Daughter of the King (33 page)

Daddy arrived with his wife and his dog in the Holy Land in July 1970. He spent the next two years and an endless fortune in legal fees trying to assert what seemed like his God-given right to live in the land where his oppressed Jewish forebears were interred. An amendment to the Law of Return stated that Israel could exclude a Jew “with a criminal past likely to endanger public welfare.” Daddy had that one minor gambling conviction in Saratoga, but he would be hard-pressed to deny that his past was full of criminals. His whole life was one criminal past. On the other hand, Doc Stacher’s past was far worse, and they let him in.

What Doc Stacher did not have was Richard Nixon leaning on Golda Meir. Having grown up in Milwaukee on the eve of Prohibition, Meir had an American’s knee-jerk revulsion to the notions “Mafia” and “gangsters.” Meyer Lansky sounded bad enough. She did not want Israel to be flooded with his associates and an army of Italian wiseguys at the Wailing Wall. She was concerned about the image of her country and about the future goodwill of America’s president, which would have turned to ill will had she said “welcome” to Daddy.

I visited Israel once with Gary while Daddy was there, in the summer of 1971. Vince stayed home. Because I had had no Jewish upbringing, much of Israel was lost on me. On the surface, the country seemed like Florida, hot and full of Jews, but with mountains and history. Jerusalem was ancient, but Tel Aviv was quite similar to Miami, a very twentieth-century white deco city on the beach.

Despite all the efforts of this master string puller, nothing Daddy could do would soothe the hard hoodlum-fearing heart of Israel’s supreme court, which declared him
non grata
in what he thought was his own country. Still, not about to go back to America and, if Nixon had his way, spend the rest of his life behind bars, Daddy made a deal
to go to Paraguay, which was notorious for welcoming fleeing Nazi war criminals. After he left Israel, tailed by American agents, he spent close to two days on jets, zigzagging around the world, looking for refuge. I think of the Rolling Stones’ song
Gimme Shelter
.

Daddy’s odyssey took him from Tel Aviv to Zurich to Rio to Buenos Aires and finally to Asunción, Paraguay, where he had reputedly bribed the corrupt Stroessner dictatorship with millions of dollars to take him in. But the country that had offered its hospitality to the likes of Joseph Mengele and Martin Bormann out of nowhere got religion and rejected Daddy at the airport as an “undesirable.” With a suitcase of money, and accompanied by only one Israeli advance man/bodyguard, Daddy made last-ditch tries in Lima and Panama City before giving up the ghost. Where was George Wood to fix things when he needed him?

Daddy’s heart was doing flips. His stomach spasms were excruciating. It was amazing he survived the airborne ordeal at all. In the fusillade of a thousand news cameras, he arrived at Miami airport where an ambulance was waiting to take him straight to the hospital. It was preferable to a squad car to jail, though this was a homecoming Daddy never expected to have. Miami’s Mt. Sinai Hospital was as close to Mt. Sinai and the promised land as Daddy was going to get in this lifetime. That promised land was, like Nixon’s America, the land of broken promises.

Remarkably enough, Meyer Lansky, and not Richard Nixon, was the last man standing. While Nixon imploded in Watergate, Daddy was able to defeat, one by one, the barrage of criminal actions the Nixonians launched at him, mostly variations on the theme of contempt of court and tax evasion. One of the government’s biggest cases went up in smoke after the key witness, a Boston hoodlum named Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa testified that he was a bag man for Daddy. He described his job collecting the gambling debts of American tourists in Lansky-controlled London casinos, like the Colony, which had George Raft as its front man.

Teresa claimed that he had flown from London to Miami to deliver the undeclared loot to Daddy in person. The problem was that on the days that Teresa specified, Daddy was in a Boston hospital, under the care of the august Dr. Seymour Gray. Dr. Gray testified on Daddy’s behalf. Guess who the jury believed, Fat Vinnie or Dr. Gray? I had never seen Daddy happier than he was the day he walked out of that courtroom in July 1973, free and vindicated. He was seventy-one. He looked great, with hardly a gray hair, notwithstanding the endless harassments of Richard Nixon.

