Messick, Hank. Lansky. London: Robert Hale & Company, 1973. 286 pages.

When the U.S. edition of this book was published in early 1971, Meyer Lansky was living quietly in Tel Aviv. Journalists there suddenly became interested, and following a Hebrew edition of this book, public opinion forced the government of Israel to deny citizenship to Lansky under the Law of Return. This biography of Lansky portrays him as chairman of the board of the international syndicate. It was Lansky who set up Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, who gave orders to Santo Trafficante, and who cooperated with Paul Ricca, the man behind "publicity hound" Sam Giancana.

Hank Messick's many books on organized crime are widely respected. In 1965 he was hired by the Miami Herald for a series on Meyer Lansky, and his first book, The Silent Syndicate (1967), reported on crime and gambling in Kentucky and Ohio. Messick makes a distinction between the syndicate and the Mafia. The former is international and multicultural, and often includes the latter as a subset. But beginning with the Joseph Valachi hearings in 1963 and J. Edgar Hoover's "La Cosa Nostra" hype, the Mafia got all the attention while Lansky was left alone. Messick was the first to hint at the reason for this: Hoover had been compromised by Lansky, as Anthony Summers recently confirmed in "Official and Confidential" (1993). This debate is significant today for assassination theorists, because most "Mafia did it" authors still give Lansky a mere footnote or two at best.
ISBN 0-7091-3966-7

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