CHAPTER EIGHT
The German Americans’ original home neighborhood in New York City was Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), or what is now known as the East Village and the Lower East Side, downtown, where the St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church was the epicenter of activity. But tragedy struck when much of the neighborhood went for a ride around Manhattan aboard the huge side-wheel paddleboat General Slocum on June 15, 1904. As the Slocum was headed up the East River toward Long Island Sound, a fire broke out and spread rapidly. Passengers had a choice of burning to death or drowning, as few of them could swim, and the women were dragged down by the weight of their 1904 clothing. The Slocum sank near North Brother Island, taking 1,021 souls with it, the deadliest incident in New York history until 9/11. The old neighborhood was hauntingly empty and laden with despair, so the survivors moved uptown to a neighborhood known as Yorkville, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
By 1938, New York City had the third largest German-speaking population in the world, behind only Berlin and Vienna, and most of them lived in Yorkville, which by this time was commonly referred to as Germantown. There were German neighborhoods in the outer boroughs as well, such as Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn and Ridgewood and Glendale in Queens, but they were tiny in comparison. East Eighty-sixth Street, nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, was Yorkville’s main drag.
On Wednesday evening, April 20, 1938, Meyer Lansky himself accompanied a squad of fifteen gangsters on one of their first anti-Nazi missions. A Bund meeting was scheduled, a big, cheerful one, full of celebration. It was Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday!
The gangsters congregated a few blocks away, circled around Lansky, who was on one knee and pulling open a pasteboard box.
“If anyone from the press asks, say you’re a patriot, a veteran,” Lansky instructed as he pulled from the box a stack of crisp brand-new American Legion hats.
“Put these on. You are legionnaires, and the legion is the crew with the beef.”
To help sell the cover, they brought along Joseph Greenwald, who was the Bronx County commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Also on hand was Judd Teller, the journalist who’d supplied “the list,” with a well-thumbed notebook and stubby pencil in hand.
The Bund rally would be held at the Yorkville Casino on East Eighty-sixth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. The Bund was on home turf here and very comfortable. Their national headquarters was just around the corner on Eighty-fifth. Because it was a special occasion, there was to be a parade!
Yorkville Bund parades mustered at Carl Schurz Park, an appropriate staging area for a German-pride event. The fifteen-acre park covered the land along the East River at the foot of Eighty-Sixth Street and was named since 1910 after a German-born secretary of the Interior. When parades were about to begin, neighbors could hear the tubas warming up with a little “O Mein Papa.” East River Drive (now FDR Drive) was then under construction, built to go under the park through a tunnel. The park was closed for tunnel blasting, so this day’s Bund parade stayed close to the East End Avenue entrance.
From their gathering point at the park, the Bundists would march—as militaristicly as possible considering the level of inebriation—westward to the casino for the big rally, after which there would be more beer and charming young girls who’d sit on the lap of anyone in a brown shirt.
Many of the Bundists wore nameplates clipped onto their breast pockets, first name only, usually, along with their occupation. These were meant to be conversation starters. Bund meetings were designed to be as social as possible, good places for men of business to network.
The Yorkville Casino was a six-story building built in 1904 by the Musician’s Mutual Protective Union (forerunner of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians) as a social center for both German and Irish immigrants who lived in the neighborhood. The word casino in this case did not mean a house of gambling but rather a place for meetings and dances. The casino was a place for fun, and most of the German American events held there were just that. Bands played, schnitzels and wursts were served, and the beer flowed freely. (The casino continued to function as a dance hall until the mid-1960s.)
The building had two ballrooms. The smaller of the two was used to show German-language movies. The larger one had a fifteen-thousand-square-foot dance floor, and it was there that the Bund meeting was held. The dance floor was covered with neat rows of folding chairs, and the bandstand was empty, with the exception of a single podium.
According to Teller, the squad of invaders divided into three teams. One—consisting of Lansky, Buggsy, Pep, and Mendy—went into the arena and took seats among the enemy, trying to look inconspicuous. The second—Tic Toc, Drucker, Workman, and Magoon—remained outside the hall. The outside crew held baseball bats and sawed-off pool cues. The inside crew brought their fists.
A third group managed to climb a fire escape and entered the building through an upstairs window.
