MONEY AND THE POWER, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Sally Denton and Roger Morris live in Santa Fe, New
Mexico.

　　The history of Vegass dark underside . . . has seldom been so
abundantly and compellingly told. The Washington Post Book
World
　　Riveting. . . Absorbing. . . A saga of underworld subculture that
intersects with that of government agents, senators, and presidents
and ranges from Cuba to Dallas to Watergate.The Wall Street
Journal
　　A must-read. . . . One of the most important non-fiction books
published in the U.S. in [a] half century. Los Angeles Times
　　Something on every page hits like a meat ax. In their unsparing,
meticulous reporting, Denton and Morris produce a compelling,
important dossier.New York Daily News
　　– Review
　　

　　Chapter 1
　　1.Meyer Lansky
　　The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
　　He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland
possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United
States as a place of angels, “somewhat like heaven,” he would say
much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed
at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements
of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he
called his “overpowering memory”-poverty, and still more savage
prejudice.
　　In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer
Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon
acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as
he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped
by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and
ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised.
Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the
plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the
jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the
rest of the gang before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he
would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical
strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the
calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.
　　He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and
back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America,
ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and
prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics,
legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately,
always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their
distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy
money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the
promise, remained bleak and uncertain.
　　A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was
naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds
in his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he
drew an indelible lesson about gambling and life. “There’s no such
thing as a lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers.
The winners are those who control the game . . . all the rest are
suckers,” he would say. “The only man who wins is the boss.” He
decided that he would be the boss. He adopted another, grander
axiom as well: that crime and corruption were no mere by-products
of the economics and politics of his adopted country, but rather a
cornerstone. That understanding, too, tilted the odds in his
favor.
　　By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already
commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and
wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants,
Benjamin Siegel, called “Bugsy”-though not to his face-for being
“crazy as a bedbug.” Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the
Bugs and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their
services to the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon
notorious throughout the city as “the most efficient arm in the
business.” Like other criminals then and later, and with epic
consequences in the corruption of both labor and corporate
management, they also hired out their thuggery first to companies,
and then to unions-most decisively the Longshoremen and
Teamsters-in the bloody war between capitalists and workers. Some
employers “gave their hoodlums carte blanche,” as one account put
it, which they took with “such enthusiasm that many union
organizers were murdered or crippled for life.” Lansky and Siegel
would be partners and close, even affectionate friends for more
than a quarter century, and in the end Lansky would have “no
choice,” as one journalist quoted him, but to join in ordering
Bugsy’s murder.
　　At a bar mitzvah, Lansky met Arnold Rothstein, the flamboyant
gambler involved in fixing the 1919 World Series, and he soon
became Rothstein’s prot?©g?©. During Prohibition
they made a fortune in bootlegging while dealing in heroin as well.
Their collaborators, competitors, and customers in the criminal
traffic, as Lansky later reminisced, were “the most important
people in the country.” On a rainy night in 1927 in southern New
England, a gang working for Lansky hijacked with wanton violence a
convoy of Irish whiskey being smuggled by one of their rival
bootleggers, an ambitious Boston businessman named Joseph P.
Kennedy. The theft cost Kennedy “a fortune,” one of the hijackers
recalled, as well as the lives of eleven of his own men, whose
widows and relatives then pestered or blackmailed a seething
Kennedy for compensation.
　　Ruthless with enemies, Lansky was careful, even punctilious, with
his partners and allies. One of his closest and most pivotal
associates was yet another boyhood acquaintance and fellow
bootlegger, an astute, pockmarked Sicilian named Charles “Lucky”
Luciano. Their rapport baffled those who witnessed it, bridging as
it did bitter old divisions between Italians and Jews. “They were
more than brothers, they were like lovers,” thought Bugsy Siegel.
“They would just look at each other and you would know that a few
minutes later one of them would say what the other was
thinking.”
