Among the first people to seize on this opportunity was a short, dapper Canadian called John Pullman. He is believed to have been the financial brains behind the late Meyer Lansky, a key member of American organized crime from the 1930s until his semi-retirement and legal woes in the 1970s. According to Lansky's biographer, Robert Lacey, it was Pullman who introduced Lansky to "...the possibilities of using offshore banks as channels and repositories for the cash generated by Meyer's Las Vegas skims..." Pullman began his career in Prohibition as a bootlegger. After a stint in the 1950s in Cuba then a wide-open, mob-run gambling haven he turned his attention to offshore banking of the murkiest kind. In 1961, he became President of the Bank of World Commerce, a notorious institution in the Bahamas. Its shareholders and directors were a shady lot and included, among others, the corrupt union leader, Jimmy Hoffa. In that post, Pullman helped to take illicit profits earned in the United States by American organized crime and funnel them into accounts at the Bank of World Commerce. This money was then transmitted or hand-carried to Switzerland. In some cases, the money went directly from the United States to Switzerland. An important clue to Pullman's role in this occurred in March 1965 when one of his couriers, Sylvain Ferdmann, a Swiss economist, dropped a note at Miami's international airport. When law enforcement examined the note, they found that it referred to Ferdmann accepting $350,000 in cash for deposit in a Swiss bank. The note bore John Pullman's signature. American authorities pressured the Bahamas to shut down the Bank of World Commerce in 1965. Pullman, by this time, was firmly ensconced in Switzerland where he had an office at the controversial International Credit Bank. Indeed, in the late 1960s, law enforcement surveillance would track major American organized crime figures who would fly to Geneva where they were wined and dined and financially advised by Pullman. Pullman also heavily invested in Canadian real estate projects including helping to complete one of the first major plazas in Toronto in the 1950s. Although law enforcement widely suspected that at least some of his investments involved the funds of shady clients who wanted long-term investments for their dirty profits, that was never proven in a court of law.