The journalist Lansky complained about in the Israeli TV interview was Hank Messick, who in 1965 published a series of articles in the Miami Herald in which he called Lansky "the boss of the Eastern Syndicate," "the biggest man in organized crime today," and said he was "worth $300 million." All were wild exaggerations. But, all of us here know that BS like that sticks to OC and the wilder the exaggerations, the more they stick--and the more myths get built around them. That article, which became established "fact" thanks to lazy, sensation-seeking journalists, was the beginning of the end for Lansky thanks to the myths that got built around him,

The Justice Dept. in 1971 launced an 18-city Organized Crime Strike Force. Seventeen of the 18 were cities. The Messick article stimulated them to make Lansky the 18th "city." The department and the FBI dogged him for the rest of his life--in the US and in Israel.

Robert Lacey, in his outstanding biography, "Little Man - Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life," said this about Lansky's attempts to establish himself in the Bahamas: "The Royal Commission of Inquiry into The Bahamas Casinos in 1967 reported that 'we began to wonder whether the name of Meyer Lansky was not some vast journalistic piece of fiction, so ghastly and mythical a figure did he appear.'"

"Such was the magic of the Lansky name that Lansky and the underworld had become virtually synonymous," Lacey wrote. "Like the word 'Mafia' itself, 'Meyer Lansky' had become shorthand for a particular sort of evil. If an operation was cunning and financially complicated, it had to have been devised by Meyer Lansky. To write 'Lansky' was a substitute for analyziing investigative complications, and when reporters found that the facts could not support the concept of the hidden Lansky command structure that had become an article of investigative faith, they resorted to expressions like the 'Lansky Group' or the 'Lansky Syndicate.'"