Inside the ballroom, Lansky looked around and was enveloped by rage.
“The stage was decorated with pictures of Hitler, the fucking birthday boy,” Lansky recalled.
Large swastikas hung from the back of the stage and formed the backdrop. There were swastikas all over the place, a man on stage delivering a speech as much like Hitler as he could, with arms waving and spittle spewing from his lips.
All eyes were on the speaker. The inside crew didn’t just plow into the crowd and start a brawl—although that eventually happened. First, they gathered in the hallway outside the main ballroom and attacked stragglers, late arrivals, and guzzlers hitting the can.
A man, not connected to the gangsters in any way, began to heckle the speaker.
“Are any of these speeches going to be in English?” he cried out three times before he was shushed back into his seat.
Seconds later, the inside gangsters entered the ballroom and aggressively approached the stage. The outside crew overwhelmed the sentries posted at the front entrance and stood ready for the inevitable emergency evacuation.
The fire escape group whooped and hollered as they came down the stairs to join the fray. In seconds, it was on. The Nazis found themselves being attacked from three directions.
Eventually, there were fifteen fistfights and a lot of Nazi panic. If the Nazis had stood their ground and put up their dukes, they might have done okay because they heavily outnumbered the gangsters. But they were weak and keened like banshees.
There was one mouthy Nazi. He had a salesman’s frozen smile, and his nameplate read “Fred. Retail.” He ran up the stairs to avoid the violence. Buggsy was hot on his trail and planted a nice combo—thank you, Gleason—on the guy’s jaw, causing him to sag against a wall. Fred slid down the wall like vanilla ice cream rolling down a cone. Once he was on the floor, Buggsy kicked him in the ear.
“Mr. Retail, you’re a lucky man. You are getting a beating wholesale,” Goldstein exclaimed with a bright grin.
Drucker, who up until that point hadn’t done much, ran up the flight of stairs to see if Buggsy needed help. The gangsters worked as a team, and they dangled the semi-conscious Nazi out a second-floor window. There was a brief discussion. Should we or shouldn’t we? Then—what the hell—they dropped the guy to the sidewalk below, and he landed right foot first, causing his leg to accordion.
The crowd quickly thinned as Nazis, many of them bleeding, fled out the front door and returned to their homes in the East Eighties.
Lansky remembered that the job ended with his boys chasing three Nazis down the street.
Not all of the Nazis fled. Some were left where they’d fallen, unconscious from a blow to the head or grotesque and screaming with compound fractures. The Nazi who’d been dropped out the window had a busted right femur.
Teller later said it didn’t last long, five minutes tops, but it was an action-packed few minutes. When Teller himself turned and moved to a safe distance, the hall was already mostly empty, but scattered about were injured Nazis. So much blood.
Teller hung out at the other end of the block to observe the aftermath. The police arrived just late enough to do no good. The men in blue were scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened. There were a handful of arrests, mostly of Germans who were very brave now that the attackers were gone.
The gangsters dropped their weapons and legion hats on the sidewalk as they left, and sure enough, the papers the next morning blamed the American Legion for the riot. It would be years before Lansky would admit to his role in the brouhaha.
“I must say I enjoyed beating up Nazis,” Lansky later commented. “There were times when we treated some big anti-Semite in a very special way, but the main point was to teach them that Jews cannot be kicked around.”
Of those arrested, the most serious charge went to the blond and German-born Otto Geissler, who was held for violation of the Sullivan Act, best known as a gun-control law, but also prohibiting a man from carrying a knife in a scabbard. Or any other “dangerous weapons”, for that matter.
Both Geissler’s defense attorney and the prosecutor were Jewish, and the judge was a veteran of the World War. Geissler’s lawyer was Joseph Ellison of the Voluntary Defenders’ Committee of the Legal Aid Society. He stood up for several of the battered Nazis, all in a day’s work.
Judge Matthew J. Troy looked out into his courtroom and saw a bunch of sad, bandaged men, and one by one, after making each sweat a bit, sent them home, warning them to play nice from now on. The judge discussed the irony of an anti-Semite being defended by a Jewish lawyer.
“This all demonstrates the worthwhileness of Americanism,” Judge Troy commented. If the judge knew that his colleague, Judge Perlman, had instigated the fracas, he kept his mouth shut about it.