Hank Messick's many books on organized crime are widely respected. In
1965 he was hired by the Miami Herald for a series on Meyer Lansky, and his
first book, The Silent Syndicate (1967), reported on crime and gambling in
Kentucky and Ohio. Messick makes a distinction between the syndicate and the
Mafia. The former is international and multicultural, and often includes
the latter as a subset. But beginning with the Joseph Valachi hearings in
1963 and J. Edgar Hoover's "La Cosa Nostra" hype, the Mafia got all the
attention while Lansky was left alone. Messick was the first to hint at the
reason for this: Hoover had been compromised by Lansky, as Anthony Summers
recently confirmed in "Official and Confidential" (1993). This debate is
significant today for assassination theorists, because most "Mafia did it"
authors still give Lansky a mere footnote or two at best.
ISBN 0-7091-3966-7
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