Daddy would live another decade. The only jail he would ever see was the prison of his own ill health. His next ordeal, in 1976, was heart bypass surgery, which was much riskier then than it is now, especially at his age. Again, Daddy was a cat with more than nine lives. After his long recovery, we began planning a big seventy-fifth birthday celebration for July 4, 1977. Paul, who was now divorced and working as a high-level American military adviser, often in the Far East, decided to join the festivities. After years of not speaking to me, he had seen I was on the straight and narrow path at long last. He forgave me for all my trespasses, and that meant everything to me. But the celebration we planned for Daddy got derailed when we had our immediate family’s first murder.

Teddy had a son from her first marriage, Richard Schwartz, whom Daddy had set up in the restaurant business in Miami. Richard, then forty-eight, was Buddy’s age and a needed companion. Daddy did everything he could for him, loyally dining at Richard’s place, The Inside, once a week, often with his famous friends. Big names, even if they were crime names, were good for business. I’m not sure if it was symbolic, but Daddy always sat outside at The Inside.

One night at The Forge, a Miami steak house that was once Al Capone’s favorite speakeasy, Richard got into a fight with a young golf pro named Craig Teriaca over a ten-dollar bill someone had left at the bar. Richard, who always carried a gun, shot and killed the man point blank. He killed the wrong man. Teriaca’s father was a big local
bookmaker and a made man in the Mafia. The Miami press blew the matter up into a Jews-versus-Italians gang war. Footing the legal costs of Richard’s criminal defense, Daddy found his name was all over the front pages again: “Meyer Lansky’s Killer Son.” Richard was forever using the L-word, dropping Daddy’s name, creating the illusion of blood ties. Blood was the word. While awaiting trial, Richard was getting into his big Cadillac when someone with a sawed-off shotgun blasted a huge hole through the driver’s side window, killing Richard instantly. No witnesses came forward. Another Lansky-related murder was never solved.

Buddy was getting sadder and sadder. He’d gotten divorced, losing Annette and his one chance of normalcy. He was living and working the switchboard in the Hawaiian Isle Motel, which belonged to Daddy’s developer friends, the Bloom brothers. Lapsing back into gambling, he had cashed in an insurance policy worth tens of thousands, bet it and lost it. Not only loan sharks, but the sharks of the IRS, who had a unique sense of smell for Lansky blood, had come after him. Overwhelmed, and deeply ashamed of letting Daddy down once again, Buddy took an overdose of sleeping pills. He managed to survive. He had those Lansky cat lives as well.

Everyone’s luck has to run out at some point. Daddy’s did. In the spring of 1980 he began coughing up blood. He flew to Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic. He came back and told us he was fine. He was lying. After a lifetime of Benson and Hedges, he had lung cancer. He had several operations, but the cancer was more tenacious than Richard Nixon. In 1981 his beloved Bruiser died and was buried besides Teddy’s beloved Tiger in Miami’s Pet Heaven cemetery. Bruiser became a hot paparazzi item on his walks with Daddy, and the press used him as a symbol of how the mighty had fallen.

Bruiser’s death seemed to sap Daddy of his will to go on. One night at dinner with Vince and me in the fall of 1982, he mentioned, casually in passing, “I only have a few more months.” It was as if he were talking about the weather. There was no fear, no self-pity. Just
the facts of life and death. Always game for a fight, Daddy began outpatient radiation treatments in Miami. They made things worse, preventing him from swallowing. The last food I remember him enjoying was a box of pears from Harry & David’s Fruit of the Month Club. He loved their sweetness.

Then it got worse. In late 1982 Daddy went back into Mt. Sinai Hospital for the last time. I went every day. I had a hard time handling how tiny, frail, and weak my great hero had become. Daddy could barely speak. I tried to move him in the bed, trying to make him as comfortable as a man could be all trussed up with tubes and wires, a dying puppet dancing to the dirge of the doctors. His feet were like ice. I put two pairs of wool socks on them to keep him warm. He conducted no nostalgia sessions on his life. He just stared at me with longing in his eyes. I hated sharing his last days with Teddy. Maybe he did as well. Once when Teddy started to go out for a break, saying, “Will you be all right without me?” Daddy snapped back and out of his fog, “As long as my beautiful daughter is here. Go!”

