MONEY AND THE POWER, THE(ISBN=9780375701269) 英文原版 下载 mobi 免费 pdf 百度网盘 epub 2025 在线 电子书

Las Vegas–the name evokes images of divorce and dice, prostitutes and payoffs, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. Now, at the dawn of the new century, this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.

The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.

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　　Sally Denton and Roger Morris live in Santa Fe, New

Mexico.

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　　Chapter 1

　　1.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 to death himself by the

rest of the gang before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he

would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical

strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the

calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.

　　He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and

back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America,

ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and

prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics,

legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately,

always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their

distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy

money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the

promise, remained bleak and uncertain.

　　A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was

naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds

in his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he

drew an indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such

thing as a lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers.

The winners are those who control the game . . . all the rest are

suckers," he would say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He

decided that he would be the boss. He adopted another, grander

axiom as well: that crime and corruption were no mere by-products

of the economics and politics of his adopted country, but rather a

cornerstone. That understanding, too, tilted the odds in his

favor.

　　By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already

commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and

wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants,

Benjamin Siegel, called "Bugsy"-though not to his face-for being

"crazy as a bedbug." Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the

Bugs and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their

services to the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon

notorious throughout the city as "the most efficient arm in the

business." Like other criminals then and later, and with epic

consequences in the corruption of both labor and corporate

management, they also hired out their thuggery first to companies,

and then to unions-most decisively the Longshoremen and

Teamsters-in the bloody war between capitalists and workers. Some

employers "gave their hoodlums carte blanche," as one account put

it, which they took with "such enthusiasm that many union

organizers were murdered or crippled for life." Lansky and Siegel

would be partners and close, even affectionate friends for more

than a quarter century, and in the end Lansky would have "no

choice," as one journalist quoted him, but to join in ordering

Bugsy's murder.

　　At a bar mitzvah, Lansky met Arnold Rothstein, the flamboyant

gambler involved in fixing the 1919 World Series, and he soon

became Rothstein's prot?©g?©. During Prohibition

they made a fortune in bootlegging while dealing in heroin as well.

Their collaborators, competitors, and customers in the criminal

traffic, as Lansky later reminisced, were "the most important

people in the country." On a rainy night in 1927 in southern New

England, a gang working for Lansky hijacked with wanton violence a

convoy of Irish whiskey being smuggled by one of their rival

bootleggers, an ambitious Boston businessman named Joseph P.

Kennedy. The theft cost Kennedy "a fortune," one of the hijackers

recalled, as well as the lives of eleven of his own men, whose

widows and relatives then pestered or blackmailed a seething

Kennedy for compensation.

　　Ruthless with enemies, Lansky was careful, even punctilious, with

his partners and allies. One of his closest and most pivotal

associates was yet another boyhood acquaintance and fellow

bootlegger, an astute, pockmarked Sicilian named Charles "Lucky"

Luciano. Their rapport baffled those who witnessed it, bridging as

it did bitter old divisions between Italians and Jews. "They were

more than brothers, they were like lovers," thought Bugsy Siegel.

"They would just look at each other and you would know that a few

minutes later one of them would say what the other was

thinking."

　　Lansky's share of the enormous criminal wealth and influence to

come out of Prohibition in the early thirties would be deployed

shrewdly. He branched out into prostitution, narcotics, and other

vice and corruption nationwide. But his hallmark was always

gambling. "Carpet joints," as the ubiquitous illegal casinos of the

era were called, run by his profit-sharing partners-proconsuls like

the English killer Owney Madden, who controlled organized crime's

provincial capital of Hot Springs, Arkansas-were discreetly tucked

away and protected by bribed officials in dozens of towns and

cities all over the United States. Still, Lansky's American

roadhouses were almost trivial compared to the lavish casinos he

would build in Cuba in league with a dictatorial regime.

