Meyer Lansky - Death

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.