For nearly 50 years the FBI chased Meyer Lansky as the financial mastermind of the American syndicate, a man presumed to be sitting on hundreds of millions in numbered Swiss accounts. When he died of lung cancer in Miami in 1983, he left a modest estate and had struggled to pay his disabled son’s medical bills. This episode traces how a boy born in Grodno in 1902 and raised on the Lower East Side befriended Benjamin Siegel, refused to pay protection money to a young Charles Luciano, and turned that standoff into a partnership that crossed ethnic lines.

Lansky treated crime as a corporation. He helped organize the Atlantic City Conference of May 1929, pioneered offshore laundering after Switzerland wrote banking secrecy into law in 1934, and ran upscale carpet joints where rigged games were forbidden because the house edge was profit enough. The same cold arithmetic later forced him to accept the killing of his oldest friend, and it failed him completely in Cuba, where a revolution he never priced in erased his life’s work overnight.

• In 1938 Judge Nathan Perlman asked Lansky to break up pro-Nazi rallies in Manhattan. He did it in Yorkville and refused payment.
• During Operation Underworld in 1942, Lansky brokered a deal between Naval Intelligence and the imprisoned Lucky Luciano to secure the New York docks.
• At a Havana summit in December 1946 Lansky pleaded for Bugsy Siegel’s life over the Flamingo’s overruns. Siegel was assassinated in Beverly Hills in June 1947.
• He built the Havana Riviera in 1957 for 14 million dollars, then fled when Batista fell on New Year’s Eve 1958, abandoning an estimated 17 million in cash.
• Israel, a state he had armed and funded, used a criminal exclusion clause to deport him. He was acquitted of tax evasion in 1973.