horrifying places where people were burning their houses down and murdering their families. They arrive in the U.S. as very tough people who were not going to let that happen to them again.
"There's a line in (Mamet's screenplay for) 'The Untouchables' that goes, 'They come after you with a knife, you go after them with a gun.' This is all through 'Lansky.' As Mr. Mamet once said to me, 'What, they let me out of Auschwitz, so now I have to kiss some Nazi's ass?'" "David Mamet," Zollo continues, "didn't put any words into Lansky's mouth that were not his own. I didn't make Lansky's choices. But I didn't go through a pogrom either." Halfway through the 30s, Lansky began establishing gambling operations in Florida and New Orleans, and later in Havana, where dictator Fulgencio Batista called him in to clean up casinos that were too crooked even for his tastes. Lansky got the syndicate to fund Bugsy's pioneering Flamingo Hotel casino in Las Vegas, and allegedly sanctioned the hit on Siegel when his childhood friend appeared to be skimming the profits.
Lansky's reputation was so mysterious and subject to exaggeration that even the Encyclopedia Britannica repeats the claim that he had amassed an estimated fortune of $ 300 million by 1970, the reputed fruits of gambling operations in the Bahamas and Europe, as well as side forays into narcotics smuggling, pornography, racketeering, prostitution and extortion. In fact, Lansky's wealth was nowhere near this; when he died in 1983, he had roughly $ 300,000 in assets, money that was insufficient to keep his eldest son, who suffered from cerebral palsy, out of a nursing home charity ward.
He died, moreover, never having been charged with or convicted of a major crime, a fact that did not dissuade Golda Meir from approving his expulsion a year or so after he fled to Israel in 1970 to avoid a federal grand jury and charges of tax evasion. Though he was eventually permitted to visit the country for one month a year, Lansky was ultimately barred even from burial there.
"Here was another guy," says Zollo, "with all this juice, and in the end, he's left with nothing. That image, and the anti-Semitism, to me, made Lansky a tragic figure."
Director John McNaughton ("Wild Things," "Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll") told The Report he assumed a somewhat more dispassionate view of Lansky. For McNaughton, the Jews were not unlike many other immigrants who "came to this country and had it tough."
"My father and grandfather were immigrants, as were most of the kids I grew up with. For me, for Richard (Dreyfuss), and, from what I know of him, for Mr. Mamet, our fathers figure pretty prominently in our emotional attachment to Meyer Lansky. I remember Richard playing the older Lansky with his silver hairpiece and his cardigan sweater, and with the way he moved. It would send chills up my spine the way he actually looked like my father."
But McNaughton rejects the claims of some critics that "Lansky" romanticizes its subject. "Lansky was a career criminal. And while there is some sympathy and humanness to him, he did whatever it took. Sometimes he hid behind the excuse of anti-Semitism because it was to his advantage. Sometimes, he really was picked on because he was a Jew.
"When he was a young man, he was extremely undemonstrative, cold and calculating, a pretty rough character. When he grew older though, he gained a sense of humor, especially about himself. He became somewhat attractive as a man."
McNaughton says he came away from a 10-day shoot in Israel last year with the sense that Lansky found no shortage of admirers during his own sojourn there in the 70s. Some Israelis, he says, knew of Lansky's success diverting arms slated for the Arabs to the Haganah in 1948. Others recalled the help he gave Meir in raising funds in the U.S. at the start of the war; still others his role in procuring the arms loaded onto the Irgun ship Altalena. "The only problem we had was shooting outside the King David Hotel. For some reason, they had a grudge against him."
"Probably skipped out on the bill," I say.
McNaughton responds with an anecdote. "There's a scene at the end that, to me, sets the style of the film. Lansky is sitting in the deli with the journalist, the waitress comes over and asks for his order, and Lansky says 'the usual.' "'What's the usual?' the journalist asks. Lansky ignores him. When she finally brings him his breakfast, Lansky looks at the kid and says, 'You see, if you wait around long enough, you get your answer.'
"Did he skip out on the bill?" McNaughton says, laughing. "Could be. We'll have to wait and see."