　　For Luciano and other gangsters, Lansky was the preeminent

investment banker and broker, a classic manager and financier of a

growing multiethnic confederation of legal and illegal enterprises

throughout the nation. He organized crime along corporate

hierarchical lines, delineated authority and responsibility,

holdings and subsidiaries, and, most important, meticulously

distributed shares of profits and proceeds, bonuses and

perquisites. There would always be separate and distinct provinces

of what came to be called most accurately the Syndicate-feudal

baronies defined by ethnic group, specialty, assets, or geography,

that ruled their own territorial bases and colonies, coexisting

warily with the others, distrusting, jockeying, waiting, always

conscious of power. It was part of Lansky's clarity of vision to

see how they might be arrayed to mutual advantage despite their

unsurrendered sovereignty and mutual suspicion. He recognized how

much the country-in the grip of Wall Street financial houses and

powerful local banks, industrial giants in steel, automobiles,

mining, and manufacturing, the growing power of labor unions, the

entrenched political machines from rural courthouses to city halls

of the largest urban centers-was already ruled by the interaction

of de facto gangs in business and politics, as in crime. A faction

unto himself, after all, he would never subdue or eliminate the

boundaries and barons. Over the rest of the century their domains

would only grow. In business, he preferred to own men more than

property, especially public officials whose complicity was

essential. He did not, like most of his associates, merely bribe

politicians or policemen, but worked a more subtle, lasting

venality, bringing them in as partners.

　　Americanizing corruption as never before, Lansky extended it into

a truly national network and ethic of government and business, a

shadow system. His Syndicate came to bribe or otherwise compromise,

and thus to possess, their own politicians, to corrupt and control

their own labor unions and companies, to hire their own

intelligence services and lawyers, to influence banks with their

massive deposits. But it was Lansky who gave their expedient

alliance a historic cohesion, wealth, and power. Already by the

thirties their shared apportioned profits were in the tens of

millions of dollars, equivalent to the nation's largest

industries.

　　The wiry adolescent Lansky had grown into a small,

unprepossessing man. He was barely five feet four inches tall,

weighing less than 140 pounds. By his late thirties, he was the

father of three in a colorless and arranged first marriage. With a

pleasant open face, limpid brown eyes, and neatly combed dark hair,

he resembled nothing so much as the earnest accountant or banker

that in a sense he had become. Save for white-on-white silk shirts

and the largest collection of bow ties in the country, he exhibited

none of the coarse ostentation or pretensions of his colleagues.

His private life was discreetly modest. At home he spent most of

his time in a wood-paneled den and library lined with popular

encyclopedias. Able to recite from memory the Gettysburg Address

and long passages from The Merchant of Venice, he was an avid

reader, a regular subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club, ever

conscious of his lack of formal education. His personal hero, he

confided to a few friends, was another figure of similar physical

size and historic imprint, Napoleon Bonaparte.

　　Above all, he was a political man. Like most denizens of his

world, he was insistently patriotic, and generally conservative if

not reactionary in the usual political terms, with an

understandable distaste even for reformers, let alone social

revolutionaries-though he always seemed to understand, long before

more educated men, that ideology and conviction in American

politics commonly have a price. Like his successors over the rest

of the twentieth century who learned the lesson well, he would be

an inveterate contributor to Democratic politicians at all levels.

Lansky paid "handsomely"-legal scholar and sociologist William

Chambliss recorded his secret cash contributions-into the

presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928, Franklin Roosevelt in

1932, Harry Truman in 1948, Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and 1964, and

Hubert Humphrey in 1968, as well as the races of senators,

congressmen, governors, mayors, and councilmen. At a Democratic

National Convention in the 1930s he met the amply corrupt Louisiana

senator Huey Long, whose partnership opened the South to the

alliance, and for whom Lansky opened what would be one of the first

foreign bank accounts for corrupt American politicians. Covering

his bets, he also passed cash through an intermediary to the 1944

Republican presidential campaign of onetime New York "gangbuster"

Thomas Dewey, and backed a few GOP candidates over the years,

though generally preferring, and thus flourishing under, Democrats.

Beneath the surface, Lansky knew, Dewey was a classic example of

the American prosecutor and politician who exploited the public

fear of criminals but in the end did remarkably little about crime,

a prosecutor who convicted a few big names while imprisoning mostly

street-level small fry, leaving the Syndicate and the system that

fed it undiminished. "You can't help liking Mr. Dewey," a shrewd

New York socialite would say of the man in an epigram that captured

his real record as well, "until you get to know him."

