Meyer Lansky — "the mob's accountant" with roots in the Russian Empire
Meyer Lansky was born Maier Suchowljansky in Grodno, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, now Hrodna in Belarus, in 1902, into a Polish-Jewish family. His exact birth date was not recorded; on the family's arrival in the United States an immigration official assigned him the date of 4 July 1902.
His parents brought him to New York in 1911, and he grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He left school early and was apprenticed as a toolmaker; his name was Americanised to Meyer Lansky, and he became a naturalised citizen in 1928.
As a young man he met Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and Charles "Lucky" Luciano, and in the 1920s his group became involved in liquor smuggling during Prohibition and in other illegal enterprises. Federal and local law enforcement later described him as the principal financial organiser of a national crime network. From the mid-1930s he developed gambling operations in Florida, New Orleans and Cuba, and he was an investor in the Flamingo hotel and casino that Siegel opened in Las Vegas; Siegel was killed in 1947, and accounts differ on whether Lansky had any part in it. He also invested in legal businesses, including hotels and golf courses, and by 1970 his holdings were estimated at 300 million dollars.
In 1970, facing a grand jury and a possible indictment for income-tax evasion, he went to Israel and applied to remain under the Law of Return, which grants citizenship to Jews. After a legal dispute lasting about twenty-six months, Israel refused him residence, and on his return to the United States he was arrested at Miami airport. A judge later ruled, on medical evidence, that he was too ill to stand trial on the tax charges, and most of the remaining charges were dropped. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's report of his funeral, he was never convicted of a serious crime.
He lived quietly in Miami Beach in his last years and died there of lung cancer on 15 January 1983, aged eighty, and was buried after a simple Orthodox Jewish service. The character Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II is widely seen as modelled on him.
"Brought by his parents from Grodno to New York in 1911; grew up on the Lower East Side and was naturalised in 1928."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Grodno, Grodno Governorate (now Hrodna, Belarus)
Born on 4 July 1902 in Grodno, Russian Empire (now Belarus). In 1911 he emigrated through the port of Odessa to the United States and grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
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Grodno, Grodno Governorate (now Hrodna, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.