"These guys came to this country with nothing - little education and no opportunity," said her son, Gary Rapoport, sitting nearby. "But they did a lot of good," said the daughter. There was no mention of the money the mob raised for orphans or the work they did during WW II. She secreted it home and read that her father and uncles were the most powerful criminals in the world. She stopped at the news stand and saw her father's picture on a magazine. Sandra's first hint that her father was a made man came when she was 13. All in return for freeing Luciano, who had been sent to prison on prostitution charges. Then the two went to Dinty Moore's, where Lansky met with Uncle Joe - Joseph Lanza, head of the seafood workers' union and one of the most powerful men on the waterfront - to cook up a patriotic plan to secure the docks and root out traitors who might destroy other ships.
She remembers the day Lansky took her to view the French luxury liner Normandie, which had been sabotaged and was burning on the West Side docks. She'd take her cue and go pal around with the hat-check girl, who gave her candies and let her sort mink stoles and topcoats. When it was time to talk business, Sandra could see it in her father's face. In the seat of honor at Dinty Moore's was Meyer Lansky, a stoic, well-dressed Jew, husband and father of two boys and a little girl upon whom he doted. And they said her uncles formed the mafia, what the papers called the National Crime Syndicate, and later Murder Incorporated. The FBI knew these men as "Bugsy" Siegel and "Lucky" Luciano. There were her father's closest associates, men with whom he'd bonded as a boy: Uncle Benny and Uncle Charlie. There was Uncle Joe Adonis, and Uncle Willie Moretti. There was Uncle Frank Costello, and Uncle Abe Zwillman, the kings of New York and New Jersey.
#Charlie murder lan full#
She always assumed her father was a jukebox salesman because he had shown her a showroom full of Wurlitzers at his office at Emby Distributing Company near Times Square.Īnd his group of friends, the men with whom he broke bread most often at Dinty Moore's on West 46th Street, were all her uncles. If that doesn't ring a bell, pull up a seat on the porch and let Sandra Lansky ring it for you.
Central to them all - her charmed childhood, the company she kept, her astonishing life - was her father, Meyer Lansky.
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