I've been terribly busy this week digging up some of Tacoma's juiciest secrets and solving some of its biggest mysteries. Mobsters. Tunnels. Smuggling rings. Garish color schemes on Craftsman homes. Pajamagrams.

Just when I thought I had solved every last mystery and was ready to blow your minds (I imagined Bill Baarsma shaking his fists and saying "I woulda gotten away with it if it weren't for those darned kids." And Tom Stenger would tell me off. Again.), I realized we'd already run most of the story. Yesterday.

Here's the long and short of it, courtesy of the TNT's own Jonathan Nesvig:

Meyer Lansky, the (Las Vegas) mob’s money man and one of the underworld’s most powerful and influential figures, had ties to Tacoma. One of his sons, Paul, an engineer, and his family lived in the North End. Meyer Lansky used to visit on July 4, which also was his birthday.
Neighbors recall Lansky arriving in a black limousine and FBI agents watching his every move during the late ’60s and early ’70s... In Las Vegas, Lansky helped bankroll Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo hotel. Legend has it he had Siegel killed over the vast cost overruns on the project. Lansky kept a financial interest in the Flamingo until the 1960s.
Lee Strasberg played a character based on Lansky in “The Godfather, Part II.” Lansky died in 1983 in Miami Beach at age 80.

Some basic Googling reveals that a Meyer Lansky III still lives around these parts. [Call me.]

And what does this all have to do with pajamagrams? Nothing (that I can find). But did you even know they existed? And do you notice how it prevents you from pronouncing it pa-JAH-ma? That gives me comfort enough.