He was caught on a wiretap saying to his wife that Organized Crime was bigger then US steel....So?...
...so organized crime might have been bigger than US Steel, but Lansky wasn't. As PB said, Robert Lacey's bio, the best ever, is thoroughly researched. Lacey traced the big-money BS to Hank Messick, a tabloid author who admitted to Lacey that he heard, second-hand, that Lansky was "worth $300 million" and went with it in his book because it was an impressive number. Lacey did the research and found that Lansky was worth no more than $5-6 million at his peak--not chickenfeed, but hardly the stuff of $300 million. The reason Lansky lived to be 81 and died peacefully was that he was never rich or powerful enough to incur the jealousy of real Mob bosses, which is always fatal. "He was the accountant, not the boss," says Lacey.
