Daughter of the King (30 page)

“
Your
country,” I wanted to snap back, but I was way too frightened. I had never had a run-in with the law before. The closest I had come was getting a speeding ticket in Miami, coming home at dawn very drunk the previous winter. I should have lost my license, on the spot. When the cop asked for my license and saw my name, he tore the ticket up. We ended up having a pancake breakfast together. He asked me out, but I was leaving too soon. No such luck this time. These guys meant business.

Gabby laid out what they were there for. The FBI, together with the IRS, was conducting an investigation into “skimming” in the Las Vegas casinos, whereby a huge amount of the take was not accounted for but “skimmed” off in cash, like the cream on top of milk, and never declared. That skim was where organized crime made its fortune, tax free. “I haven’t been to Las Vegas since my honeymoon in 1954,” I said, recalling but never mentioning the endless fat envelopes Marvin and I collected from my uncles. I guess that was the “skim.”

“It’s not you. It’s your father,” Gabby came right to the point.

“I don’t think Daddy goes to Las Vegas anymore. He’s been in Miami, Havana . . .”

“He doesn’t have to
be
there,” Gabby said. “Your father is a brilliant man.”

Gee. Thanks for the compliment. “Daddy has been sick,” I almost pleaded with them. “He almost died. He’s been in and out of hospitals.”

“We’re not after your father, Miss Lansky,” the nerd interrupted me with what surely was one of the biggest lies I had ever heard. We’re looking into his associates, who
do
go to Las Vegas, whom you may know.” The accountant pulled a thick notebook out of his briefcase and began reading names. “Benjamin Sigelbaum, Edward Levinson, Irving Devine, Jack Entratter, Vincent Alo, Jacob Lansky . . .” Ah, Uncle Jack. Was that what they were up to? Gabby knew I was on the outs with Jack and Anna over the wedding. Did they think a social slight would cause me to rat out my family?

Gabby broke in. “Sandi. I know these are your family, friends of your family. But do you really think they care that much about you? That they have your interests in mind? Just look at the facts . . .” I guess they did expect me to rat them out. People must have turned informants for less. “If your dad is innocent, if he’s not involved, you can help him . . .” By informing on everyone else, I thought to myself. Nice girl. Family girl.

I thought about the names on the list. Of course I knew them. With so many of Daddy’s old friends and allies either murdered, dying, or deported, this was the new Lansky generation. Bennie Sigelbaum, a Miami hardware magnate, was no Bennie Siegel in looks. But he had a huge personality, was a great storyteller, and Daddy liked him. Eddie Levinson, who ran the Fremont casino hotel in downtown Las Vegas, had worked for Daddy in Havana. Irving Devine, another “Niggy” because of his tan, had a huge meat company that supplied all Daddy’s hotels. Niggy’s wife, Ida, was supposedly the successor to Virginia Hill, the mob moll who carried fortunes in the linings of her many mink coats. The tall, courtly, cigar-smoking Jack Entratter was like a godfather to me. He used to run the Copa; now he had been sent to Las Vegas to run the Sands, which he had put on the map as the home of the Rat Pack. Dean Martin loved him.

All of these people had been kind to me. All had amazing stories, “true crime” stories that may have appealed to Buddy. But I hadn’t had the slightest interest. Were they skimming? What difference did it make to me, or to anyone except these creeps from the FBI? Who were they hurting? J. Edgar Hoover, whom Daddy had told me was one the biggest gamblers of them all? I had my own true crime stories, my drugs and how to get them. That was the only crime I was obsessed with. “I’ve heard of them,” was all I would give Gabby.

“You don’t know them?” he looked at me skeptically.

“Maybe. Maybe I met them. I’ve met so many . . . I don’t remember.”

All I was willing to give these guys was coffee. After an hour or so, they decided to leave. I knew they’d be back. I had never been so hurt. Gabby could see it. He let his partner go ahead. He said he’d meet him downstairs in a minute.

“I thought we were . . . friends,” I told him. Tears came to my eyes. I had tried to be strong. I couldn’t hold it anymore.

“We are,” Gabby said.

“This was all a trick, a set-up. Those meals, the times we had . . .”

Suddenly he took my hands. He squeezed them as if he meant it. “Believe me. I do care about you. This is my job.”

