A Game of Casino

Sparing neither velvet draperies, nor soft polish on exotic wood, nor white silk for the crapshooters' dinner jackets, the new casinos of Havana rate as the hemisphere's most alluring and elegant. Says a dice man in the deep-carpeted gaming room of the Hotel Nacional: "We are getting bigger bets than Las Vegas. All the real big Eastern crapshooters are coming down here to take a crack at us." And for all the real big Eastern hoods, running Havana gambling looks to be this winter's richest bonanza. Last week Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan dropped a suggestion that a yearning to cut himself into Cuban casinos doomed Racketeer Albert Anastasia to his death last October by bullets from masked gunmen in a Manhattan hotel barbershop (TIME, Nov. 4).

Technical Assistance. In the fleshpot city of Havana, where gambling has always been one of the more reputable vices, a few casinos were prospering moderately in the early 1950s. Then some U.S. thugs introduced an eight-dice game called razzle-dazzle, so complex that most suckers never even learned the rules before they were fleeced. As resentment over this form of larceny spread among U.S. tourists, President Fulgencio Batista grew worried. In 1955 he decided to look around for U.S. technical assistance. The man who popped up was Meyer Lansky.

The Kefauver Committee Report on Organized Crime paints Russian-born Meyer Lansky, 55, as one of the six top U.S. hoodlums: bootlegging, gambling on both coasts, many a link to Murder, Inc. From Batista Lansky got a dream decree for enterprising crapshooters willing to invest abroad. The government waived corporate taxes for ten years, canceled customs' duties on imported gaming equipment. Under certain conditions it offered to back casinos in nightclubs or hotels worth more than $1,000,000. The Minister of Labor, whose brother turned up this year owning a cut of one big new casino, obligingly ruled that roulette stick-men and craps pitmen were "technicians," admissible to Cuba for two years.

A year passed before such palaces as the new Havana Riviera and Capri hotels could be built and before the mob could raise the "nut"--the bankroll behind the chips. But by last month ten Havana casinos were going, most of them profitable from the first roll. Running the Sans Souci casino was a Lansky hood, Santo Trafficante Jr.; at several others Lansky was the boss or named the boss.

Fight for the Hilton. One luxurious casino is still to open, in the 630-room Havana Hilton Hotel, now abuilding, and New York police have documents showing that Racketeer Anastasia wanted to muscle in on Havana gambling. But if Anastasia had a yen to get control of the Havana Hilton casino, Meyer Lansky was equally set on keeping him out. A Lansky agent, Joseph Silesi, turned up among the 13 groups that went to Hilton Hotels International with bids to run the casino.

Last week Hilton Vice President John W. Houser announced that with the help of a former G-man he had tentatively picked a reputable Cuban businessman and two Nevada politicians to run the Hilton casino. Houser added that he had been questioned by District Attorney Hogan and surmised that Hogan believed Anastasia was shot for trying to move in on Cuban territory. Hogan announced that he wanted to question Trafficante and Silesi. From Havana Trafficante pleaded, "I don't know what this is all about." Silesi, also in Havana, was more succinct. Hogan, he said, "can drop dead." Lansky himself dropped out of sight.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.