aslan said:
I would plaster Binion's history all over the place,
Ya, the REAL Benny history, told most detailed by Denton and Morris in The Money and The Power - How Las Vegas became America's Shadow Capital. Unfortunately the Binion chapter, worth the price of the book, is not available online... but this is -
Excerpt Chapter 1
1. Meyer Lansky
The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice.
In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gangbefore the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.
He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America, ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics, legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately, always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the promise, remained bleak and uncertain.
A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was
naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in
his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an
indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a
lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are
those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would
say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be
the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and
corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of
his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding,
too, tilted the odds in his favor.
