Published: 5 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THIS HOLLYWOOD MOVIE has all the right ingredients: a young waitress falls in love with a Jewish organised-crime figure, who meanwhile wants to take advantage of every Jew’s right to claim Israeli citizenship in order to escape the clutches of the FBI.
Then there’s the frightened prime minister who tries to get rid of him. For the grand finale, there’s a lawsuit that reaches the Supreme Court and a final tear-jerking scene in which the plane carrying the mobster touches down in the United States and FBI agents take him into custody.
But it’s not a movie. It was the real-life story of Zali de Toledo and Meyer Lansky. In the early 1970s, De Toledo, who is today 77 and lives in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon, was a waitress in the lobby of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. Life after the Six-Day War was beautiful, Tel Aviv was beautiful and De Toledo’s life was about to turn in the same direction.
“There was an American guy named Dan staying at the hotel, and he introduced Lansky, 66 at the time, to De Toledo, who was 26 – and she became the secret lover of the feared mafioso.
Feared? De Toledo bursts into laughter when I remind her that a whole country trembled at the mention of Lansky’s name and that the press dubbed him a “dangerous criminal.”
FULL STORY My affair with Meyer Lansky, the mobster (Haaretz)