Daddy’s colleague Benny Sigelbaum was at Mt. Sinai at the same time. He told us how he could hear Daddy’s blood-curdling screams of pain down the corridor. I couldn’t imagine it. Daddy was the quietest, most controlled man who ever lived. Nothing could make him scream. Whatever they were doing had to be beyond torture. I wanted it to end. Finally it did. On January 15, 1983, Daddy’s last words to me were the simplest. “I love you.”

At the funeral home I viewed Daddy in his casket. Teddy had dressed him. Terribly. The impeccable dresser had a stain on his tie. I also saw that she had not put on shoes and socks. His feet were as ice cold as they had been in the hospital. “Who’s gonna look?” she said. I couldn’t stand that. The bravest man in the world could not go out with cold feet. Vince went home to get a new tie, a new suit, the best shoes and socks in Daddy’s vast collection. Daddy always wanted to look his best. Now Vince and I saw to that.

The burial was at Mt. Nebo Cemetery in Miami. There were probably ten times as many journalists and FBI agents at the burial than the forty or so mourners. Paul had flown in from Japan to see Daddy, but had gone home just before he died. Jewish burials are so fast, there was no time for Daddy’s pride and joy to come back and pay further last respects. The group of friends numbered a few of Daddy’s fellow “organized crime” suspects, Nig Rosen from Philadelphia, Niggy and Ida Devine from Las Vegas, the sunshine boys, the ones with the tans. Benny Sigelbaum got out of his Mt. Sinai sickbed to say goodbye.

But the “big guys” who were still alive, like Daddy’s dearest pal, Jimmy Blue Eyes, followed tradition and did not show, even though Uncle Jimmy was right there in Miami. Charley Luciano was long gone, having died of a heart attack at the Naples airport in 1962. Frank Costello died in 1973, also of a heart attack, at the Majestic. Daddy didn’t go to either of their funerals. Daddy probably would have skipped Uncle Jimmy’s last rites if he had the chance. Call it the denial of death.

Mommy died in New York, a year later. We brought her body down to Mt. Nebo, and buried her just one hundred yards or so from the man she loved and whom she could never get over. Buddy died in 1989. He was buried right next to Daddy. When Teddy passed away in 1996, she ended up in the Sigelbaum plot. She had an overwhelming phobia about being buried, and this was the only available spot for an above-ground mausoleum. Only after Teddy died did we install Daddy’s rose-colored marble headstone, which read simply “
LANSKY
.”

The big question was the one the family never answered. Where was the money?
Forbes
had estimated that Daddy was worth three hundred million dollars. How could it have possibly disappeared? There was very little money in the will, barely enough to keep Buddy going as long as he did. Vince had gotten a new job through Daddy, in the restaurant supplies business. Daddy loved those restaurants, and the restaurants loved him. Vince was doing fine. His whole thing was never, ever to ask Daddy for money.

Daddy had told us that if we ever needed anything, just go see Uncle Jack. With all the Nixon lawsuits threatening to take everything he had, Daddy had transferred that everything to his low-profile younger brother, who, while not the financial wizard Daddy was, had learned quite a bit from the master about moving money around. Where he moved it to, we didn’t know. Switzerland? The Bahamas? Buried in some mountains like in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
? In the hands of some mystery uncle? It could have been anywhere. But it had to be somewhere. I pushed for it, for Gary, for D.J., whose medical maintenance was enormously expensive. Daddy wanted to care for him the way he cared for Buddy. So I dragged Vince to do the unmentionable: Ask Uncle Jack where the treasure was.

Uncle Jack went crazy at the mere question of Daddy’s wealth. “I’m broke!” he screamed. “Broke! I have now idea what you’re talking about. Don’t do this to me. I have enough trouble with Teddy. She’s here every day
hocking
me for money.”

As we left Uncle Jack to his self-proclaimed poverty and misery, Vince turned to me and said, in mock-wiseguy style, “We have only two choices. Kill him, or kidnap him and torture him until he tells us where the money is. What do you want to do?”

I laughed. It felt good to laugh, after the months and months of tears. “Screw the money,” I said. “We have each other.” Jake Lansky may not have been crying wolf. Without his brother to guide his life, he died that September 1983. His will left his family vastly better off than Daddy’s, but didn’t come close to solving the three hundred million dollar mystery. Vince, the former private eye, didn’t even want to try. Vince didn’t care about money, and, in the end, which has turned out to be wonderfully happy, neither did I.

I
NDEX

Abbott and Costello,
177