The Outfit by Russo Gus

Author:Russo, Gus [Russo, Gus]
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2008-12-02T06:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Vegas

(The New Booze III)

13.

Cohibas and Carpet Joints

The glitzy, high-stakes world of casino gambling was anything but alien to the bosses of organized crime at midcentury. The Outfit had dipped a tentative toe into those waters during the previous two decades, but the New York and Florida gangs had been the first to take the concept seriously. Although the casino enterprise was one of the few gambling ventures in which the Chicagoans were behind the curve, they would soon make up for lost time. The Outfit’s decision, in the wake of Kefauver, to go increasingly legit, was not a total transformation, however; they had not lost their habit of making truckloads of money quickly. And the illegal opportunities afforded by legal casino gambling provided the perfect link in the hoods’ evolutionary chain.

The boss who had run the gauntlet years earlier for all the gangsters who would follow was Curly Humphreys’ East Coast alter ego, the genius of the New York Commission, Meyer Lansky. After rising to the top of the New York bootlegging trade, the greatest Jewish gangster in history focused his immense talents on casino gambling. And he chose as his laboratory the tropical paradise of Cuba with its amenable president, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar.

A Sunny Place for Shady People

Meyer Lansky first came to Havana in the 1930s, having already earned a reputation as the owner of the best “carpet joints” in America. These gambling parlors were the first to deliver the card, wheel, and dice games from the backrooms and sawdust floors of saloons into their own dedicated, upscale nightclubs. Lansky was thus among the forefathers of the plush gaming industry, establishing clubs up and down the East Coast. Naturally, for these illegal clubs to operate in the open, the compliance of local officials was required, and Lansky, like every other gangster boss, took advantage of the inherent greed of the upperworld. With officials properly satiated, Lansky oversaw carpet joints that succeeded wildly, due in large part to their reputation for fair gaming and intolerance for cheats. These Lansky traits brought him to the attention of Cuba’s new military leader, Fulgencio Batista, a U.S. sponsored strong-arm with visions of creating a combination of Paris and Monte Carlo in the Caribbean.

Batista’s dream of a Cuban music and gambling paradise was hindered by his homeland’s notorious reputation as an unregulated haven for cardsharks and swindlers. In this free-for-all atmosphere, where come-on games with names like “razzle-dazzle” and “cubolo” flourished, casual tourists were being robbed, and serious gamblers had no reason to play in the first place. To make matters worse, the races at regime’s premier, beautiful racetrack, Oriental Park, were rightfully perceived as being fixed daily. Again, the serious bettors and horse owners stayed away. When Batista sought to remedy the scandalous state of affairs, he wisely sought the expertise of a Polish-born, Brooklyn-bred thirty-five-year-old expert with a reputation for running the most honest gambling concessions in the United States. Born Mair Suchowljansky, he was now known as Meyer Lansky, the New York head of the Commission.

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