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Mob Psychology
Little Man: Mayer Lansky and the Gangster Life Robert Lacey
Americans cherish their gangsters, Robert Lacey remarks in this entertaining biography of Meyer Lansky, one of the most mysterious criminal figures of the past fifty years. At times that fascination seems to extend to the entire world of crime, itself an inverted image of the American Dream, with its violence, energy and pursuit of the fast buck. Only serial killers, presidential assassins and out-and-out psychos – none of whom are interested in money – are excluded from the gallery of glamorized rogues.
The small-town bank-robbers of the 1930s were rapidly mythologized into a band of punk Robin Hoods, from Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd to Baby-Face Nelson and Ma Barker, a proto-feminist heroine if I saw one, who died beside son Fred, firing her Thompson in a final gun-battle with the G-men. But none of them could match the sinister charm of the big city crime-bosses who emerged from the Prohibition years. As the American economy boomed during the Second World War, the public imagination seemed to insist that crime too be conducted on a corporate basis, matching the giant scale of the steel, oil and automobile industries.
With the invention of the Mafia, whose existence many US law enforcement officers deny to this day, the endemic corruptions and venalities of American life were explained away at a stroke. Capone had died in prison of syphilis after being convicted of tax evasion, and he was followed by a financially more savvy group of New York criminals, above all Lucky Luciano, who broke away from traditional Sicilian practices into more expansive and profitable underworld activities.
Although associated with these mobsters, who were deeply involved in drugs, extortion and labour racketeering, Meyer Lansky was a very different figure, as Robert Lacey points out, and his elevation to the pantheon of criminal fame is in many ways surprising. But if the American public demanded that crime be put on a corporate basis, someone had to be found with the brains and administrative skills to run the corporation, and Lansky seemed to play the part to perfection. The American press called him the Chairman of the Board, and the brains behind the Mafia. He was claimed to have a personal fortune of $300 million, to have financed Bugsy Siegel in the creation of Las Vegas and to have teamed up with Batista to run the great Havana casinos. ‘We’re bigger than US Steel’ was his most quoted remark, and he achieved the ultimate in popular fame by being portrayed by Lee Strasberg as the Mafia chief Hyman Roth in The Godfather II.
A few years ago I drove along Miami Beach where Lansky had retired, past the luxury condos with their washed gravel drives that looked as if they were delivered fresh from the quarry each morning, past the stretch limos guarded by large-shouldered men in black suits and shades. I imagined Lansky in a duplex apartment under the sky, manipulating the Mafia’s vast cash reserves on a terminal linked to Wall Street as he gazed at his fleet of cocaine-running speedboats. But I couldn’t have been more wrong, and the luxury condos, if not the cocaine boats, were almost certainly owned by Miami dentists and heart surgeons. As Robert Lacey reveals, the image of Lansky created by American newspapers and television was a complete myth, partly sustained by the failure of the US Justice Department to convict him of any serious crime, a failure that only reinforced the belief in Lansky’s all-embracing power.
In fact, before his death he was living in a poorly furnished one-bedroom apartment, and left so little money to his heirs that his crippled son was soon reduced to existing on welfare. After the overthrow of Batista, and the loss of the Riviera hotel-casino in Havana that Lansky had built, he lived for years in a modest bungalow north of Miami, whose only expensive equipment was the elaborate bugging device which the FBI secretly installed. Unlike the New York crime bosses, Lansky was never involved in drugs, prostitution or labour racketeering, despite his childhood friendship with a real crime-tsar, Luciano. Born in eastern Poland in 1902, Lansky arrived in America with his parents at the age of four. A clever child with a flair for mathematics, he was small but aggressive, and as a teenager became a lookout and strong-arm man for the Jewish and Italian gamblers on New York’s lower east side. His quick mind and organizational skills were invaluable to Luciano during the bootlegging years, and with the repeal of Prohibition Lansky turned his skills towards that other great American pastime, illicit gambling.