“You’re a spy. An undercover spy. How could you?” I cried.

“I liked you the minute I saw you at the Thayer. I liked you the minute I saw you at the Harwyn. I like you every time I see you. I like you now.”

“I hate you. Get out of here!” I opened the door to the hallway. He let go of my hand, worried that someone might see him. He had used me, yet something about him remained conflicted. I sensed there was some altar boy left within him.

I was a wreck. I couldn’t tell anyone what happened. I thought about telling Daddy, but I was scared. He would have blamed me. Why did you get involved with this spy to begin with? I couldn’t explain. There would have been no use trying. A week later, Gabby surprised me with a call. I worried the phone was tapped. He asked me to meet him, just to talk, and not for the FBI, not for the record, but about us. I had liked him so much, I couldn’t let it go, a moth to his very dangerous flame.

I had Gabby meet me at Gitlitz, a decrepit deli on Broadway around the corner from me. Gitlitz was to meat what Steinberg’s was to dairy, somewhere all-American people like Edward Patrick Hartnett would never, ever go. Gitlitz was very fluorescent, the least flattering light in New York, filled, like Steinberg’s, with aging European émigrés and Holocaust survivors. In lesser clothes, Daddy could have fit right in. I wanted to take Gabby out of his element, make him look at these poor people, who the Lanskys and my uncles would have been just like if they hadn’t been successful, and make him feel guilty for picking on the old and infirm.

Without his partner, Gabby was a different person, the person before, the person I was falling in love with. With no idea what to order in this alien environment, he had nothing but a cup of tea. He was all
remorse, totally conflicted. He told me how he had grown up dirt poor, how he was in debt to the FBI, who had sent him to language school, to law school. West Point was a free ride as well. He genuinely loved his country for giving him a chance to make something of himself.

“My father loves his country, too. As much as you do,” I said, proudly enumerating how he had attacked the Brownshirts in Yorkville, how he had saved the docks from the Nazis during the war.

Gabby knew all that. He knew more about my family than I did, a lot more, though he had never met anyone but me and had only seen Paul. However, he had been drilled in J. Edgar Hoover’s party line, that Daddy was the wizard of American crime. “Is that the right way to thank your country?” Gabby asked.

“Who did he hurt?” I asked “Who?”

“Bugsy Siegel, Willie Moretti, Albert Anastasia, Longy Zwillman, Augie Pisano,” Gabby reeled off the names in a way that left me reeling as well.

“These were his best friends. You’re crazy. Where do you get this?”

“There but for the grace of God,” Gabby said, looking around at the old Jewish men shuffling in and out, eating their pastrami sandwiches as if they might be their last supper. Gabby cited chapter and verse on how Daddy may have been involved in the hits on my uncles. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he may have given the nod, if only to stay alive himself, to keep his power. Like a thoughtful teacher, like Daddy could be when he had the time, Gabby outlined a pitched battle going on in the “LCN,” La Cosa Nostra, which was the official name the FBI was giving to what the public was calling the Mafia. Daddy was right in the middle of it, between Frank Costello on one side and Vito Genovese on the other. The winner was a sly fox named Carlo Gambino, who got Costello to retire and sent Genovese to prison for life. Meyer Lansky, a brilliant logical Jew caught between two crazy mobs of Italians, had to do what he had to do in order to survive, even if that meant that his dearest friends did not survive.

“
Sauve qui peut
.” Gabby summed it all up in the French expression that he may have learned in law school, but that I had never learned at Calhoun. “Every man for himself.” All he was doing, he said, was accepting the hard reality of Daddy’s life. “It doesn’t have to be
your
reality,” he told me. I didn’t believe him anymore than I believed those awful books during the Kefauver Hearings or the vicious broadcasts of Robert Montgomery. But he made the case not like a rabble-rousing demagogue but rather like a calm lawyer—facts, facts, facts.

“What do you really have against my father?” I tried to get to the heart of the matter.

“Nothing personal,” Gabby said. “He works for bad people.”

“So do lawyers,” I defended my father. “You’re a lawyer. If lawyers can give bad people their day in court, why can’t my father give them their day at the bank?”

“This is more of a conspiracy, but . . . okay . . . fair question,” the lawyer conceded.

“If you knew something about your father, something . . . something bad,” I asked Gabby. “Would you tell it . . . to someone . . . like yourself? Would you?”

