CHAPTER ELEVEN
During the Great Depression in the Windy City, the most powerful Jewish gangster was Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. It wasn’t so much that he was the boss of anything, but he was Al Capone’s right-hand man, and Al Capone was boss of everything. Thus, Guzik wielded tremendous power.
If you asked him, Guzik would say he was Capone’s business and financial advisor. Guzik was Russian-born (1886), but had no memories of the Old World as he came to America with his parents as an infant.
The Guziks settled in Chicago, where dad ran a cigar store. When Jake was old enough, he took a job tending bar, and sometimes he was a “steerer,” aggressively guiding businessmen from out of town in the direction of his brother’s brothel.
“You gentlemen looking to have a good time during your stay in Chicago? I’ll fix you up,” went Guzik’s rap.
In 1932, Guzik was busted by the feds and served three years for tax evasion, splitting the stint between Leavenworth and Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania. His first chance at parole was rejected as the board found Guzik to be a menace and dangerous.
Dangerous? Ha! Guzik said that was a joke. He’d never lifted a finger in anger.
Upon his release in 1935, he immediately returned to Chicago and resumed his position at Capone’s side, doing the math. Now, he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather, known in his profession as “Greasy Thumb” because he was always “counting Capone’s money.”
It was obvious that Guzik picked up much of his fashion sense from Capone. They both wore dark trench coats in inclement weather and cream-colored fedoras with dark brown bands above the brim. They were both in love with food as well, and Guzik—like his boss—had a pudgy, round face and a double chin.
And so, when it came time to fight the Nazis, Judge Perlman called Guzik. As part of Guzik’s job involved “handling judges and politicians,” he answered the call with a friendly hello.
Perlman asked, “Jake, do you know anyone who might want to punch out a few Nazis?”
“I do. My boss”—in prison at the time, but still, no name was necessary—“likes to eat at a place next to a boxing gym. Many Jewish fighters. Barney Ross. You heard of him.”
The gym was on Kedzie Avenue and Roosevelt Road, on a block where Capone owned a few buildings in a row. There were all kinds of Jewish tough guys hanging around looking for stuff to do. Some ran errands for the boss; some were prizefighters in training, dreaming of fighting someday in the main event at the Chicago Stadium, which despite its name was an indoor arena. There would be no trouble putting together a crew. He’d have to run it past his boss, of course, but he didn’t expect a problem.
Perlman said “Great” and hung up the phone. His next call was to the Chicago B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) and Rabbi L. Elliott Grafman, the founder of that organization’s new project, the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Grafman, in turn, called a journalist by the name of Herb Brin.
“Go see Richard Gustadt,” the rabbi said.
Brin was going to ask why, but the rabbi had already hung up.
Herb Brin was born in 1915, the son of immigrants. His dad, Solomon, was born in 1883 in Konin, Poland. As a young man, Solomon, against his will, went to battle as a baker with the Russian army during the Russian-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. He came to America when he was twenty-seven, with dreams of panning for gold in Alaska, entered the country at Galveston, Texas, went to work for the railroad, met Pia, who would become his wife and the mother of his children, and never made it to Alaska.
A little over a year after they were wed, a baby boy was born, little Hymie. During Hymie’s infancy, the family lived in a cold-water flat on Lincoln Street in Chicago. When the child was three, they moved to a better apartment in a basement on Claremont Avenue, then when he was thirteen to an even nicer apartment above ground on Claremont.
Solomon operated a plumbing supplies store on Kedzie Avenue. The Brins were moving on up—and then the Great Depression hit.
One day Hymie, when he was about eleven, was walking with his dad down Kedzie Avenue.
Sol said to his son, “We call you Hymie because we love you, but you should pick an American name.”
They were passing the Kedzie Avenue Theater, at the corner of Kedzie and Madison. It was built in 1912 for vaudeville and still split programs between live acts and the “flickers,” still silent in those days.
