FBI Miami report on the 1971 Flamingo skimming indictment of Meyer Lansky and others (1973)
Pages of an FBI Miami report of 1973 stating that Meyer Lansky, Morris Lansburgh and Sam Cohen were indicted by a Miami federal grand jury on March 25, 1971 on a charge of conspiracy to skim profits from the Flamingo Hotel Casino in Las Vegas during 1960 to 1967.
- Date
- 1973
- Kind
- case-file
- Source
- FBI Records: The Vault
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.
Part 22 of the FBI Vault’s “Meyer Lansky” file holds Miami Division reports of 1972 to 1975 on Lansky’s contempt and tax cases. Scan 64, stored here, is the second page of a report in Miami file 92-102. It was read as a page image. The date of the report is not printed on this page. The events it recounts run to April 5, 1973.
The page says that on February 28, 1973 a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida returned a guilty verdict against Lansky “charging him with criminal contempt.” It records a motion by his attorney that the verdict be set aside. It then states: “It is noted that Meyer Lansky, along with Morris Lansburgh and Lansburgh’s partner, Sam Cohen, were indicted by a FGJ, Miami, Florida, on March 25, 1971. They were charged with conspiracy to skim profits from the Flamingo Hotel Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada, during the years 1960 to 1967, with the purpose of avoiding paying taxes on the skimmed proceeds.” It adds that an overt act in the indictment was an agreement Lansky was alleged to have executed for a $200,000 “finder’s fee” on September 9, 1960, when interests of Lansburgh purchased the Flamingo Hotel Casino.
Scan 71 of the same part is a note headed “Special Investigative Division,” dated 6/15/73. It states that Lansky “was sentenced to one year and one day” on 6-14-73 after his conviction on 2/28/73 for criminal contempt, that he had failed to answer a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury in March 1971 “concerning the illegal skimming of funds from Las Vegas casinos,” and that he was scheduled for trial on 7/9/73 on income tax evasion charges. The indictment is described here as a charge. This page does not give an outcome of the Flamingo case. In the OCR text of the same part, as far as it can be read, Lansburgh and Cohen are said to have pleaded guilty and been sentenced on April 27, 1973. Part 20 of the file refers, as far as the OCR can be read, to an October 1971 superseding indictment by a Las Vegas grand jury; that part was not read as page images.
