Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life Hardcover – January 1, 1991 by Robert Lacey 
 
The story of Meyer Lansky and the criminal empire he supervised exposes the harsh reality of life in the underworld and demonstrates how Lansky's desire to achieve mythic status as an outlaw ultimately destroyed him
 
From Publishers Weekly
This biography of the notorious hoodlum by the author of The Kingdom succeeds in deglamorizing a gangland figure around whom all sorts of mythology was created, both during his lifetime and after. A product of the ghetto on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Lansky (1902?-1983) spent his adolescence developing the conviction that, if there were an honest and a dishonest way of achieving a goal, the dishonest way was preferable. Like many members of organized crime in his era, he became a specialist, working with casinos. He was rigidly honest about not cheating the public and paying his partners their due. His family life was a horror: Lansky's first wife became semi-psychotic and their three children had miserable lives; his second marriage was somewhat better. The media-generated image of a financial eminence grise worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the gangland chairman of the board, was largely fictional. A major contribution to the history of organized crime in the U.S. Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
5.15