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Meyer Lansky

Meyer Lansky was an organized-crime financier whose gambling interests linked New York, Florida, Cuba and Las Vegas. His relationships with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and other investors placed him behind important early casino ventures, especially the Flamingo, without making him the public face of the resorts he helped finance.

Born in the Russian Empire in 1902, Lansky immigrated to the United States with his family in 1911. He grew up in New York and formed an early partnership with Siegel. Their criminal activities included bootlegging and illegal gambling, and their association with Charles “Lucky” Luciano crossed ethnic divisions within the city’s underworld. Prohibition created opportunities for large, coordinated businesses; its repeal encouraged those organizations to find other sources of revenue. Gambling became central to Lansky’s career. His reputation for financial calculation should not obscure the violence and coercion within the organizations through which he worked.

In Las Vegas, Lansky and his associates saw possibilities in legal casino gambling and in the race wire that supplied horse-racing results to bookmakers. Their group acquired the El Cortez in 1945. Lansky also invested in the Flamingo, where Siegel oversaw a costly and troubled development. After Siegel’s murder in Beverly Hills in June 1947, associates took over the resort and it became profitable. Accounts differ over who ordered the killing; Lansky’s involvement has been alleged but was never established by a criminal conviction. The distinction between documented financial relationships and theories about an unsolved murder is essential to understanding this part of the city’s history.

Lansky’s ambitions extended well beyond Nevada. He invested heavily in Cuban casinos, including Havana’s Riviera and Nacional, before the 1959 revolution transformed the island’s gambling business. Later legal proceedings and his attempt to settle in Israel kept him in the news. He returned to the United States, where federal cases against him ended in acquittal or dismissal, and died in Miami in 1983. His lasting Las Vegas significance lies in the network of money and relationships that helped develop early resorts. Following that network explains how apparently local hotels could be connected to businesses and criminal organizations thousands of miles away, while also revealing the limits of stories that assign every event to one powerful mastermind.

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