Robert Lacey makes the point that, far from being one of the architects of modern organized crime, Lansky in the post-war years was primarily a casino operator, inside and outside the law. He helped to devise the concept of the big Las Vegas resort hotel, which offered glitz along with first-class service and is now the dominant style of the international hotel. The illegal skimming of the take which he organized for the gangster owners of the Vegas hotels is the main charge against him, but like many a corrupt book-keeper he led a frugal private life, subscribing to the Book of the Month Club and worrying about his unhappy children, who were clearly unable to cope with the manufactured image that the US media had foisted upon their father.
By the time he died at the age of eighty he seems to have wearied of his reputation as the mastermind of American crime. As the nurses struggled to resuscitate him he thrashed away at them, crying out his last words: ‘Let me go!’ The Las Vegas hotels he helped to run have long since been sold to legitimate international corporations, and one wonders where the American imagination will turn to next in its search for a criminal superhero.
Guardian 1991
Closed Doors
The Hughes Papers Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy and Mark Hurwitz
A strongly punitive note sounds through this investigation into Howard Hughes’s final years, as through so many recent books and news magazine exposés, particularly those of American origin. Clearly Hughes’s sometimes bizarre though often merely eccentric behaviour during the last twenty years of his life still profoundly irritates his fellow-citizens, destroying far too many cherished fantasies. Great-grandson of a Confederate general, son of the millionaire inventor of the world’s most efficient oil-drilling bit, aviation pioneer and Hollywood man-about-town who ‘escorted’ its greatest leading ladies, Howard Hughes bought and sold airlines and film studios, personally designed a brassiere for Jane Russell and helped to introduce that unique cultural institution, the in-flight movie.
How galling, then, that this embodiment of so many potent national myths should slam the door on it all at the age of fifty and opt for exile, silence and cunning, and even more so that his quest for absolute privacy should be conducted in such a tantalizingly public way. If Hughes had retired to some impregnable mock-Xanadu or an exclusive Long Island sanatorium, no one would have minded; but he doubled the offence by sealing himself into the penthouse of the Desert Inn Hotel above the one national fantasy he had so far left alone – Las Vegas.
Unlike The Hughes Papers, a compilation of Hughes’s confused financial shenanigans, mild political bribery and muddled efforts to take over the whole of Nevada, the one book about Hughes which might have refurbished the myths has not yet been published – Clifford Irving’s fake biography. This imaginary account of Hughes’s secret life during his purported exile – the big-game hunting expeditions, meetings with Hemingway, conversations with Schweitzer, etc. – would have safely restored the hero to his pedestal. Had Hughes, who was seventy-one when he died, in fact died two or three years earlier, before he could have issued his denial, Irving’s biography would not only have been published but its authenticity, for powerful psychological reasons, could never have been seriously challenged.
The Hughes Papers exhaustively analyses the possible involvement of the Hughes empire in political and financial corruption. But the present state of the art as revealed by Watergate and the Lockheed scandals suggests that Hughes’s activities in the fifties and sixties amounted to little more than discreet tinkering, and would barely be of interest except for his increasingly eccentric behaviour. I admire Hughes, above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on a couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets while watching the 170th re-run of Ice Station Zebra, reminds me in many ways of life today in the Thames Valley. Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes.
New Statesman 1977
Last of the Great Royals
Hirohito Edward Behr
Asked in 1986 for his thoughts on Halley’s Comet, which had visited our skies after an interval of seventy-five years, the Emperor Hirohito remarked: ‘It’s nice to see it again.’ The reply accords in every way with the popular image of this remote and unworldly sovereign, dedicated to marine biology, that most endearing of sciences, who knew little or nothing of Japan’s preparations for the Second World War and bore no responsibility for the appalling atrocities his armed forces committed. Hirohito’s finest hour, by this reckoning, was his surrender speech on 14 August 1945, a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling on his forces to lay down their arms and reminding them, in a felicitous phrase that has its own dotty charm, ‘that the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’.
