Quote:

But didn't even ethnic Jewish gangsters kick up to him? No sense of ethnic community? Were they answering only to Italian families?


There were hardly any Jewish gangsters after the late '30s. The ones that survived prohibition did so because they didn't mess with the commission and cooperated with Luciano through what has been called the Combination.

The mafia gradually wiped them out as they became inconvenient for them and started causing problems (and remember, we're mainly talking NYC here, because that was the center of Jewish immigration).

Meyer survived because of his association with Luciano and the commission. After Cuba Lansky didn't really have anything, he couldn't make money for the commission members (who by 1957 were not his old friends and didn't owe him anything) and he had no organization of his own to fund new ventures as he was able to do in Cuba.

This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this, hey, thats great. But it's very, very unpredictable. There are so many ways you can screw it up.-Paul Castellano (he would know)

"I'm not talking about Italians, I'm talking about criminals."-Joe Valachi