He might have mobster... but from me was
MEYER LANSKY was one of the wealthiest and most feared mobsters in America for more than four decades. He ruthlessly controlled and invested the Mafia’s ill-gotten gains from drugs, prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking theft and murder.
He co-founded Murder Inc, the contract killing mob syndicate responsible for some 1,000 assassinations.
But to Turkish-born beauty Zali de Toledo the Mafia legend was the caring, tender lover 40 years her senior, in a secret 12-year romance she is finally revealing.
“I saw the Meyer Lansky nobody else knew,” says Zali, who discloses intimate details of their love affair in her new book They Called Him A Gangster. “He was the love of my life.
“Few knew him as I did: the gentle soul, funny and warm, who could be moved to tears by life’s injustices. He was loving and tender and caring.
“I loved Meyer, and he loved me even more. We completed each other. In some ways he was a father figure to me, but at the same time he would draw strength from me.
“Meyer would often rest his head on my shoulder, and we would sit silently, just holding each other, safe from the world, sheltered within the cocoon of our love.”
Yet Zali’s tender lover was a kingpin of American organised crime from the 1930s to the 1980s, amassing a personal fortune of $300million (£231million).
Lansky helped orchestrate the 1934 gathering of rival Mafia gangs across the US into a national syndicate.
With long-time partner in crime Lucky Luciano he transformed Las Vegas from a dusty backwater into a glittering Sin City, and ran Mafia gambling operations from there to Cuba, the Bahamas and London.
With a nod of Lansky’s head, his lifelong friend, mobster Bugsy Siegel, was killed for skimming Mafia millions.
He even blackmailed FBI chief J Edgar Hoover with compromising photographs, mob insiders claim.
But to Zali he was the charismatic millionaire who struck her with “a thunderbolt of attraction” when they first met at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv where she worked as a waitress serving him drinks on his visit to Israel in 1969.
“I blushed, and he gave me such a loving smile,” she says.
“I felt drawn to the man as though caught in a whirlpool, spinning dizzily. I was in love with him from that first moment.
“This man had reputedly done terrible things and yet I didn’t care. But what was it that was attracting me – the man or the danger?”
Lansky was no Hollywood leading man. At 5ft 4in he was four inches shorter than Zali, and weighed 9½ stone. With thinning hair and a doughy face, Byelorussian-born Lansky, brought to America by his parents at the age of nine in 1911 was by then 67 years old. She was 26.
“Our age gap made no difference,” says Zali, now aged 78. “He was short, but imposing, always impeccably dressed and groomed, with deep, penetrating hazel eyes.”
When Lansky turned up at her apartment the next morning, plunged into a passionate affair.
“I threw my arms around him and held him as tightly as I possibly could, pressing him into my body,” she says. “I felt so secure, so protected, as if nothing on earth could ever harm me as long as I remained in this man’s embrace.
“Despite our differences we became virtually inseparable.
“But I was no naif. By the time I met Meyer I’d had a troubled youth, been a battered wife, unloved and mistreated, doing menial work like cleaning toilets before I escaped my marriage and fled Turkey for Israel.
“Meyer was such fun to be with. I’d cook for him and he’d be so happy he would pick me up dancing in the kitchen, and would sing to me ‘You Are Always In My Heart.’ He had a lovely singing voice. And he’d tell me to buy myself a little something.”
Lansky lavished her with gold bracelets and rings, diamond brooches, a diamond-studded Cartier bracelet, and a luxury apartment as their love nest in Tel Aviv.
He also gave her a door key that once belonged to Bugsy Siegel’s moll
Zali