Daughter of the King (32 page)

“Yes. Very much. Nice girl.” She waved at Gary. “Nice boy, too.”

“Good, Mama,” Vince said. “’Cause this is the girl I’m gonna marry.”

News to me! He had never mentioned marriage before. “Vince, is this the way Sicilians propose to a girl?”

“Well?” He smiled at me, waiting, waiting.

“Yes.”

Gilda broke out a bottle of Asti Spumante.

Daddy had no idea about Vince until he got a letter from him in Miami (Vince had begged me for the address) asking for my hand. He called me. “Who is Vince Lombardo?” he asked.

“The man I love. The man I want to marry.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Two years.” He didn’t ask anything about him, and I didn’t volunteer. Never explain. Besides, I’m sure Daddy had already checked him out.

“Give me his number.”

Daddy came to New York to meet Vince, alone. They made a deal. Daddy would let us marry if Vince promised to get out, if he were in, and stay out, under any circumstances, of the Mafia for the rest of his life with me. Vince made the deal. And no one broke a deal with Meyer Lansky. Vince would make his way, and maybe his fortune, in home improvements. We were married on September 12, 1964, in Revere Beach, Massachusetts, back in my birth state. Hy and Elizabeth Abrams hosted the ceremony at their seaside mansion. Hy was one
of Daddy’s oldest friends, a partner way back at the North Shore dog tracks, a partner now in the Flamingo and the Sands in Las Vegas. I asked Elizabeth to be my witness instead of Teddy. Tough. It was my wedding, and I could pick whom I wanted to.

It was almost exactly ten years after my marriage to Marvin. What a difference a decade makes. A justice of the peace performed the ceremony. Gary was the ring bearer. The best man was Vince’s friend Tony Salerno, who was the nephew of Fat Tony Salerno, the big boss who “owned” Harlem. You could keep the boy out of the Mafia, but you couldn’t keep the Mafia away from the boy. They were everywhere, although not at Joseph’s, the very snooty restaurant, the haunt of Cabots and Lodges, where we had the big dinner. We were staying at the Copley Plaza. Before we drove out to Revere for the wedding, Vince and Tony managed to lock themselves in their room, and hotel maintenance couldn’t open the door. Gary figured out how to spring them. He had a future with Vince in the construction business.

Uncle Jack and his wife were there. I had turned the other cheek. So they snubbed me from Linda’s wedding; I was too happy to let that bother me now. Because Teddy was there, Mommy, who loved Vince, stayed home. But she was happy, too. Also there was Daddy’s chief Boston doctor, Seymour Gray, the great Harvard Medical School professor whose patients included the Saudi royal family. Dr. Gray had kept Daddy alive and well to see this amazing day. I kept looking at Daddy’s face. Was he happy? I hoped so.

Daddy was impossible to read. I didn’t see the unalloyed pride I remembered from the day Paul graduated from West Point. How could I compare the two days? Daddy was older now, sadder. His life was winding down. There was a lot more to look forward to back then. There was more hope. The hope was gone now. I looked at Vince and his friend Tony. I had married a gangster. That wasn’t Daddy’s dream for me, but it was too late in the game for dreaming. The best we could do was survive. I hoped we all would. If only little D.J. could
have been there. But he was stuck at the Crippled Children’s Hospital. Despite Dr. Gray’s overseeing his care, he was not getting better.

I did my best to put D.J.’s tragic condition out of my mind. That lasted until the next day. Then I started worrying again, and the guilt flooded in. Vince and I had no honeymoon. He wanted to go to work. He also refused, proud manly man that he was, to take a cent from Daddy, or let me take any, either. For the first time in my life, I was no longer the poor little rich girl. I was the poor housewife in Queens, where we moved from West End Avenue to live within our straitened budget. I had no conception of how hard that would be. Mommy had to move back to her place on the West Side. Queens might as well have been Queensland. It was too far for her to come, too far for me to go. She had lost the purpose I had given her when she took care of Gary. Meanwhile, I lost my mind.

