This season HBO's Boardwalk Empire makes a major time leap, moving from the Roaring Twenties into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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The financial and political landscape of the show is bound to change, but with the portrayal of real-life gangsters like Al Capone (Stephen Graham) and Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), the criminal element of the series is also going to experience a significant shift.

During the first four seasons of the prohibition drama, Luciano and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) are a couple of young men trying to make a name for themselves. The 1930s marked their rise to power, so how will the HBO series handle the change? Will it stay true to history?

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Lansky first appeared on the show half-way through the first season and managed to survive an infamous scene in which Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), and Chalky White (Michael K Williams) spared his life so that he could bear witness to the murder of rival criminals.

While the London native did try to do some research on the role, Yusef assured The Morton Report in 2011 that he wasn't confined to history. "Terry Winter's Meyer Lansky is not necessarily the Meyer Lansky," explained the actor, referring to the show's creator Terrence Winter. "We're not making a documentary."

The real-life Lansky was born in 1902 and died of a heart attach in Florida in 1983, suggesting that HBO's Lansky might just make it through alive by the end of the series this fall. Known as the "Mob's Accountant", the real Lansky had three children. His daughter Sandra, has seen the show and is apparently not a fan, calling the dealings of her father "awful" to Examiner earlier this year.

Boardwalk Empire returns to HBO for its fifth and final season September 2015.

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