A mafia boss spent his final years in Miami Beach. See what his life was like

Miami Herald

03-04-2025

Meyer Lansky, gray eminence of organized crime, died of lung cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, in 1983.
By popular belief, never proved legally, Lansky taught the Mafia's crude leadership of the 1920s and 1930s, showing them the subtleties of financial manipulation, concealment and investment of the proceeds of bootlegging and gambling.
Publicly, Lansky ridiculed such notions. He was a small, thin, bowlegged, mild-mannered, grandfatherly man who looked like anyone else his age, playing out life's closing years in Miami Beach. He was spotted walking the streets of South Beach and having a corned beef sandwich at Wolfie's deli.
Let's take a look at Lansky through the words and pictures from the Miami Herald archives:
The faces of mob boss Meyer Lanksy
Obituary: Meyer Lansky dies, eluding law a final time
Published Jan. 16, 1983
By Miami Herald staff writer Arnold Markowitz
Meyer Lansky, gray eminence of organized crime, died of lung cancer at 6 a.m. Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. He was 80 years old, a legend who laughed off a near- lifetime of determined but futile investigations.
Lansky, attended around the clock by private nurses, died in his sleep. Funeral and burial arrangements were described only as private. A hospital spokeswoman said the staff was under strict orders to reveal no other details.
In Lansky's Jewish faith, it is customary to bury the dead as quickly as possible. For years, he and his wife Thelma have had gravesites reserved in Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem, where Lansky's Russian parents lie.
What FBI, police, state and congressional investigators consistently failed to accomplish, the ailments of old age achieved.
Lansky endured several hospital confinements in recent years, all at Mount Sinai. A tumor was removed from his left lung in February 1980. Last November, he returned for treatment of a stomach ailment. On New Year's Eve he was admitted again, for dehydration.
By popular belief, never proved legally, Lansky sophisticated the Mafia's crude leadership of the 1920s and 1930s -- showing them the subtleties of financial manipulation, concealment and investment of the proceeds of bootlegging and gambling.
Lansky, whose Russian-Jewish heritage disqualified him for official membership in the Mafia, was its leading nonmember associate. Most investigators were convinced that he was more influential than any family boss. As he grew old and his health deteriorated, he is believed to have assumed the role of an elder statesman-consultant on gambling and finance.
Publicly, Lansky ridiculed such notions. He was a small, thin, bowlegged, mild-mannered, grandfatherly man who looked like anyone else his age, playing out life's closing years in Miami Beach.
In his old age, he acquired a light-hearted manner and sense of humor that further belied his gory legend, full of tales of ancient gangland rivalries settled in bullets, blood, garrotes and cement galoshes. How much of the legend is true and whether it truly disturbed Lansky seem unlikely ever to be known publicly.
Lansky married Anna Citron in 1929. They had three children, Paul, Bernard and Sandra, before Lansky divorced Anna and married Thelma Schwartz in 1948.
Lansky and 'Teddy' were together until he died. They lived unobtrusively among other retired condominium dwellers in Imperial House at 5255 Collins Ave., Miami Beach. For years they dined out frequently. More recently, they employed a live-in chef, neighbors said Saturday.
Federal law enforcement agencies made extraordinary efforts to convict him. Once in 1973 they succeeded -- for contempt of court for ignoring a grand jury summons.
A judge sentenced him to a year and a day. While Lanksy remained free on a $200,000 bond, an appeals court studied the record. Then it overturned the verdict, ruling that the timing of the summons had made it virtually impossible for Lansky to appear.
In 1972, they got him deported from Israel, where he had lived for two years and had hoped to finish his life.
Once the U.S. Justice Department created an organized crime strike force with a single mission: Get Lansky. The project flopped.
In June 1980, the Israeli government agreed, after numerous refusals, to grant Lansky a tourist visa. When Israeli legislators complained that Lansky probably planned to consort with the local underworld, the government changed its mind and rejected his application.
'I'm not a threat to Jews or society,' Lansky complained when Israel's Interior Ministry called him one of the most dangerous men in the world. 'I'm a Jew, and I want to go to Israel just as any other Jew would.'
