Final_Judgment

[94] Final Judgment 155
In his final years—and posthumously—Lansky (with the willing help
of Hollywood and the rest of the media) became a folk hero of sorts.
Gangsterism was being made fashionable—even as the glory days of John
F. Kennedy and Camelot were being trashed by that same media. Lansky's
days with Benjamin Siegel were glamorized in films such as The Gangster
Chronicles, The Neon Empire, and in Mobsters, where a host of teen idols
played Lansky, Siegel, Costello and Luciano in their early years.
Author Robert Lacey—who had previously written a glowing profile of
the British royal family—turned his attention to the royal family of the
international crime syndicate and produced—with the help of the Lansky
family—a Lansky biography, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster
Life. Lacey's epic tells much—but ignores a lot. He would have us believe
that Lansky was, more than anything, a devoted family man, and not the
ruthless thug that he truly was. Even as Lacey's Lansky biography was
hitting the bookstores, yet another Hollywood production brought Lansky
to the screen. This film, Bugsy, starring heart-throb Warren Beatty as
Benjamin Siegel, cast the highly-regarded actor Ben Kingsley (who had even
played Mahatma Gandhi) as a wise and all-knowing Meyer Lansky.
However, the Hollywood versions of the life and times of Meyer
Lansky were far from the truth, no matter how colorful a story they told
about the evil genius they portrayed.
Thus, even in death, Meyer Lansky prevailed. Lansky's central role As a
virtual middleman between the high-level forces that conspired in the
assassination of John F. Kennedy has been cleverly buried by a willing
media. "Israel's Godfather" was lionized almost as a misunderstood
statesman. Meyer Lansky, however, was not that.
Instead, Lansky was a cynical, cold-blooded killer who had ordered the
death of his closest friend—Benjamin Siegel—and who certainly had no
qualms about helping orchestrate the murder of an American president who
threatened not only his own survival, but that of his beloved State of Israel.