Meyer Lansky was born in Russia in 1902, arrived in New York with his family in 1911, and became active in organized crime by the time he was in his teens. He is known for having been both utterly ruthless and a brilliant criminal visionary.

The mob wars of 1928-31 that wiped out the older generation of Sicilian-born Mafiosi led to the establishment of the Syndicate, in which Lansky and his close friend Lucky Luciano were prominent. Also in 1931, Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion, and this got the Mob interested in money laundering, which became one of Lansky’s core fuctions.

Lansky allegedly had a dream of establishing a gangster paradise in Cuba, which during the 1920’s was dominated by an overheated, vice-based economy. Although the Depression and the end of Prohibition put a damper on these plans, Lansky began making gambling investments on the island and funding Fulgencio Batista, who had come to power as the result of a coup in 1933.

In 1942, Lansky was approached by the Office of Naval Intelligence to get the Mafia’s help in the war effort. This allegedly led to the arrest of eight German infiltrators and a general decrease in sabotage on the docks. It also enabled the Mafia to build up its heroin syndicate after the war. The CIA further allied with the Mafia in the late 40’s to wipe out communist influence in Italy.

Lansky was intimately involved in the history of casino gambling. He saw the possibilities of legalized gambling in Las Vegas as early as 1941, then made it a reality after World War II.

Meanwhile, Lansky was growing interested in Cuba again, but it took two events to make his plans a reality. One was the Kefauver Commission in 1950-51, which shut down Lansky’s Florida operations. The other was that Batista, who had governed Cuba as a populist president in the early 40s, assumed dictatorial powers through a coup in 1952 and instituted an increasingly corrupt and oppressive regime. He welcomed the Mafia and enacted laws encouraging hotels and nightclubs.

Mobster Santo Trafficante visited Havana in 1953, bought a nightclub, and became a part-time resident. Luciano also began running casinos in Cuba, with Lansky’s participation. These casinos (like those in Las Vegas) were used to launder heroin profits, which were deposited in banks in both Cuba and Miami.

All this came to an end in 1959, when Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship, closed down the casinos, and threw out the mobsters. Lansky retreated to Miami, where in the early 1960s he and Trafficante became involved in the CIA’s anti-Castro plots.

During his final years, Lansky started finding other locations for casinos, such as the Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas. In the 1970s, he pushed for legalized gambling in Atlantic City. He died in 1983.