Comments by "voteZDLR" (@voteZDLR) on "Mafia's Top Lawyer Who Runs Las Vegas" video.
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Boardwalk Empire's a great show if you like the characters that are central to this guy's story. I mean he's talking about how his first major case was defending this guy for stealing a car basically and transporting it across state lines -- a felony. And something that is according to him almost always a lost case, and yet he won. Probably some jury intimidation there, but we don't hear that LOL.
Anyway he says that it impressed a guy named Meyer Lansky. Meyer was #2 only to Lucky Lucciano, the man who basically gave birth to the American Mafia at least insofar as having it be a loose organization of gangs that are governed by a body called the "Commission" which was basically the bosses of each family. It gave more organization to organized crime than had ever been done before. And with it, more power... and oftentimes more peace, because each of the heads of the 5 families all must unilaterally agree for anybody from any family who was a made member to ever so much as be touched by anybody. And of course death and destruction comes to those who would break that rule, Henry Hill and his friends come to mind, who murdered made man Billy Batts in Hill's restaurant and then prayed nobody ever found out it was them.
Anyway, Lucky Lucciano's #2 and the "brains" behind it for all intents and purposes was Meyer Lansky. And of course no story about those two would ever be complete without mentioning their protege Bugsy Siegel, who basically was sent to Las Vegas to turn it into the city it is today -- Sin City. A playground for gangsters, celebrities and normal people alike. Boardwalk Empire talks about the roots of that relationship and covers it all in such a great way. For every fictional character/event, there's like 3 or 4 things that are true to life or at least based in truth.
Finally, my favorite allegory about Lucky Lucciano and Meyer Lansky is how they met to begin with. Lucky Lucciano was always a tough guy, a bully even, even in his youth. One of the people he picked on during his childhood was this young Jewish kid, he figured he'd have money and not be able to defend himself. Wrong. Meyer Lansky couldn't fight, but three times or so all within one week Meyer Lansky fought Lucky and his goons. He lost every single time. By the 3rd or 4th time, because he was able to take the beating so well, Lucky was like "I could use someone like you, you got a lot of fight in you. Not enough, but you got a lot." or something like that. He respected Meyer's ability to take a beating, in other words, and his ability to defend himself even when there's no chance he'd win. That was the basis of their friendship and of course their business relationship, with which they made a fortune doing a variety of crimes and scams but most importantly of all running booze -- and heroin, too, that came later. A secret venture all of their own. Lucky Lucciano basically invented the black market heroin trade in America.
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