{ "item_title" : "The Mob's Financial Brain", "item_author" : [" Luca Bellarosa "], "item_description" : "He never carried the title of boss. He never joined the Mafia, because he couldn't. Yet for half a century, the most powerful gangsters in America trusted one quiet, bookish man with their money.Meyer Lansky was born in the Russian Empire and grew up in the crowded tenements of New York's Lower East Side. As a boy he worked out a rule that would shape his entire life: gamblers lose, and the house always wins. Alongside his friends Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel, he moved from bootlegging to building a gambling empire that stretched from the elegant lake houses of Saratoga to the carpet joints of Florida and New Orleans. That empire reached its peak in the glittering casinos of Havana, where a dictator was his partner.Lansky ran honest games inside dishonest businesses. He paid off sheriffs and politicians, hid ownership behind front men and, investigators believed, moved money through couriers and secret Swiss accounts long before the world had a word for money laundering. Newspapers called him the financial genius of organized crime. The government spent decades trying to prove it.But was the legend true? The famous claim that his organization was bigger than U.S. Steel, the three-hundred-million-dollar fortune, his role in the murder of his oldest friend: how much of it can be proven? When Lansky died in Miami Beach in 1983, after a lifetime under surveillance, the fortune was never found. His only jail sentence had lasted a matter of weeks. A revolution had swept away his Havana empire overnight. And the Jewish homeland he longed to call his own had turned him away.The Mob's Financial Brain separates the man from the myth. It reveals how a soft-spoken immigrant helped turn crime into a business, and why the money machinery he built outlived the gangsters who used it.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/474/9798164745103_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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