I also read Havana Nocturne recently and was particularly struck by this statement:

These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion.

Gaming and leisure were only part of the equation. The idea formulated by Luciano, Lansky, and others was for Havana to serve as the front for a far more ambitious agenda: the creation of a criminal state whose gross national product, union pension funds, public utilities, banks, and other financial institutions would become the means to launch further criminal enterprises around the globe. The Havana Mob could then bury the profits from these criminal operations underneath the patina of a 'legitimate' government in Cuba and no one would be able to touch them.

That got me checking my files for related materials -- and one of the more interesting items I found was this piece from 2006 on Indian casinos:

http://www.alternet.org/story/30612

When sleaze meets sleaze, magic happens. One glance across a crowded room, and they instantly recognize kinship. But when supersleaze teams up with supersleaze, a fusion-like chain reaction flashes to life, consuming everything in range. And that's what happened when Jack Abramoff met Indian gambling. . . .

This is how Indian gaming began. After being chased out of Las Vegas and New Jersey by state and federal heat, the mob discovered Indian reservations. It was like a gift from the Mob Gods. One mobster testifying before Congress was asked how the mob viewed Indian reservations. He replied, "As our new Cuba."

That's because Indian reservations are sovereign nations within a sovereign nation. The mob could set up casinos, pay off tribal leaders and skim casino proceeds with impunity. If the FBI showed up, they had tribal security usher them out the gate, because they had no jurisdiction on reservation property. . . .

Indian gaming proponents are quick to counter, "That was then; things have changed." They've changed all right; they got smart. The likes of one-time Republican National Committee chairman Frank Farenkopf, and later, GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, stepped in. While Democrats saw Indian gaming as supporting another downtrodden minority, something "we have to put up with because of how we screwed the American Indians in the past," the GOP saw it another way. The GOP saw Indian gaming the same way the mob saw it: as a cash cow.

It sometimes seems as though everywhere I look for Jack Abramoff, I find traces of Lansky. It was Lansky who first set the Seminoles in Florida up in the bingo business, even before the casino boom got underway. And, as Daniel Hopsicker discovered, Abramoff's mob-connected associate in SunCruz, Adam Kidan, had previously worked in a casino on St. Maarten's for a one-time minor Lansky associate, Rosario Spadaro. (Spadaro was the former partner of Eduardo Cellini, whose more prominent brother, Dino Cellini, had run the Riviera Casino and Tropicana Club in Cuba and was later connected with Operation Mongoose.)

(There are even rumors that Lansky got the Israeli Mafia going when he was hiding out there from the feds in 1970-72, but I'm not sure the LaRouchies didn't make those up. They like to start Lansky rumors because he fits into their conspiracy theories -- though they do have to strain a bit to tie him to the British royal family.)

Lansky was also a money-laundering genius. Starting when Al Capone was sent away for tax evasion in 1931, he began looking for ways the Mob could conceal its profits, and when Switzerland invented confidential bank accounts in 1934, Lansky was one of the first to recognize their advantages.

It's starting to seem as though the CIA had two primary sources for its later money-laundering expertise. One of them was this skinny Jewish kid from the Lower East Side -- who first formed an alliance with the OSS during World War II to uncover Nazi sabotage on the docks -- and the other was Allen Dulles, who had spent the 30's plying essentially the same trade on behalf of Nazi industrialists. There's probably a moral there somewhere, if I could only figure out what it was.