Interesting irony:

]oseph (Doc) Stacher was a boyhood chum and close associate of Lansky--they were born in the same year (1902) and both immigrated from Ukraine. He ran gambling rackets for Abner "Longy" Zwillman, helped arrange a critical alliance meeting between Lansky and Italian mobsters in 1931, and was Lansky's right hand man for gaming in Vegas and the Caribbean.

In '64, Stacher was indicted for tax evasion. The Feds revoked his naturalization and wanted to deport him to Ukraine. But this was the Cold War, and the government was loathe to ship anyone--even criminals--"behind the Iron Curtain." Stacher applied for permission to live in Israel under Israel's Law of Return, and was accepted. He lived the rest of his life peacefully in Israel as a "returned Jew."

Lansky tried the same ploy in 1970, when he was the target of a Justice Dept. "strike force." But the Feds plied the Israeli government with reams of material from Lansky's FBI file--they even invited the government's prosecutor in Lansky's citizenship case to Washington, rolled out the red carpet for him, and gave him access to the FBI building and everything in it. Lansky's only "criminal conviction" of record was a guilty plea to a misdemeanor gambling charge in Saratoga Springs, NY, for which he served less than three months in the local jail. But, with constant pressure from the US government, the Israelis ordered Lansky to leave as a "threat to national security."