When Lansky moved into Cuba to open his first offshore gambling, narcotics, and money laundering haven, Dalitz was brought in as a privileged partner. When Lansky and the other directors of the National Crime Syndicate decided that his longtime partner Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel had become a liability and had to be assassinated, it was Dalitz who assumed the lion's share of Siegel's Las Vegas casino interests — interests he still holds today.

Lansky and Siegel had formed the original Murder, Inc. — otherwise known as the "Meyer and Bugsy Gang" — to enforce the creation of a National Crime Syndicate overseeing the Prohibition-era illegal liquor and narcotics traffic. From the very outset, Dalitz had been a member of the national commission of the crime syndicate. Up until Lansky's death in 1983, Dalitz was a regular visitor to the crime boss's Miami Beach condo, and was widely presumed by law enforcement officials to be one of the primary heirs to Lansky's crime empire.

Just two years after Lansky's death, Dalitz was publicly surfaced as an ADL philanthropist. It was a sign of the times. By the beginning of the 1980's "Decade of Greed," drug money — narco-dollars — had already replaced petro-dollars as the primary source of liquidity to fuel the stock market and real estate speculative bubbles facilitated by the Carter and Reagan administrations' deregulation of the banking and brokerage industries. As the power of drug money grew, so too did the political and financial clout of the ADL Junk bond swindlers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, and dope bankers like Edmund Safra — not to mention Moe Dalitz — regularly poured millions into the ADL war chest. In return for this largesse, the ADL publicly branded anyone who challenged the clout of organized crime as a dyed in the wool anti-Semite.