Polish-American organized crime and Hymie Weiss (Wojciechowski) both having a Polish heritage. Fred Goetz was involved in carrying out the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In New Jersey, the organization led by Mickey Cusick, was the prominent boss of bootlegging in Southern Jersey. The infamous gangster Meyer Lansky, one of the leaders of the National Crime Syndicate and associate of Lucky Luciano, was actually a Polish Jew. Joseph Filkowski led a mostly Polish bootlegging ring in Cleveland, Ohio, along with gangster Joseph Stazek. In Pittsburgh, Paul Jarwarski was also a prominent figure, carrying out the first armored car robbery. In Buffalo, New York John
Meyer Lansky out," he said. Lansky even went as far as to tell people he had lost almost every penny in Cuba and that he was barely scraping by. Hank Messick, a journalist for the "Miami Herald" who had 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." 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