Havana Conference
The Havana Conference is a week-long meeting of high-ranking mobsters of the American Cosa Nostra and Kosher Nostra , or the so-called National Crime Syndicate , which is said to have taken place in the week of December 22, 1946 in Havana , Cuba, in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba . The Havana Conference is considered to be the most important summit since the Atlantic City Conference of 1929, as important groundwork for the next decades was set here.
The conference
The conference was convened by Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky . The mobsters in attendance represented New York City , New Jersey , Buffalo , Chicago , New Orleans, and Florida . The mobsters were accommodated in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba , in which Meyer Lansky owned shares.
Conference topics
There was talk of the disagreement between Vito Genovese and Frank Costello after Genovese sought supremacy over the Luciano family , when Lucky Luciano was deported to Italy and Luciano officially appointed Costello as the new boss of the family. Luciano asked both of them to let their differences rest and shake hands.
A major theme of the conference was the global drug trafficking and the Syndicate's operations in the United States. There was talk of losing influence and power to other criminal organizations if they did not continue to actively participate in drug trafficking and develop it more efficiently.
Another point that needed to be clarified was what Meyer Lansky called the “Siegel situation” after Lansky’s childhood friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel fell out of favor with the syndicate when the sum needed for the construction was for his “ Flamingo ”hotel and the suspicion arose that Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill had brought two million US dollars of the budget abroad. It is said that they talked about the flamingo and decided to kill Siegel. Lansky failed to calm the other bosses down. Siegel was shot dead in his Beverly Hills home on June 20, 1947. The perpetrator could not be identified. After Siegel's assassination, the flamingo was directed by Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway , whereupon it soon made big profits.
The meeting also laid the foundation stone for the casino business with the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista , whose advisor Meyer Lansky had become.
Attendees
In the movie
- In the film The Godfather - Part II , the Havana conference is adapted when Michael Corleone travels to Havana to attend a meeting with Hyman Roth (character based on Meyer Lansky) and other bullies.
- In Bugsy in 1991 is filmed as the mobster in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba on the "seal" situation discussed.
- The film Lansky filmed how Meyer Lansky and other bullies discussed the supposedly stolen money from the Flamingo budget and voted on Siegel's death.
literature
- Fred Cook: Mafia . Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973.
- Nicholas Gage: Mafia USA Dell Publishing Company, 1972.
- Martin Gosch & Richard Hammer: The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano . Dell Publishing Company, 1974.
- Richard Hammer: Playboy's Illustrated History of Organized Crime . Playboy Press, 1975.
- Don Maclean: Pictorial History of the Mafia . Pyramid Books, 1974.
- Ed Reid: Mafia, Cosa Nostra, Syndicate . Random House, 1954.
- Thomas Repetto: The American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power . Henry Holt & Company, 2004.
- William Roemer: War of the Godfathers . Ivy Books, 1990.
- Carl Sifakis: The Mafia Encyclopedia (2nd edition). Checkmark Books, 1999.
- Frederic But Jr .: Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia . Manor Books, 1972.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Information about the conference on the website of the Mafia Museum Las Vegas , accessed on February 21, 2017
- ↑ Conbook Magazine - Hotel Nacional de Cuba, Havana: Where America's Underworld went in and out ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Honorable Society - Power, Myth and Murder of the Mafia by Norman Lewis at www.spiegel.de from Der Spiegel issue 51 of December 16, 1964
- ↑ Allan May: Havana Conference - 1946 (Part Two) . In: AmericanMafia . PLR International. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
- ↑ viajesalpasado - The golden era of the Mafia in Havana
- ↑ Spiegel Online - Mafia legend Meyer Lansky: Clever head of the "Kosher Nostra"
