Chapter One
Meyer Lansky
The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by
Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels,
"somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family
fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand
Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but
what he called his "overpowering memory"—poverty, and still more savage
prejudice.
In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a
slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a
fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for
his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded
a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised.
Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a
weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was
almost beaten t ... read full excerpt from The Money and the Power ebook