He thought for a long time. “Probably not.” He turned his eyes downward, as if in shame.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Forgive me. See me again.”

I left Gabby and Gitlitz more mixed up than ever. I wandered in a daze up Broadway. I staggered past the happy crowds coming out of Zabar’s, their shopping bags bursting with delicacies. My appetite was gone forever. I could see how conflicted Gabby was, which made me all the more conflicted. I think he did like me, but how in the world could the daughter of a crime lord fall in love with the figurative son of J. Edgar Hoover? It was crazier than Romeo and Juliet.

The whole situation reminded me of the old Hitchcock thriller
Notorious
, which I liked to watch when it came on the late show. In the
movie Ingrid Bergman plays a girl with a wild past and an addiction to alcohol and men. I could relate. Her father has just been convicted of being a Nazi spy and has committed suicide in prison. Cary Grant plays an undercover American agent who seduces Bergman and convinces her to go to Rio and seduce and marry a powerful Nazi, played by Claude Rains, in order to infiltrate the Nazi cell for Cary Grant, and for America. Does Grant love her or is he using her? With those stars, you know how it ends. Still, the parallels to me were obvious, though in the movie, Bergman has a hot affair with Cary Grant, as opposed to my innocent hand holding with Gabby.

A year or so later there was a hit song on the radio called “Mixed-Up, Shook-Up Girl.” Was that ever me right now. I had no choice. Blood was thicker than the gin at the Harwyn Club. If I had one real friend in the world, it was Daddy. Father knows best. So I convinced myself to let Daddy go crazy. It was like turbulence on a plane ride. It would eventually end. I knew that, no matter what, Daddy would forgive me.

I just had to find him in New York, which was less and less likely. I couldn’t call. He had given up his suite at the Warwick when he found that it had been bugged. We could go for a walk, but I wanted to be in a public space, like a restaurant, for when he hit the roof at the mess I had gotten us into. He could only get so mad in a restaurant. Dinty Moore’s, the old reliable, would be the place. So I waited until he came to the city, after one of his increasingly frequent visits to Boston to see his famous gastroenterologist, Seymour Gray.

I was so nervous, I can’t really recall how I broke the news to him, whether it was over the gefilte fish or the lamb chops, or at the end, with the apple pie. “Daddy. I’ve been seeing somebody.”

“Really? Is he nice? Is he a regular guy?” That was code for “unlike Marvin.”

“He went to West Point.”

Daddy perked up. “Paul introduced you to someone?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You should make up.” He suggested without real hope.

“I met him all by myself.”

“Is he in the service?”

“So to speak,” I hedged. “The secret service.” Daddy gave me a puzzled look. “Daddy, I didn’t know it, but he turned out to be in the FBI.”

Daddy held his fork in midair as if he had been hit by lightning. For a second, I thought he had had a heart attack. But Daddy was as understanding as he was tough. To begin with, he refused to believe that any West Point man could be all bad. What a loyal alumnus he would have made! That got me off the hook for falling for Gabby. Second, my resourceful father, the master of playing all the angles, came up with his usual brainstorm. “Let’s turn a negative into a positive. We’ve got a man inside. Let’s use him.”

The plan was to feed Gabby and the FBI disinformation to send them on wild goose chases. He gave me a list of names to drop, names and places, I can’t remember today and could barely remember then. The idea was to tantalize the FBI with the notion of laundered gambling money, in Switzerland, in Singapore, in Brazil, in the Bahamas, in the Cayman Islands. Those names of questionable bankers and questionable banks (Daddy was an encyclopedia of world banking) would give the FBI and the IRS enough false leads “to keep them off my back until I rest in peace.”

The idea of Daddy’s mortality, even in slight jest, chilled me, when combined with how old he seemed to have gotten. However, his spirit and his “you can’t touch me” defiance was as young as ever. And what about all the awful things, the blood on his hands, the triggers pulled by others, that Gabby had implied? Daddy simply shook his head. For the last twenty years he had been a target for the FBI and the IRS, tapped, bugged, photographed, spied on, audited, reaudited, arrested, prosecuted, nearly deported, and, aside from the little plea bargain in
Ballston Spa over the card games that politicians play, Daddy was as clean as a West Point honor guard.