Final_Judgment

256 The Twain Shall Meet [195]
Morris Dalitz. The former Cleveland bootlegger-turned-Las Vegas
casino gambling czar. Dalitz was a longtime Lansky intimate who was
Benjamin Siegel's successor as Lansky's point man in Las Vegas. 538
As we saw in Chapter 10, Dalitz later employed "racket buster" G.
Robert Blakey as a consultant/character witness in a libel action in which
Dalitz was contesting charges that his La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad,
California was linked to organized crime. It was shortly thereafter that
Blakey was placed in charge of the House Assassinations Committee
investigation of the JFK murder.
Dalitz himself, as noted in Chapter 10, was also a longtime fund-raiser for
the Israeli lobby in the United States and honored by the aforementioned
Anti-Defamation League (ADL ) for his services.
Carlos Prio Socarras. The President of Cuba from 1948-1952, Prio
Socarras had been a front-man for Meyer Lansky's partner-in-crime, Cuban
strongman Fulgencio Batista. In fact, it was Lansky who persuaded Batista
with a hefty bribe to "step down" in favor of Prio Socarras. 539 And as we
saw in Chapter 14 Prio was engaged in gun-running with a business partner
whose name is now more than a footnote in history: Dallas nightclub
operator Jack Ruby.
No wonder then, that the Italian journal, Paesa Sera, would be moved to
comment: "It is a fact that the CMC is nevertheless the point of contact for
a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties
whose common denominator is an anti-communism so strong that it would
swallow up all those in the world who have fought for decent relations
between East and West, including Kennedy." 540
CMC/Permindex—it might also be added even more particularly—is
nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain
respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is a
devotion to the cause of Israel.
ISRAEL'S ROLE COMES FULL CIRCLE
As we have noted, however, it is the Tibor Rosenbaum-BCI connection
with Permindex that points most definitely toward the Israeli Mossad
interest in Permindex. BCI, as we have seen, was very much a creature of
Israel and its Mossad. Among the directors of Rosenbaum's BCI was Ernest
Israel Japhet, also chairman and president of the Bank Leumi, the largest
bank in Israel. BCI and Bank Leumi were involved in the diamond trade and
tied into Far East drug trafficking. 541
(We have already examined, in Chapter 6 and Chapter 12, Lansky's
central role in global drug-trafficking in Southeast Asia, all of which was
made further possible—under CIA cover—as a consequence of American
involvement in the Vietnam conflict.)
Two other directors of BCI—as we noted in Chapter 7—were Ed
Levinson, front man at the Fremont Casino in Las Vegas for Lansky's close
friend, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, who died in exile in Israel and John Pullman,
Lansky's international money courier. Rosenbaum's other operation, the