Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Hotel Nacional Cocktail inspired by Meyer Lansky, the infamous mob accountant, who fled Cuba on this date, January 7, 1959.
Meyer Lansky - whose original name was Meier Suchowlański - was Jewish, born in Poland in 1902. He emigrated with his mother and brother to the U.S. in 1911 and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There, during his teenage years, he befriended Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. If either of those two names rings a bell you can tell where this is going.
Lansky was good at math and understood the true odds of casino games. He also had the right mob connections for security. When you combine that with his ability to bribe law enforcement successfully, he was well set to become a casino kingpin. By 1936, Lansky was running gambling operations in Florida, New Orleans, and Cuba.
Lansky’s buddy, Lucky Luciano, had been sent to jail for pandering in 1936. Shortly after WWII, Luciano was paroled under the condition that he permanently return to Sicily. Naturally, he secretly moved to Cuba instead. There he ran a number of casinos with the sanction of Cuba’s authoritarian dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
Eventually the U.S. government pressured Batista to deport Luciano - which is when Lansky stepped in. He and Batista agreed that in exchange for kickbacks, Lansky and the Mafia would control the racetracks and casinos in Cuba. Batista also offered to match, dollar for dollar, any hotel investment over $1 million the mob made in Cuba.
Lansky became the kingpin of Cuba’s gambling operations. To encourage investment and expand operations, he called on his fellow mob bosses to hold a summit in Havana. The event, known as ‘The Havana Conference’ took place in late 1946, and was the first full-scale meeting of the group since 1932. They even flew Frank Sinatra in to provide entertainment. Naturally, this all occurred at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.
Lansky and his buddies made boatloads of money over the next dozen years, but the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro were about to spoil that party.
On New Year’s Eve 1958, Lansky was celebrating the $3 million he’d made over the first year at his new hotel, the Habana Riviera, even as Castro’s revolution began. By January 7, 1959, the day before Castro marched into Havana and took control, Lansky fled to the Bahamas. The good times in Cuba were over, crackdowns on casinos in Miami followed, and Lansky then had to depend upon his Las Vegas revenues.
Despite being more business-minded than most of his peers, it didn’t change the fact that Lansky was ultimately a criminal. And while he was generally more low-key in his endeavors, law enforcement kept a close eye on him. By 1970, Lansky faced a damning case which threatened to bring him down for a number of crimes, including tax evasion. He fled to Israel, citing the country’s “Law of the Return” for Jews, which created a diplomatic mess.
“The episode posed a dilemma for the Israeli government,” The New York Times explained in Lansky’s obituary. “Had it allowed him to stay, it would have been criticized for harboring a reputed criminal. And when it asked him to leave, it was criticized for turning away a Jew who had asked for refuge.”
After two and a half years, Lansky was forced to return to America, and was arrested upon his arrival in Miami - but in the end, all charges were dropped due to his declining health. Lansky died in Miami in 1983, at the age of 80, from lung cancer, making him one of the few top mafiosos who wasn’t taken down by the typical mobster “occupational hazards.” Even in his final years, Lansky maintained an amazing business sense. While rumors persisted for years that Lanksky passed away with upwards of $300 million stashed away in bank accounts around the world, his estate at his death was modest, and included less than $35,000 in his bank account. Historians now believe the vast wealth Lansky was rumored to have at the end of his life was mostly myth, or had been lost in ventures like his hotels & casinos in Cuba, with no substantial assets ever recovered.
While Lansky lived in many places around the globe, he made it clear that Cuba was always one of his favorite places. Since the Hotel Nacional Cocktail was the house special at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, we’ve made that today’s Drink Of The Day, in a salute to Meyer Lansky.
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
