Death
Lansky's last years were spent quietly at his home in Miami Beach. He died of lung cancer on January 15, 1983, age 80, leaving behind a widow and three children. On paper, Lansky was worth almost nothing. At the time, the FBI believed he left behind over $300 million in hidden bank accounts, but they never found any money.
However, his biographer Robert Lacey describes Lansky's financially strained circumstances in the last two decades of his life and his inability to pay for health care for his relatives. For Lacey, there was no evidence "to sustain the notion of Lansky as king of all evil, the brains, the secret mover, the inspirer and controller of American organized crime." He concludes from evidence including interviews with the surviving members of the family that Lansky's wealth and influence had been grossly exaggerated, and that it would be more accurate to think of him as an accountant for gangsters rather than a gangster himself. His granddaughter told author T.J. English that at his death in 1983, Lansky left only $37,000 in cash. When asked in his later years what went wrong in Cuba, the gangster offered no excuses. "I crapped out," he said. Lansky even went as far as to tell people he had lost almost every penny in Cuba and that he was barely scraping by. In all likelihood, it was only an excuse to keep the IRS off his back. According to Lansky's daughter Sandra, he had transferred at least $15 million to his brother Jake due to his problems with the IRS. In fact, all of his men seemed to have more money than him. They owned hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, stocks and bonds and some like Sam Cohen and Alvin Malnik, even owned banks. "Meyer Lansky doesn't own property. He owns people." said Hank Messick, a journalist for the Miami Herald who had spent years investigating the character. Messick, the FBI and legendary District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau all believed Lansky had kept large sums of money in other people's names for decades and that keeping very little in his own was nothing new to him. If Lansky's low-key demeanor was fooling many people, it certainly was not fooling the FBI. He was treated like royalty wherever he went and the way some of the most powerful people in Miami conducted themselves around him was enough for them to keep him on the radar until his dying day. The truth regarding Lansky's wealth and influence remains a mystery.
Read more about this topic: Meyer Lansky
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
““Promise me solemnly,” I said to her as she lay on what I believed to be her death bed, “if you find in the world beyond the grave that you can communicate with me—that there is some way in which you can make me aware of your continued existence—promise me solemnly that you will never, never avail yourself of it.” She recovered and never, never forgave me.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)