Daughter of the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

the men in Washington. They hated drugs. They hated prostitution. But the Washington party line was that if you had liquor and if you had gambling, then drugs and whores were sure to follow, and Tom Sawyer’s America would turn into Owney Madden’s Hot Springs. As we haveseen from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, the puritan doomsday has been a false alarm.
    The Unclehood was in the entertainment business, giving the people what they wanted, up to a point. There were other elements in gangland who might have catered to “true crime,” but not the Unclehood. As one of my uncles, Uncle Doc Stacher, often said, the main difference between Meyer Lansky and his old Prohibition friend Joe Kennedy was Kennedy’s rosary and his Harvard degree. If Daddy and my uncles had had those degrees (forget the rosaries), they probably would have ended up on Wall Street. Without them, they ended up in Havana and Las Vegas. But what really is Wall Street, anyway, but a fancy casino whose croupiers have MBAs?
    None of my uncles had gone to Harvard, or anywhere near it other than maybe to pull some heist in Cambridge or Arlington. They hadn’t gone to any college. In fact, I think my father’s eighth-grade education was the equivalent of a Ph.D. in the Unclehood. He was the scholar of the group, the wise man. But look how far they had come with nothing but their brains and their fists. It was all a matter of perspective, a matter of opportunity, a matter of respect. Whether Kennedy or Lansky, the key to success was all about taking risks. Daddy wanted his children to be armed with degrees, rather than the pistols and brickbats that he and Uncle Benny and all the others were armed with. That Buddy and I, true to the Unclehood, never finished high school, that we were millionaire dropouts, was one of the great tragedies and heartbreaks in the life of a man who never displayed his emotions. But I can guarantee you that no daughter of Wall Street had as privileged a girlhood as the one Daddy arranged for me. That I blew it has always haunted me, the thought that maybe there was a Lansky curse, that we were all genetically programmed to take the wrong turn, to miss the yellow brick road, and to choose the dark highway to oblivion.

CHAPTER TWO
    A MERICAN P RINCESS
    F or a girl whom many assumed to be a Jewish American Princess, I had absolutely nothing Jewish in my upbringing. It started with my birth, on December 6, 1937, at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, where a Catholic priest my mother had befriended—later the famed Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston—blessed the event. I was raised by an Irish nanny named Minnie Mullins and a Filipino butler/chauffeur named Tommy, who was a devout Catholic. My mother made a big deal of celebrating Christmas, with a huge tree and more gifts than any Santa could handle, and an even bigger one of celebrating Easter, with Easter egg hunts and baked hams and custom-made hand-painted dresses for me that I could have worn in the Easter Parade if Daddy had only let me.
    We lived in one of the most expensive apartment houses in Boston, on Beacon Street in Back Bay, in the heart of the Mayflower aristocracy, with a view over the Charles River and the Esplanade where the Boston Pops Orchestra played their summer concerts. This was WASP country, Harvard country, the land of Cabots and Lodges. And Lanskys. Meyer Lansky was precisely the kind of man the Puritan New England preachers would have given angry sermons against. Yet here he was, the merchant of pleasure in the land of pain.
    But pain was why we were in Boston, a pain that may have caused my parents to lose their Jewish faith. My brother Buddy was Meyer Lansky’s firstborn son, whom he hoped would become a Harvard man, a great man, a straight man. But Bernard Irving Lansky came into the world of the Depression in 1930 with the birth defect of spina bifida, which the doctors initially misdiagnosed as the even more limiting cerebral palsy. Spina