　　Lansky's practical politics were plain. Applying the wisdom

acquired on the Lower East Side and in the national underworld he

came to dominate, he was unyielding and merciless with those who

challenged or cheated him. But he would be very different from many

of his predecessors and successors, in legitimate business as in

crime, who overreached. Monopolistic greed, he believed, led to

blood or headlines, rupturing society's usual apathy, arousing if

only for a moment a spasm of reform that was bad for everyone's

profits. He welcomed his competitors-the more corruption the

better; the more people compromised, the more collusion,

acceptance, and resignation, the less danger of change. Nowhere was

this strategy more decisive than in his convoluted relations with

his supposed enemy but often de facto ally, the government of the

United States.

　　Those closest to Lansky would claim that he accomplished the

supreme blackmail in the thirties, obtaining photographs of

homosexual acts by J. Edgar Hoover, the increasingly powerful and

celebrated director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The

pictures were said to hold at bay this most formidable of potential

adversaries. But the racketeer and the bureaucrat also had mutual

friends, backers, and associates, among them prominent businessmen

like Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Industries or developer Del Webb,

or groups, like the American Jewish League Against Communism, that

shared the right-wing politics the gangster and G-man had in

common. Whether by crude blackmail or the more subtle influence of

their common circle, over the decades Lansky enjoyed almost

singular immunity from serious FBI pursuit; "Lansky and the Bureau

chief in a symbiotic relationship, each protecting the other,"

University of California scholar Peter Dale Scott would write of

the suborning.

　　But sexual compromising, mutual friendships, or ideology only

began the collusion. In 1937, Lansky arranged for the FBI and the

Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to make the highly publicized

arrest of one of his associates, drug trafficker Louis "Lepke"

Buchalter. The betrayal at once removed a Lansky rival, gratified

Hoover and FBN director Harry Anslinger in their mutual obsession

with popular image, and further compromised federal law

enforcement, which was growing ever more dependent on informers and

double agents for its successes.

　　Then, at the outset of World War II, U.S. Naval Intelligence and

the nation's new espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services

(OSS), enlisted Lansky and the Syndicate in a historic

collaboration, the top-secret Operation Underworld, in which

government agents employed mobsters and their labor goons in a

campaign of coercion and bribery ostensibly to prevent sabotage and

quell uncontrolled leftist unions on New York docks. The "dirty

little secret of Operation Underworld," as a former White House

official put it, "was that the United States Government needed

Meyer Lansky and organized crime to force an industrial peace and a

policing of sabotage on the wharves and in the warehouses. The

government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government

and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and

because it could conceive little other choice in the system at

hand."

　　Working conditions on the docks, as in much of the economy,

remained harsh, and the struggle between management and labor

violent and unpredictable. Industrial amity was one of the many

myths of World War II. The early 1940s would see more than 14,000

strikes involving nearly 7 million workers nationwide, far more

than any comparable period in the country's history. The secret

little war on the waterfront was a major step beyond the Buchalter

betrayal, which had redounded to the advantage of both criminals

and bureaucrats, and was another mark of the self-reinforcing,

almost complementary accommodation and exploitation emerging so

widely out of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. Beyond public

relations or displays like Hoover's or Dewey's, federal and state

law enforcement at this time remained widely inept, if not

corrupt.

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编辑推荐

　　Las Vegas–the name evokes images of divorce and dice,

prostitutes and payoffs, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is

a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than

ever imagined. Now, at the dawn of the new century, this neon

maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant

“sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and

worship of money that have come to permeate American life.

　　The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet

at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of

intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris

reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street,

international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they

expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen,

and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through

this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton

uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and

provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century

American history.

媒体评论

　　The history of Vegass dark underside . . . has seldom been so

abundantly and compellingly told. The Washington Post Book

World

　　Riveting. . . Absorbing. . . A saga of underworld subculture that

intersects with that of government agents, senators, and presidents

and ranges from Cuba to Dallas to Watergate.The Wall Street

Journal

　　A must-read. . . . One of the most important non-fiction books

published in the U.S. in [a] half century. Los Angeles Times

　　Something on every page hits like a meat ax. In their unsparing,

meticulous reporting, Denton and Morris produce a compelling,

important dossier.New York Daily News

　　-- Review

书籍介绍

Las Vegas–the name evokes images of divorce and dice, prostitutes and payoffs, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. Now, at the dawn of the new century, this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.

The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.