Daughter of the King (5 page)

Daddy had already made his first fortune in bootlegging, and he threw all of it at trying to cure his son, who could not walk and could barely use his arms. Daddy and Mommy took him to the best doctors in New York and all over the country, wherever there was a lead. They were the wandering Jews. They even tried the magic healing waters in Owney Madden’s Hot Springs. They would have travelled to Lourdes if they had thought there was a chance of a miracle. But when miracles did not appear, both of my parents seemed to give up on their own parents’ devout Judaism.

However, they didn’t give up on life. They tried again, and, two years later, in 1932, they hit the genetic jackpot with my brother Paul, who was not only the picture of his beautiful mother but also the picture of health. That same year, they also heard of a medical miracle worker at Boston’s Children’s Hospital who promised them that, like Jesus, he could make the lame walk. They kept their apartment at the Majestic and took a place in Boston. Daddy lived and breathed business, but it would still come second to Buddy. Daddy was on a mission. Mommy believed in the new doctor, Dr. Carruthers, and at
the same time, with the support of Father Richard Cushing, she began believing in Jesus.

I
f anybody deserved the title of Jewish American Princess, it was my mother. Anna Citron had been a real catch for Daddy, who had definitely married “up” in 1929, from his father Max’s grinding job pressing pants for slave wages. My parents had their honeymoon in Atlantic City, where Daddy characteristically mixed business and pleasure by attending a kind of summit conference of all my future Italian and Jewish uncles to plan the future of the liquor business while the end of Prohibition was in sight. It would be naïve to ignore the fact that part of Mommy’s allure to Daddy was that her family represented a way for Daddy to get out of bootlegging and go legit.

Mommy’s father, Moses Citron, was a major produce wholesaler in New York, who also had a chain of markets, Universal Fruit and Produce, in New Jersey. They lived on an estate in New Jersey near the Zwillmans in ritzy South Orange. Grandpa Citron looked very grand in his pinstripe suits. Daddy may have gotten some of his style ideas from him. Grandma Citron was enormously fat. She looked like she had devoured all of Grandpa’s produce.

Grandpa Citron had been born in Moldavian Romania to a fine family of produce barons. Romania was apparently something of a land of opportunity for Jews, at least compared to Russia and its pogroms, where the Lanskys didn’t have a fighting chance. He and Grandma Citron, whose first name was Shelma, had married into a world of culture, breeding, and wealth. They were not your typical immigrants.

Grandpa was a college graduate, and when he and Grandma came to America, they didn’t go to Ellis Island, like the Lanskys, but travelled by clipper ship to California, where they had purchased a big
plot of land to create a vineyard. However, when they arrived, they found that the land they had bought in Europe was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Welcome to real estate in the New World. They quickly decamped to New York, where Grandpa Citron built his major produce business to mirror that of his family back in Romania.

Grandpa Citron had wanted my mother to go to college like he did. However, she was the baby in the family, the fourth of four children, and according to Old World tradition, she was expected to marry, and to do it as soon as possible. She was all of eighteen, and her parents always regretted that they had sacrificed her to those ancient traditions, rather than insisting that she get the higher education she clearly would have loved. Instead she married a “hoodlum.” Grandpa Citron didn’t care. He embraced his new son-in-law and gave him a job, so he would have a legitimate salary.

Daddy didn’t want a job with anyone. Once my parents were married, Daddy charmed his way into a partnership with Grandpa Citron, forming, along with future Uncle Moe Dalitz, an enterprising bootlegger who would “own” Cleveland and be a major force in Las Vegas, a giant corporation called Molaska, Inc., which would manufacture molasses out of which the soon-to-be-legal-again liquor could be distilled. Grandpa Citron invested what today what would be millions of dollars in Molaska, which had huge plants in New Jersey and Ohio. The idea was that, with Citron backing, Meyer Lansky could become a Joe Kennedy–style big businessman, even without the Harvard degree. Molaska had all the potential to become the next Seagram’s and make the Lansky-Citrons the American version of the Canadian Bronfmans.

But Daddy must have had a gambling gene that even the loftiest ambitions to respectability could not overcome. You don’t run the casinos in Las Vegas, Havana, and London without that inner high roller. Instead of playing it totally legit, totally Wall Street, with the Molaska Corporation and making legal whisky, Daddy and Moe Dalitz
decided to make
illegal
whiskey, so they wouldn’t have to pay the government’s new heavy “pleasure” tax. They thought they could get away with it, just like they had gotten away with it during Prohibition. But they didn’t.

By 1935, the taxmen had descended, raiding the plants, serving subpoenas, looking for ways to “get” Daddy and Uncle Moe. But Daddy was as elusive as Harry Houdini. He had Molaska declare bankruptcy and hid behind an impenetrable maze of shell corporations that made the credit default swaps that nearly bankrupted America in 2008 look like a kid’s game. But the price he paid was losing his big chance to go straight. He also cost Grandpa Citron a fortune, which surely didn’t sit well with Mommy, who had enough stress with Buddy’s illness.