General MacArthur, an almost preposterously imperial figure, was one of the first to accept the now traditional view of Hirohito. At their meeting in September 1945 the trembling Hirohito expected to be arrested on the spot – already there had been calls for his indictment as a war criminal. But MacArthur was affability itself, offering the Living God a Lucky Strike and putting him at his ease. Their meeting was in private, though Mrs MacArthur was listening to every word behind a curtain, and it is hard to know what convinced MacArthur that Hirohito was ‘a sincere man and a genuine liberal’. At any event Hirohito, after publicly renouncing his godliness, then embarked on the rest of his immensely long and undisturbed reign. He resumed his state visits to foreign countries and was courteously received by Queen Elizabeth and President Ford. By the time of his death Japan had become one of the world’s economic superpowers, and the Japanese monarchy was almost alone in having retained its dignity intact – by comparison our own scrambling royals might be auditioning for EastEnders. Hirohito’s funeral was attended by the President of the United States and a host of kings, heads of state and prime ministers. The hunger-strike mounted in protest by a British ex-serviceman seemed little more than a quaint anachronism.
Edward Behr’s biography is a cool and convincing attempt to dismantle the myths that constitute one of the most successful public relations exercises of our century. Above all, he sets out to expose Hirohito’s true role in the 1930s and 1940s – a formidable undertaking, given the maze-like complexity of Japanese imperial and political life, and the uniquely strange upbringing of Hirohito himself. Behr portrays the wartime Hirohito as a cunning prevaricator and opportunist, who exploited his own wavering diffidence in dealing with his military chiefs. However, spontaneity and personal choice were qualities the future Emperor had never been allowed to cultivate. At the age of ten weeks he was taken away from his seventeen-year-old mother, the Empress Sadako, and brought up by a retired admiral. He was provided with no childhood friends or games, and had to submit to grim routines to improve his posture and eyesight. One of the few respites came at the age of fifteen, when his father, the Emperor Taisho, sent one of his concubines to Hirohito’s quarters. She reported back that the Crown Prince ‘had displayed a certain scientific curiosity in sex, leading in time to a perfectly normal conclusion’. So was born, perhaps, the future marine biologist.
This apart, Hirohito’s only real pleasure in his entire life was his visit to Britain in 1921. He was captivated by the Royal Family’s friendliness and informality, and returned to Japan with a set of bagpipes, a lifelong dedication to English breakfasts and plus-fours, and a determination to be the first monogamous Emperor. By all accounts he made a happy marriage, though his bride received from the Empress Sadako what must be the ultimate mother-in-law’s wedding gift – an illustrated pillow book of advice on sex techniques and ways of ensuring a male heir.
On ascending the throne Hirohito reduced the size of the court and put an end to the custom of being presented, on important occasions, with gifts of dead fish. But his meals were first sampled by food-tasters, and there was a daily examination of the royal faeces. More importantly, he had earlier established a privately subsidized think-tank, the University Lodging House. This was a select and secretive club where bright young bureaucrats mingled with up-and-coming military men, and became a sounding-board for various right-wing and ultra-nationalist ideas.
Edward Behr points out that Hirohito was exceptionally methodical and industrious, read everything to which he put his seal, and was aware of whatever took place within the Supreme War Command and the cabinet. Despite certain vague reservations, he supported the invasions of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937, promoted those responsible and was well aware of the preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Behr believes that he envisaged a short, sharp war with the United States and Britain, which would be followed by a peace treaty guaranteeing Japan’s future dominance over East Asia. All too soon the American counter-attacks in the Pacific and a series of devastating naval defeats cooled his ardour. His aides noticed that he spoke increasingly of his friendship with the British Royal Family, harping on his blessed days at Balmoral.
Meanwhile, of course, British prisoners were being worked to death on the Burma railway. By the time the B-29 raids had begun to lay waste entire Japanese cities, a growing air of unreality had settled over court life. Between visits to the palace air-raid shelter there were lectures on calligraphy and Chinese culture. At last, after the dropping of the A-bombs, Hirohito decided to save what was left of Japan, and made his famous broadcast ending the war. But as General MacArthur remarked, it is hard to understand how someone powerful enough to end the war could not have prevented it in the first place.
After defeat he entered the last phase of his rule. He attended poetry competitions and became a keen TV fan and addict of sumo wrestling. Forever shy, he was said to be at ease only with marine biologists of his own height. However, his role in the war was not completely forgotten. In 1972 one of his former soldiers, Corporal Yokoi, returned to Japan after holding out for twenty-eight years in the jungles of Guam. Japanese TV audiences were baffled by the corporal’s insistence on carrying out his military duties to the last, determined to return his rifle, still in working order, to his Imperial Majesty. Hirohito commented: ‘I hope he gets a good rest.’
