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Jul 18, 2011 10:09 PM EDT / thedailybeast.com.
Reputed Mafia financier Meyer Lansky takes a break in a Miami attorney's office, Friday January 22, 1982., AP Photo.
During WWII, Jewish mob boss Meyer Lansky teamed up with the Navy to fight the Nazis. Eric Dezenhall, author of The Devil Himself, uncovers the unlikely story.
In godfatherly fashion, SEAL Team Six was gearing up to whack Osama Bin Laden at the moment Prince William and Kate Middleton took their vows at Westminster Abbey. The events weren’t connected, but given our culture’s wish to see things through a Hollywood lens, let’s picture President Obama stroking his dog, Bo, behind the Resolute desk and telling the Middletons to “consider this justice a gift on this, the day of your daughter’s wedding.”
Think mixing the government and gangland is farfetched? Going back a few wars, our leaders sent the mob after the Nazis, the subject of my new historical novel, The Devil Himself.
The collaboration between gangsters and Naval intelligence during World War II—which the government denied for nearly 40 years—began after the behemoth cruise ship Normandie caught fire and capsized at Pier 88 in Manhattan on the heels of Pearl Harbor.
The luxury liner was being retrofitted for U.S. troop deployment when it was destroyed in early February 1942. The Navy suspected Nazi sabotage. After all, German U-boats had killed more U.S. sailors in the north Atlantic than died at Pearl Harbor.
Naval officers were rebuffed by the longshoremen on the mob-controlled New York waterfront, men averse to snitching—for anybody. For help, the Navy turned to mobster Meyer Lansky who, it turns out, had a lot to say in later years about his World War II service, both to family, friends, and in notes he made in a personal journal from Woolworth’s.
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