Clean Hands

CLEAN HANDS follows Lieutenant Commander James Everett of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, who is assigned in February 1942 to secure the cooperation of Meyer Lansky, financier of the National Crime Syndicate, in protecting the New York waterfront from German intelligence and, eventually, in preparing the Allied invasion of Sicily. Everett is a Charleston gentleman raised to distrust everything Lansky represents. Over five years, through the war and its aftermath, the two men build an arrangement that succeeds beyond what either expected, delivering intelligence that saves American lives and paving the way for the invasion through Lansky’s old friend Charles Lucky Luciano, still serving a thirty-year sentence at Dannemora. But the war ends, the institutions that needed the arrangement begin to distance themselves from it, and Luciano pays a price nobody promised him. Told through hotel rooms, prison visiting rooms, and letters from Everett’s wife Eleanor waiting in Charleston, CLEAN HANDS is a play about what necessity costs, what a country actually owes the people who serve it quietly, and how a decent man decides, one small compromise at a time, who he has become.