I see there’s a new movie out called “Lansky,” about the legendary Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. But I don’t see any mention about an old acquaintance of his, the late Albert Isella, the legendary Baltimore bookmaker.
Lansky was the reputed financial genius of all major league organized crime. Bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking, the occasional murder — Lansky was allegedly the brains behind a lot of it.
Isella, on the other hand, was a guy who took bets on the old three-digit street number. This was before the state legalized the numbers game in order to cash in on people’s desire for a small financial fling in their lives.
For this, Al was arrested more than a hundred times over the years. In fact, on the night Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak, and the Oriole Park scoreboard flashed “2,131,” I was cheering along with everyone else at the park when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was Isella’s attorney, Richard Karceski, pointing to the flashing 2,131 and puckishly asking, “How come they’re flashing the number of times Al’s been arrested?”
An exaggeration, but only by degree.
In fact, on the same afternoon Vice President (and former governor of Maryland) Spiro Agnew famously pleaded nolo contendere in the old federal courthouse on Calvert Street, Isella was directly across the street, at the city courthouse, pleading guilty to a charge of bookmaking, for which he paid a small fine.
On the evening of his disgrace, Agnew took his family out to dinner at Sabatino’s Restaurant in Little Italy. That’s where Isella worked full-time for many years as the restaurant’s maitre d’.
When Agnew walked in, the first person he saw was Isella, who greeted him, “Hey, Governor, I see they got you today.”
Agnew braced himself for what he imagined was a verbal taunting. Instead, Isella offered a few words of comfort: “What the hell, they got me, too. Don’t worry about it, boss, it don’t mean a thing.”
Across the years, Isella had friends of all kinds. He used to say it was Gov. Marvin Mandel who showed up at Sabatino’s one day and told him not to use the telephone there because “the cops are tapping you.”
Later, I asked the former governor how well he knew Isella.
“Are you kidding?” Mandel said. “I’m the one who warned him to stop taking bets over the telephone because the state police had his line tapped down at Sabatino’s — because he was taking bets on it.”
But as they release this new movie on Meyer Lansky (starring Harvey Keitel), I’m reminded of the story Isella swore was true about his connection with the legendary Jewish mobster.
Somewhere in the 1960s, Al was spending time in Miami Beach. He and Lansky knew each other a little. Al was driving along busy Collins Avenue, with Lansky in the front passenger seat. It was a sunny Saturday morning.
When they stopped at a red light, Lansky glanced through his side window and spotted a man in a dark suit standing on the corner. He quickly ducked below the window and told Isella, “Get this car out of here.”
“I’ve got a red light,” Al said.
“Get this damned car out of here,” Lansky said again.
Isella ran the red light and then, once they’d distanced themselves from the dangerous intersection, asked, “What’s going on?”
“That guy on the corner,” Lansky said. “That was my rabbi. I’m not supposed to be in a car on Saturdays.”
I’ll give you odds they didn’t put that little scene in the new movie.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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