But as Edward Behr asks in his epilogue, had there ever been, in the Japanese eye, the notion of surrender? Nowhere in Hirohito’s speech is surrender, or defeat, specifically mentioned, and many Japanese are now convinced that Japan was the war’s prime victim. Whatever else, this total inversion of the truth may be the greatest achievement of this astute, devious and mysterious man.
Observer 1989
Sinister Spider
Dragon Lady: the Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China Sterling Seagrave
Of all the maligned women in history – a richly stocked sisterhood that stretches from Eve to Mrs T – the most unfairly treated may well have been the last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, who ruled from 1861 to her death in 1908. Sterling Seagrave’s scrupulously researched exposé of the insults to her reputation makes one wonder how false our images of the great and famous probably are. Were Cleopatra and Catherine the Great anything like the figures that historians have described? Even in the era of the telephoto lens and the satellite interview our impressions of Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos may reflect our needs rather than their reality.
Contemporary reports, apparently so reliable, can lead to enormous injustice, and around Tzu Hsi the most scurrilous gossip solidified into instant history. During my Shanghai childhood in the 1930s I listened spellbound to strange tales about the Dowager Empress told by old China hands who had lived in Peking during the last years of her reign. Virtually entombed within the Forbidden City for fifty years, she had presided like a sinister spider over the Manchu empire. Only her closest courtiers had ever set eyes on her, and even her doctors were never allowed to see or touch her. Whenever she was ill, so the story went, silken cords were tied to her wrists and unwound to a curtained anteroom, where the royal physician would make his diagnosis from the faintest tremblings. I was deeply impressed, though years later in England I learned of fashionable Harley Street doctors who diagnosed the maladies of their rich women patients, and prescribed the desired stimulants and tranquillizers, entirely over the telephone – a not too dissimilar kind of silken line.
What I was not told as a child was that Tzu Hsi was widely believed to be a monster of depravity, a vicious oriental Messalina who presided over orgies of sexual perversion, poisoned her own son and was responsible for China’s humiliation during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. This wholly false picture was only revised in 1975 when Hugh Trevor-Roper exposed its principal creator in his Hermit of Peking: the Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. An Oxford graduate who spoke fluent Chinese, Backhouse arrived in Peking in 1899 and became unofficial editor and adviser to Dr George Morrison, local correspondent of The Times, who spoke no Chinese at all.
Prompted by the poisonous republican propaganda of Chinese revolutionaries campaigning against the Manchu dynasty, Backhouse concocted a stream of fabricated despatches about the Empress and the Imperial Court that satisfied the western appetite for tales of eastern corruption, and fixed the image of China as a haunt of dragon ladies, cruel and inscrutable mandarins and generally devilish behaviour (how I searched for it, in vain) that has lasted in large part to the present day.
As Trevor-Roper revealed, Backhouse supported himself by forging the court papers and court diaries that confirmed his malicious portrait of Tzu Hsi. Shortly before his death in Peking in 1943, during the Japanese occupation, he compiled the last of his fictions, an account of his long love affair with the lewd and elderly Empress and the weird orgies that she organized for her entertainment.
Sterling Seagrave sets the record straight. He draws on long-suppressed reports (which Backhouse denounced as forgeries) by western visitors who had met the Empress and found her to be a genial and kindly woman of quirky disposition but great strength of character. A former concubine of the Emperor Hsien Feng, she became the Dowager Empress when she was still in her mid-twenties and a complete novice in matters of state. Despite the immense handicaps of being a woman and almost never leaving the Forbidden City for the next fifty years, she did her best to steer China through the dangerous decades of confrontation with the west.
But fiction, though not as strange as truth, can be far more potent and self-justifying, and the Dowager Empress’s supposed depravity seemed retrospectively to vindicate the gunboats and raiding parties of the European powers as they set about their ruthless exploitation of her nation.
Daily Telegraph 1992
