Read Daughter of the King Online
Authors: Sandra Lansky
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After the Prohibition laws were repealed in 1933, Madden got into trouble in New York with still another murder, that of gangster Mad Dog Coll, and decided to bring his nightclub skills to the sunny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.
F
or 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.