The gangster legacy is one of idleness and leisure.
Because a life of organized crime has a lot of downtime after all.
Days were lethargically spent in pool halls, candy shops, street corners, and diners. The best were extended stays in luxury hotels.
In this same way, the legacy of the cowboy is pickup trucks, boots, and ranchettes, that echo a longing for more land and a chance to go on a cattle drive again.
This birthright lives on in Saudi Arabia through the legacy of the Bedouin too.
See, there is this yearning to live parts of life in a way that we in the next generations have only heard stories about. If you are lucky, you might catch a glimpse of it in your grandparent’s old pictures too.
You see, the gangster legacy was about pursuing leisure over work.
I’m not going to lie. I sometimes like the ethos of that idea.
Now, all these years later, my father, and a lot of other men old enough to know better, are still hanging out. They lose whole mornings at diners like Nate ’n’ Al’s, give entire afternoons to the club. A few times each year, my dad and his friends go to La Costa, a spa near San Diego, where they live pretty much like Lucky Luciano lived in Hot Springs. They play cards, take massages, swim. They sit under the stars at night, burning off those extra hours they worked so hard to accumulate. It’s a legacy of the gangsters; it’s what men do.
-Rich Cohen, Tough Jews