Editing Meyer Lansky (section)

===Equity===
On paper, Lansky was worth almost nothing at the time of his death. At the time, the FBI believed he left behind over {{Usd|300 million}} in hidden bank accounts but it never found any money. This would be equivalent to ${{Format price|{{Inflation|US-GDP|300000000|1983}}}} in {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}}.{{Inflation/fn|US-GDP}}

Lansky's biographer [[Robert Lacey]] describes his financially strained circumstances in the last two decades of his life and his inability to pay for health care for his handicapped son, who eventually died in poverty. For Lacey, there was no evidence "to sustain the notion of Lansky as king of all evil, the brains, the secret mover, the inspirer and controller of American organized crime".<ref name=lacey>Lacey, Robert. ''Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life''. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. {{ISBN|0-316-51168-4}}</ref> He concludes from evidence including interviews with the surviving members of the family that Lansky's wealth and influence had been grossly exaggerated. His second wife's granddaughter told the author T. J. English that at the time of his death in 1983, Lansky left only $57,000 in cash, equivalent to ${{Format price|{{Inflation|US-GDP|57000|1983|r=-3}}}} in {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}} terms.<ref name=tjenglish />{{rp|328}}{{Inflation/fn|US-GDP}} When asked in his later years what went wrong in Cuba, Lansky said, "I crapped out". He told people he had lost almost every penny in Cuba and was barely getting by.

Hank Messick, a journalist for the ''[[Miami Herald]]'' who spent years investigating Lansky, said that the key to understanding Lansky lay with the people around him, "Meyer Lansky doesn't own property. He owns people".<ref>''The Private Lives of Public Enemies'' by Hank Messick and Joseph L. Nellis, 1973</ref>{{page needed|date=May 2016}} To him, the FBI, and Manhattan [[District Attorney]] [[Robert Morgenthau]], the reality was that Lansky had kept large sums of money in other people's names for decades and that keeping very little in his own was nothing new to him.

In 2010, Lansky's daughter Sandra publicly said that her father had transferred $15 million to his brother's account sometime in the early 1970s, when Lansky was having problems with the [[Internal Revenue Service|IRS]].<ref>{{cite web|last1=Welkos |first1=Robert W. |title=Exclusive: Daughter Blows Lid off of Meyer Lanskys Mafia Secrets |url=http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2010/05/20/exclusive-daughter-blows-lid-off-of-meyer-lanskys-mafia-secrets/ |website=www.hollywoodnews.com |publisher=Hollywood News |access-date=5 June 2017 |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100523044753/http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2010/05/20/exclusive-daughter-blows-lid-off-of-meyer-lanskys-mafia-secrets/ |archive-date=23 May 2010 }}</ref> How much money Lansky really had will probably never be known. Since the warming of relations between the U.S. and Cuba in 2015, Lansky's grandson, Gary Rapoport, has been asking the Cuban government to compensate him for the confiscation of the Riviera hotel his grandfather built in Havana.<ref name="Associated Press">{{cite news |title=Family of late US gangster wants compensation for Cuba hotel|url=https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/fl-ap-gangster-cuban-hotel-20151209-story.html|publisher=Associated Press|access-date=9 December 2015}}</ref>