His medical records, often presented in courts as proof that Lansky could not possibly endure legal proceedings, read like coroners' reports, not descriptions of a living man. According to the doctors' documents, Lansky suffered from heart attacks, stroke, coronary artery thrombosis, angina pectoris, duodenal ulcers, osteoarthritis, vertigo, chronic bronchitis, percarditis, lipoma, bursitis and cerebral and vascular diseases.
Death, for years a faint-hearted adversary, threatened more aggressively in February 1980. Lansky went to Mount Sinai with a tumor on his left lung and was in critical condition after surgeons removed the growth. He bounced back, as he had after open heart surgery in 1973.
He seemed a man of endless durability. Despite the succession of diseases, he eventually would turn up in public chipper, full of wisecracks.
'Thanks, you look well yourself,' he would say. 'Gained some weight, did you?'
Most of those public appearances were before grand juries. Lansky was a popular guest even though it was a waste of time to send him a summons. Once, a state prosecutor who questioned him at a grand jury session said afterward that Lansky had been 'generally affable.' Had the witness been evasive? The prosecutor admitted he wasn't sure.
'There's no such thing as organized crime,' Lansky said with a straight face during a 1978 interview. 'Instead of constantly talking about organized crime, why don't the authorities do something about all the crime in the streets?'
Lansky was born in 1902 in Grodno, Russia. The exact date is unknown, but when he and his parents arrived in the United States on April 4, 1911, immigration officers assigned him July 4 as a birthday.
Meyer Sucholjansky, his true name, ended his formal education in 1917 when he graduated from the eighth grade at New York Public School 34. He was trained as a tool and die maker.
In spite of his reputation as an important figure in organized crime, he was rarely arrested and spent less than three months of his life in jails.
His first arrest, Oct. 24, 1918, was for felonious assault. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct. Lansky paid a $2 fine.
In 1921, he is believed to have joined forces with Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel to form the Bugs and Meyer Mob. The gang specialized in hijacking cars and guarding bootleg liquor shipments for other hoodlums during the Prohibition era.
In 1928, the year he became a U.S. citizen, Lansky was charged with attempted homicide in the shooting of a gangster, John Barrett, in New York. Barrett recovered and refused to testify against Lansky.
During the same year, Lansky joined Mafia hoodlum Joe Adonis in the operation of a major bootleg liquor operation in New York, apparently his first close association with the Mafia.
Intermittent power struggles occupied the Mafia in the 1930s and 1940s. In September 1931, gunmen supposedly working for Lansky killed Salvatore Maranzano, then the Mafia 'boss of all bosses.'
In 1932 Chicago police raided an apparent summit meeting of gangsters, and arrested Lansky and five others on vagrancy charges. In a police photograph, Lansky stood next to racketeer Charles (Lucky) Luciano.
When Lansky asked for citizenship 40 years later, Israel used the same picture as evidence that he was a gangster and a threat to the state. Citizenship was denied.
Although Lansky usually diverted questions about his career with a joke and a warning against tobacco, he made a rare confession in Lansky, Mogul of the Mob, a book written by three Israeli journalists to whom he granted limited cooperation.
'I admit quite frankly that I made a fortune from bootlegging,' he said.
Lansky is believed to have moved into the lucrative gambling field during 1934-40, setting up and operating illegal gambling casinos in South Florida, New Orleans, Havana and Saratoga, N.Y.
During World War II, Lansky worked with the U.S. Navy in secret wartime projects, bargaining for Luciano's release from prison in exchange for organized crime's help in protecting the New York waterfront from saboteurs. Some stories say Sicilian- born Mafiosi provided information used in planning the invasion of Sicily.
After the war, Lansky expanded his casino network. His partner Siegel extended operations to California and then Las Vegas. With mob money he built the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, harbinger of a new age of gambling opulence. After a disagreement with Luciano over the operation of the casino, Siegel was shot to death in 1947.
Lansky left Havana, site of one of his gambling operations, during the Fidel Castro takeover in 1959.
Lansky's influence apparently was at its height during the 1950s and early 1960s. Testimony before U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver's committee investigating organized crime indicated tht Lansky was adept at combining gambling with corruption so his casinos could operate at high profits in Florida, Cuba, Las Vegas, the Caribbean, London and Europe.