W
hen the Molaska dream turned to ashes, Daddy embarked on what became his great trademark skill, casino gambling. Alas, this was before casino gambling had been legalized, so you could say Daddy was way ahead of his time. He had cut his casino teeth during Prohibition in minor gambling operations, from numbers running to crap games to bookmaking. Once liquor became legal, he quickly became a nightclub impresario—the clubs, filled with stars, becoming the lure and the front for the back-room gambling that was where the serious money lay. These clubs were called “carpet joints,” because carpets were a shorthand for the lavish luxury that awaited the high rollers.

Daddy was involved with such clubs all over the country, usually outside the limits of big cities whose upright fathers could look the other way once the fun went to an adjacent county, places like the Riviera, just over the new George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, where Frank Sinatra spilled the ice on me. Daddy, who had a “piece” of the Riviera, had similar pieces of most of America’s prime nightclubs. His main operations were in Saratoga Springs, the horse racing
mecca in upstate New York, and Broward County, just above Miami and its American Riviera. But he was also the mastermind, if not on the masthead, of similar operations near New Orleans, Cincinnati, Council Bluffs, Dallas, and Phoenix—all of which were joint ventures with uncles all over the country. I had a
huge
family. Daddy was always on the road, which caused Mommy endless loneliness that the money that was pouring in couldn’t compensate for.

Mommy’s best friend, Esther Krakower, who married Uncle Benny Siegel, was from a much poorer family. Esther had a brother, Whitey, who was a genuine gangster of the old brass knuckle school, a charter member of the Jewish gang known as Murder Incorporated. Whitey was shot to death in a gangland assassination on Delancey Street in New York in 1941. Such violence was never even referred to or even whispered about when I was growing up, unfit for my ladylike ears. Despite Mommy’s friendship with Esther, in the eyes of her parents, people like the Krakowers and the Lanskys were “not our kind.”

Mommy, probably in reaction to her mother’s behemoth weight, was extremely skinny and stylish. She had a beautiful, cultured voice, not at all a harsh Brooklyn accent. Then again, her parents weren’t New Yorkers. They were transplanted Californians, and Mommy and her siblings sounded neutral and very American. With her slinky dresses and her Pall Mall cigarette always in hand, she gave off a sultry Hollywood glamour, a little like Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
, except Mommy couldn’t sing.

Mommy was about five three, a few inches shorter than Daddy. She was taller than he was when she wore high heels, so she kept the heels low, as Daddy didn’t want anyone to think he was weak enough to fall for some big showgirl, as the foolish rich men in his nightclubs and casinos were wont to do. That was for suckers. Above all, Daddy was dead serious and wanted to be regarded as such. Mommy loved beautiful clothes and jewels and had closets and closets of them. She seemed to live at beauty salons. Before the kids were born, I don’t
know where she found time for Daddy between all her shopping and her styling. They were lucky he travelled so much.

S
o this was the world I was born into in 1937. The Citrons had one son-in-law, the husband of my mother’s sister, Sadie, in the very legitimate produce business, and another, my father, in the very illegitimate gambling business. But they didn’t judge Daddy for it, or if they did, given their patrician background, they suspended that judgment. They loved their daughter, and what was good for her was good for them. The Lanskys, on the other hand, were mystified that their son had become a criminal, no matter how much money he was making and how much of it he lavished upon them. Plus Meyer had brought his younger, weaker brother Jacob, Uncle Jack, along for this illegal joy ride. Grandpa Lansky, whom I never knew, was a cautious man like his son Jack and would have been happier if Daddy had stayed in the tool and die factory where he had held his first and last conventional job. Grandma Lansky, on the other hand, gave Daddy unconditional love, and he gave it back. The real shame, or
shonda
, as the Lanskys might wail in Yiddish, was that none of their grandchildren were being raised as Jews. They could call the Christmas trees Chanukah bushes until they were blue in the face, but they were still Christmas trees. Grandpa Max Lansky died in 1939, a very sad and unfulfilled man. Grandma Yetta would go on and on and help raise me when no one else was able to.

Daddy, having moved the family to Boston for Buddy’s health, was impatient at his slow progress and, I later learned, a little depressed over the loss of his best friend in Boston, Charlie Solomon, who had given him aid and comfort when Buddy was born and made the connections to Dr. Carruthers. Before I was born, Solomon, who was known as King Solomon, owned Boston the same way Charlie
Luciano owned New York. He had made his fortune in bootlegging alongside Joe Kennedy and owned Boston’s grandest nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove. But Solomon had been shot to death by rivals from another club. I had no idea until years later that murder could be an undercurrent in the business-y world of Daddy and my uncles. That was the key difference between Wall Street and the Vegas Strip. Big shots on Wall Street were rarely assassinated.