　　Lansky’s share of the enormous criminal wealth and influence to
come out of Prohibition in the early thirties would be deployed
shrewdly. He branched out into prostitution, narcotics, and other
vice and corruption nationwide. But his hallmark was always
gambling. “Carpet joints,” as the ubiquitous illegal casinos of the
era were called, run by his profit-sharing partners-proconsuls like
the English killer Owney Madden, who controlled organized crime’s
provincial capital of Hot Springs, Arkansas-were discreetly tucked
away and protected by bribed officials in dozens of towns and
cities all over the United States. Still, Lansky’s American
roadhouses were almost trivial compared to the lavish casinos he
would build in Cuba in league with a dictatorial regime.
　　For Luciano and other gangsters, Lansky was the preeminent
investment banker and broker, a classic manager and financier of a
growing multiethnic confederation of legal and illegal enterprises
throughout the nation. He organized crime along corporate
hierarchical lines, delineated authority and responsibility,
holdings and subsidiaries, and, most important, meticulously
distributed shares of profits and proceeds, bonuses and
perquisites. There would always be separate and distinct provinces
of what came to be called most accurately the Syndicate-feudal
baronies defined by ethnic group, specialty, assets, or geography,
that ruled their own territorial bases and colonies, coexisting
warily with the others, distrusting, jockeying, waiting, always
conscious of power. It was part of Lansky’s clarity of vision to
see how they might be arrayed to mutual advantage despite their
unsurrendered sovereignty and mutual suspicion. He recognized how
much the country-in the grip of Wall Street financial houses and
powerful local banks, industrial giants in steel, automobiles,
mining, and manufacturing, the growing power of labor unions, the
entrenched political machines from rural courthouses to city halls
of the largest urban centers-was already ruled by the interaction
of de facto gangs in business and politics, as in crime. A faction
unto himself, after all, he would never subdue or eliminate the
boundaries and barons. Over the rest of the century their domains
would only grow. In business, he preferred to own men more than
property, especially public officials whose complicity was
essential. He did not, like most of his associates, merely bribe
politicians or policemen, but worked a more subtle, lasting
venality, bringing them in as partners.
　　Americanizing corruption as never before, Lansky extended it into
a truly national network and ethic of government and business, a
shadow system. His Syndicate came to bribe or otherwise compromise,
and thus to possess, their own politicians, to corrupt and control
their own labor unions and companies, to hire their own
intelligence services and lawyers, to influence banks with their
massive deposits. But it was Lansky who gave their expedient
alliance a historic cohesion, wealth, and power. Already by the
thirties their shared apportioned profits were in the tens of
millions of dollars, equivalent to the nation’s largest
industries.
　　The wiry adolescent Lansky had grown into a small,
unprepossessing man. He was barely five feet four inches tall,
weighing less than 140 pounds. By his late thirties, he was the
father of three in a colorless and arranged first marriage. With a
pleasant open face, limpid brown eyes, and neatly combed dark hair,
he resembled nothing so much as the earnest accountant or banker
that in a sense he had become. Save for white-on-white silk shirts
and the largest collection of bow ties in the country, he exhibited
none of the coarse ostentation or pretensions of his colleagues.
His private life was discreetly modest. At home he spent most of
his time in a wood-paneled den and library lined with popular
encyclopedias. Able to recite from memory the Gettysburg Address
and long passages from The Merchant of Venice, he was an avid
reader, a regular subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club, ever
conscious of his lack of formal education. His personal hero, he
confided to a few friends, was another figure of similar physical
size and historic imprint, Napoleon Bonaparte.
　　Above all, he was a political man. Like most denizens of his
world, he was insistently patriotic, and generally conservative if
not reactionary in the usual political terms, with an
understandable distaste even for reformers, let alone social
revolutionaries-though he always seemed to understand, long before
more educated men, that ideology and conviction in American
politics commonly have a price. Like his successors over the rest
of the twentieth century who learned the lesson well, he would be
an inveterate contributor to Democratic politicians at all levels.