Gambling produced Lansky's only Florida conviction. He and his brother Jake pleaded guilty in Broward County to keeping a gambling house and were fined $2,000 each. In 1953, Meyer pleaded guilty to five charges of illegal gambling in the racetrack town of Saratoga, N.Y. He served 2 1/2 months of a three-month sentence.
In 1970 he was arrested as he returned to Miami from a secret meeting in Acapulco. The charge was having no prescription for the indigestion pills he carried. The verdict: not guilty.
In March 1971, a U.S. grand jury in Miami ordered Lansky to testify about 'skimming,' or removing profits of the Flamingo Casino for distribution without payment of taxes. When he failed to respond, he was indicted in Miami and New York on tax evasion charges.
Others indicted were gambler Dino Cellini and Miami Beach hotelmen Morris Lansburgh and Sam Cohen. Legal maneuvers, centered on Lansky's medical condition, won him postponement after postponement.
In the fall of 1976 in Nevada, U.S. District Judge Roger D. Foley dismissed the final federal charge against Lansky. Foley ruled, after hearing uncontested medical evidence, that Lansky would never be well enough to stand trial. He lived another six years.
Lansky fought attempts by the Israeli Interior Ministry to oust him from the country as an undesirable. The case dragged on until September 1972, when the Israeli high court denied him citizenship. His tourist visa had expired and the United States Embassy had revoked his passport.
He left Israel that November and spent two days flying more than 13,000 miles in search of asylum. He visited Switzerland, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, but none would accept him. Lansky was arrested when the long flight ended at Miami International Airport.
Kenneth Whitaker, then agent in charge of the FBI's Miami office, boarded the airplane, at about 5:30 a.m. Only one passenger was asleep. Whitaker woke him up.
'Meyer?' the agent said. 'Ken Whitaker, FBI.'
'I guess I'm home,' Lansky said, dryly.
A corps of FBI agents escorted Lansky through the Customs and Immigration routines. In Customs, he took a container of pills for his heart condition from a pocket and bent over a water fountain. A uniformed policeman grabbed and stopped him. Whitaker stopped the officer.
Whitaker, realizing what the medication was for, told the officer to let him 'go ahead and take the pill.'
'You're a smart one, Whitaker,' Lansky said.
Whitaker recalls another encounter with Lansky, about 18 months after the airport arrest. Whitaker was walking through a hotel lobby after making a speech to a Kiwanis Club when he saw Lansky sitting in a chair. Lansky nodded, and Whitaker began walking toward him when he found his path blocked by a large, tough-looking man.
'Oh, no. No, no,' Lansky told the human barricade. 'Let Mr. Whitaker say hello. I'm not on an airplane.'
The Miami and New York income tax evasion charges were consolidated, and Lansky was tried in Miami in July 1973. He and associate Dino Cellini, who could not be found to be tried, were accused of conspiring with New England Mafia leaders to hide income they received from The Colony Club in London, fronted by former actor George Raft, during 1967 and 1968.
Lansky was accused of setting up the casino and collecting large payments from its profits without reporting the income on his tax returns. He was acquitted after a week-long trial. The jury believed his wife's testimony that he was with her when the major prosecution witness, confessed Mafioso Vincent (Big Vinnie) Teresa, said Lansky was accepting payments.
The Lansky legend, more by speculation than by proof, linked him indirectly to many a mob killing. Indeed, he was involved in dangerously competitive illegal activities and associated with men known for violent business methods. Most of the time, though, the gory environment missed Lansky directly.
Once, in 1977, it came very close.
Lansky's stepson Richard Schwartz, one of Thelma Lansky's children by a prior marriage, was in a fancy Miami Beach restaurant, The Forge. On the next barstool sat Craig Teriaca, a younger man with strong family connections of his own.
Each man took the affirmative in a debate over ownership of a $10 bill on the bar between them. Schwartz won by shooting Teriaca dead.
On a Wednesday morning 3 1/2 months later, as Schwartz was about to open the restaurant he ran, a shotgun stopped him.
There was no sign of robbery. Motive revenge, the police deduced. Some speculated that it meant the start of mob war. No war materialized, so there was more speculation:
No gangster would have dared to kill Lansky's stepson, the speculators said. Not without the old man's consent.