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Syndicate at Bray: Hammer, Seven Arts, and The Big Fat Money Machine

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13688804.2021.1926225

1469-9729

Vincent Barnett,

European history and politics

This article investigates an alleged link between US organized crime and the UK’s Hammer Film Productions Ltd that is said to have operated via Meyer Lansky (the notorious Syndicate casino lynchpin) and Eliot Hyman, the latter being head of Seven Arts Productions Ltd, a US film production company. It does so by first examining the significant business link between Hammer and Seven Arts, which encompassed many Hammer film productions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It then traces aspects of the business history of Seven Arts and its various corporate investments such as in The Grand Bahama Development Company, the latter being engineered primarily by Seven Arts board member Lou Chesler, whose nickname was ‘The Big Fat Money Machine’. It concludes that the link between Seven Arts and the organized crime Syndicate was certainly real for a specific period of time, but it was limited primarily to some of the business operations of Chesler, the removal of whom from the company was engineered by Hyman after the controversial link to Lansky became apparent in the early 1960s.