I had made an almost full disclosure to Vince. But not total. What I had withheld from him was my continuing addiction to diet pills, which I thought I would kick but never really tried. That was an expensive bad habit, a lot easier for a rich playgirl than someone trying to learn to be lower middle class. All I felt was pressure, mounting pressure. How did Daddy handle the
real
stress of being under the federal microscope? Queens seemed so wrong, so preposterous, to me that I never unpacked. I could barely figure out how to buy subway fare. We put Gary in a public school near our apartment. I just assumed Vince would give in and accept Daddy’s bottomless handouts. Meanwhile, how was I going to pay for my pills? That was the big question for me, the only thing that mattered.

By the time my weight went down to nearly ninety pounds, Vince had had enough. I was as crazy as I was skinny. None of my clothes fit. I looked like a mad bag lady. Vince moved out in June 1965, when Gary was off at the summer camp that Daddy had insisted on paying for. In September, I spent my first anniversary having dinner with Marvin at Spindletop, trying to hit him up for money. Before I remarried
all he would give me was the $40 a week child support, down from the $100 he was supposed to pay but rarely did. I was so desperate I called Buddy begging for cash. He mailed me a five-dollar bill.

I did get a friend in Miami to send me care packages of pills from Florida, but I used them up and needed more. I stopped smoking to save money, stopped eating, though on pills that wasn’t a hardship, as I had no appetite. I stopped buying clothes. I was so small I could wear Gary’s. Unable to afford the bus, I’d ride Gary’s bike, in his clothes, down to this pharmacy in Rego Park that gave me my drugs on credit. It was my equivalent of the last chance saloon.

I took money from everyone I could beg from, then stashed it inside the coats that I couldn’t sell to used clothing stores. I tried to get money from Mommy, tried to get her to hock some of her jewels for me. But she ended up in the mental hospital at Creedmoor, with a breakdown that was precipitated when I took Gary away from her. She was stuck there for months, while I was falling apart myself. Daddy was always away now, in Europe and in Israel, investing his money from Las Vegas offshore, planning his retirement.

Havana proved to have been Meyer Lansky’s last blaze of glory, his last chance at a monument to himself. Now he was fighting for his health and for his freedom. John Kennedy was dead, the only man left who could restrain his brother Bobby, who, along with J. Edgar Hoover, had kicked up their rampage of hatred against my father to a new high, even when Daddy was at a new low. Daddy’s heart was too weak for me to risk breaking it by letting him see what a desperate addict I had become. Shielding him was the only shred of conscience I had left.

With nowhere else to turn, I turned to the Mafia. I called Vince’s uncle, Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, a brutal but fair underboss in the powerful mob family of Joe Colombo. He liked playing King Solomon, doing the just thing. For some crazy reason, he liked me and thought that, if I ever got straightened up, I would make a great wife for Vince. Accordingly, he decreed that Vince should come back to me and give
me another chance. Vince had learned one thing in life, which was to obey his elders. So he came back to me, but as part of a mission.

The first order of business was to shut down the Rego Park pharmacy that was my chief enabler. Vince went in wearing a wire and found out that they were selling illegal prescription drugs not only to me but to lots of children. He took his information to the police, and the pharmacy was shuttered. In front of him, I ceremoniously threw my entire stash of drugs down the incinerator. I never took another diet pill. Then in 1966 Vince moved Gary, his own son, Davide, six months younger than Gary, and me down to Miami to get away from the toxins and temptations of New York, and to start a new life.

As happy as he was to have me near him in Florida, Daddy wanted to start a new life as well. Could life begin at sixty-three? He wanted to try. Besides, his beloved country wasn’t giving him much of a choice. The Daddy in Miami in the sixties was a denatured version of the old lion of New York. Instead of power dinners at Dinty Moore’s with Mayor O’Dwyer and Prime Minister Costello, he’d have lean corned beef sandwiches at the Rascal House with his buddy Hymie Siegel, a retired dress manufacturer about whom Teddy joked, “If I have to get a divorce, I’m naming him as correspondent.”

Daddy’s main exercise was no longer in gyms but on the palm-shaded pavements, walking Tiger, Teddy’s Shih Tzu. When Tiger died, Teddy replaced him with another, named Bruiser. This one Daddy somehow grew to love, like Vince, whom he began calling “Vinnie Boy.” Daddy got Vince a good job as a manager at the posh Eden Roc Hotel. Maybe somebody in the family would be the next Conrad Hilton after all. I discovered a passion for breeding Italian greyhounds.

