Originally posted by Turnbull:
Lansky was a pal of Batista's from the '30's. When Batista returned to power in '52, he found that gringo gamblers were staying away in droves because the games were crooked. He asked his pal Lansky to organize gaming in Havana as a consultant, because Lansky had a solid-gold reputation for giving players an even break--he believed profits from gambling were sufficiently big so that there was no need for the house to cheat. To keep peace with his Mob pals, Lansky divided up the Havana action evenly. The scene in GFII in which Roth says he's leaving his empire to the Corleones "but all of you will share equally" is a fair approximation of how he operated in Cuba. (BTW: in that scene, "Eddie Levine of Newport" was in real life Eddie Levinson of Covington, KY, a big-time gaming operator; "Johnny Ola" in real life was Lansky's pal Jimmy "Blue Eyes" Alo.) Lansky and Trafficante partnered with Batista in building the Riviera, Havana's biggest casino hotel. It started making big money when it opened in 3/58, but Castro closed it and the other casinos after he took over in 1/59. Lansky and his investors lost everything. Trafficante spent a month in a Cuban jail before Lansky persuaded Castro to let him go.
This information can be found in Uri Dan's book on Meyer Lansky?