Lansky paid “handsomely”-legal scholar and sociologist William
Chambliss recorded his secret cash contributions-into the
presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928, Franklin Roosevelt in
1932, Harry Truman in 1948, Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and 1964, and
Hubert Humphrey in 1968, as well as the races of senators,
congressmen, governors, mayors, and councilmen. At a Democratic
National Convention in the 1930s he met the amply corrupt Louisiana
senator Huey Long, whose partnership opened the South to the
alliance, and for whom Lansky opened what would be one of the first
foreign bank accounts for corrupt American politicians. Covering
his bets, he also passed cash through an intermediary to the 1944
Republican presidential campaign of onetime New York “gangbuster”
Thomas Dewey, and backed a few GOP candidates over the years,
though generally preferring, and thus flourishing under, Democrats.
Beneath the surface, Lansky knew, Dewey was a classic example of
the American prosecutor and politician who exploited the public
fear of criminals but in the end did remarkably little about crime,
a prosecutor who convicted a few big names while imprisoning mostly
street-level small fry, leaving the Syndicate and the system that
fed it undiminished. “You can’t help liking Mr. Dewey,” a shrewd
New York socialite would say of the man in an epigram that captured
his real record as well, “until you get to know him.”
　　Lansky’s practical politics were plain. Applying the wisdom
acquired on the Lower East Side and in the national underworld he
came to dominate, he was unyielding and merciless with those who
challenged or cheated him. But he would be very different from many
of his predecessors and successors, in legitimate business as in
crime, who overreached. Monopolistic greed, he believed, led to
blood or headlines, rupturing society’s usual apathy, arousing if
only for a moment a spasm of reform that was bad for everyone’s
profits. He welcomed his competitors-the more corruption the
better; the more people compromised, the more collusion,
acceptance, and resignation, the less danger of change. Nowhere was
this strategy more decisive than in his convoluted relations with
his supposed enemy but often de facto ally, the government of the
United States.
　　Those closest to Lansky would claim that he accomplished the
supreme blackmail in the thirties, obtaining photographs of
homosexual acts by J. Edgar Hoover, the increasingly powerful and
celebrated director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
pictures were said to hold at bay this most formidable of potential
adversaries. But the racketeer and the bureaucrat also had mutual
friends, backers, and associates, among them prominent businessmen
like Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Industries or developer Del Webb,
or groups, like the American Jewish League Against Communism, that
shared the right-wing politics the gangster and G-man had in
common. Whether by crude blackmail or the more subtle influence of
their common circle, over the decades Lansky enjoyed almost
singular immunity from serious FBI pursuit; “Lansky and the Bureau
chief in a symbiotic relationship, each protecting the other,”
University of California scholar Peter Dale Scott would write of
the suborning.
　　But sexual compromising, mutual friendships, or ideology only
began the collusion. In 1937, Lansky arranged for the FBI and the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to make the highly publicized
arrest of one of his associates, drug trafficker Louis “Lepke”
Buchalter. The betrayal at once removed a Lansky rival, gratified
Hoover and FBN director Harry Anslinger in their mutual obsession
with popular image, and further compromised federal law
enforcement, which was growing ever more dependent on informers and
double agents for its successes.
　　Then, at the outset of World War II, U.S. Naval Intelligence and
the nation’s new espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), enlisted Lansky and the Syndicate in a historic
collaboration, the top-secret Operation Underworld, in which
government agents employed mobsters and their labor goons in a
campaign of coercion and bribery ostensibly to prevent sabotage and
quell uncontrolled leftist unions on New York docks. The “dirty
little secret of Operation Underworld,” as a former White House
official put it, “was that the United States Government needed
Meyer Lansky and organized crime to force an industrial peace and a
policing of sabotage on the wharves and in the warehouses. The
government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government
and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and
because it could conceive little other choice in the system at
hand.”
　　Working conditions on the docks, as in much of the economy,
remained harsh, and the struggle between management and labor
violent and unpredictable. Industrial amity was one of the many
myths of World War II. The early 1940s would see more than 14,000
strikes involving nearly 7 million workers nationwide, far more
than any comparable period in the country’s history. The secret
little war on the waterfront was a major step beyond the Buchalter
betrayal, which had redounded to the advantage of both criminals
and bureaucrats, and was another mark of the self-reinforcing,
almost complementary accommodation and exploitation emerging so
widely out of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. Beyond public
relations or displays like Hoover’s or Dewey’s, federal and state
law enforcement at this time remained widely inept, if not
corrupt.