Miami got too hot for Daddy. In 1970, he came home from a trip to Mexico, having been tailed the entire time by the FBI, who suspected that he was going to some international crime lord conclave in Acapulco. But Daddy was only there to lie in a winter sun that was warmer than the surprisingly chilly one that year in Florida. However,
at Miami airport, agents confiscated a bottle of Donnatal, an antispasmodic Daddy had taken for his digestive troubles. His pharmacist had sold the medication to him without a new prescription. You couldn’t have too many digestive drugs when you went to Mexico in those days. I knew all about friendly druggists. There was nothing sinister there, but the agents jumped at the chance to make a federal case over it.

“Lansky Jailed on Drug Counts” screamed one Miami headline. “Mob Boss in Drug Sting!” screamed another. Daddy’s Miami lawyer, Joe Varon, posted Daddy’s bail. When the case went to trial in June, the judge basically laughed it out of court, dismissing all charges. Still, another bad impression had been made in the press, accentuated by two damning major articles about him that had appeared in May. The first was in
Reader’s Digest:
“The Shocking Success Story of Public Enemy Number One.” The other was in the
Atlantic Monthly:
“The Little Big Man Who Laughs at the Law.” The Nixon administration had made Daddy’s being brought to justice one of its highest priorities. Nixon knew it would be one of the great publicity coups.

Before the 1960 presidential election, Daddy had told me that Joseph Kennedy wasn’t the only person who had sought his support. He had also had a visit from Donald Nixon, Richard Nixon’s brother, seeking to get Daddy on the Republican bandwagon. Having chosen to stand with his old Prohibition mate, Daddy now faced the wrath of a vindictive Nixon, who blamed him for keeping him out of office and for the long eight years he had to wander in the political wilderness, seething for redemption.

Nixon had another axe to grind. Biding his time until he could run again, Nixon was a big Wall Street lawyer and had gotten a taste of what New York money could buy. He learned through his best friend, Key Biscayne magnate Bebe Rebozo, that Daddy might be turning the Bahamas into the next Cuba, the new gaming paradise. Nixon wanted to get in on the ground floor and watch his stock in Meyer Lansky Resorts, or whatever the enterprise would be called, explode.

Already famous, Nixon wanted to be rich, Kennedy rich, and he believed it took connections to a Meyer Lansky to get to that level. Because Daddy didn’t trust any politician, particularly Tricky Dick, he wouldn’t take his money. I’m not sure how much skin Daddy had in the new Bahamas game, but like the rest of the world, Nixon saw Daddy as the mastermind behind all things gaming and blamed Daddy accordingly for one more slight to his hair-trigger ego.

Now, having such a vengeful enemy in the White House pushed Daddy out of America. Taking a cue from one of his oldest friends, Uncle Doc Stacher, who dealt with a heavy IRS pursuit by moving to Israel, Daddy, with Bruiser and Teddy in tow, flew off to Tel Aviv in July, never expecting to return. For a girl who grew up with Christmas trees and barely knew a bar mitzvah from an Irish bar, I couldn’t believe that my father was going to live in Israel, of all places. Rio was one famous place that master criminals used to escape to in those days because Brazil had no extradition treaty with America. But Israel?

Why not Israel? Aside for his admiration for Colonel Mickey Marcus, Daddy never talked Jewish politics or Jewish identity. For all his superficial ethnic neutrality and his remarkable ability to get along with, and even make peace among, all the Italians and Irish in gangland, Daddy was in his own way a Super Jew. His financial and military support was a cornerstone of this new state. His own grandparents, who had fled to Palestine from the Russian pogroms, were buried there. He had called out Estes Kefauver for his anti-Semitism. Israel was a logical safe harbor for Meyer Lansky. Israel had something called the Law of Return, which granted automatic citizenship to any Jew who wanted to emigrate to Israel. Doc Stacher had used it to seek asylum in Israel, and now Daddy would as well.

Not so fast! That’s what Israel said once Richard Nixon began strong-arming Prime Minister Golda Meir. Nixon wasn’t about to let Lansky pull another fast one on him. What Israel needed now, and always needed, were more weapons. Daddy had discovered in 1948
that weapons were the way into the heart of Israel. In 1970, the weapons that Israel wanted were fighter planes, and Nixon held that trump card in his presidential hand. Want our jets? Give us Lansky!