the managerial mob

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the managerial mob

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 By:Samuel Francis | March 12, 2018

"Michael, we're bigger than U.S. Steel," boasts gangland mastermind Hyman Roth to his (quite temporary) partner, Michael Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II. Hyman, however, was not the first to say it, and those familiar with the life history and achievements of the gentleman on whom Roth's character is obviously based, the late Maier Suchowljansky, better known to posterity as Meyer Lansky (or, to his friends and partners, temporary or otherwise, as "The Little Man"), may know that it was Meyer who said it first. So crime experts Ralph Salerno and John S. Tompkins reported in their 1969 book on the Mob, The Crime Confederation, and they also reported that "Mr. Lansky was being modest." In 1967, the U.S. Steel Corporation enjoyed assets of some four billion dollars and profits of $172.5 million. Next to the crime confederation, U.S. Steel was a panhandler. The Mob, Salerno and Tompkins wrote, "on the most conservative basis," raked in a gross of no less than $40 billion a year, ten times the value of the steelmakers and without the bothersome overhead of taxes,