There was a poster behind glass on the front advertising the next week’s movie, Burning Gold. The colorful poster showed an oil well blowing up in the distance while in the forefront a virile young man clenched one fist in fury and used the other to protect the beautiful blonde woman he was with.
The rest of the poster read: “Directed by Jack Noble. Cast: Herbert Rawlinson, Mildred Har—”
Wait. That was it.
“I want to take Herbert as my American name,” the boy said, and Herb it was.
Herb attended junior college in Chicago and then the DePaul College of Law, which only lasted until the school realized he couldn’t pay the tuition. He tried to get a job working for one of the big downtown department stores and was told sorry, no Jews. In 1935, he bought a beat-up two-hundred-dollar Chevy and headed west.
In California, he took a job as a milkman and, though he was only there briefly, helped the others organize a milk truck drivers’ union. He returned to Chicago because his dad was sick and went into the family business, which was manning a series of newsstands on Kedzie Avenue, up and down from Crane’s Plumbing Supplies, where Solomon still worked.
It was no doubt during this period that he ran into the Jewish gangsters and boxers who hung out at the nearby pool hall and boxing gym on Kedzie. He remained restless, filled with a young man’s wanderlust, traveling first to New York City, then to Philadelphia, where he worked briefly as a collector for the United Mercantile Exchange. It was there that he met a beautiful blonde violinist named Selma Stone.
In 1938, Herb Brin was twenty-three years old. He had listened to enough stories of the “Old Country” from his parents to know that dangerous anti-Semitism had been around a long time before the rise of Hitler in Germany and the worrisome popularity of his teachings in the United States. One of Brin’s great aunts had been murdered and dismembered as a baby on Easter Sunday by “Christians” on a holiday purge.
Brin had been familiar with anti-Semitic culture since he was a kid, when he had to run a gauntlet of Polish goons each morning on his way to school and then again on his way home in the afternoon. One day, he encountered a bully with a knife and came home with a six-inch gash in his leg.
He grew up in a world in which being anti-Semitic was “normal,” one in which owners of rooming houses routinely put signs in their window that said, “Vacancy. No Jews or dogs allowed.”
Now, Brin was a clean-cut young man who never smoked, was lousy at math, and was holding down a tough job as “gangland reporter” for the City News Bureau, a journalist’s dream.
The bureau was known for its hardboiled reporting and later became the subject of Ben Hecht’s play, The Front Page. Brin’s job took him to both the Italian and Jewish neighborhoods of Chicago, where a reporter quickly learned to walk the thin line between writing about the rackets and being whacked in an alley.
Now Brin—who had the light hair and blue eyes of Hitler’s dream child yet hated that kind of thinking with all of his guts—had been summoned to meet with the leaders of B’nai B’rith and their Anti-Defamation League. He had no idea why he was there.
“You know what we do and who our enemy is,” said Richard Gustadt, head of the Anti-Defamation League’s Chicago branch.
Brin nodded. “Our enemy,” he repeated.
“We are the only organization in America who is tracing the movements of the Bund. No one else cares. We alone see the danger here.”
“Do you want me to write a story . . . ?”
“No, no story. Nothing written down ever. You have light hair and blue eyes. We are asking a great favor.”
“I’m listening,” Brin said, already feeling his adrenaline start to pump.
“We would like you to volunteer to go undercover and join Chicago’s edition of the German American Bund. We would like you to keep us apprised of the rhetoric they are using, any actions they plan, propaganda they are distributing, and most importantly, the location and time of their meetings. We plan to disrupt their activities at every turn,” Gustadt said.
“I’m your man!” Brin exclaimed.
Brin explained that he already knew a little bit about those guys, that he’d once encountered a German American man who offered to take him to the Hausvaterland and other German clubs to demonstrate that “Germans were only against certain types of Jews.” The implication was that because he had sandy hair and blue eyes he wouldn’t be discriminated against.
“Would you be recognized if you returned?”
“No. I sat in the back and kept my mouth shut.”
“Excellent. You will contact the Bund and tell them that you believe in their cause and hopefully they will accept you among their ranks.”
“Do I report back to you if I learn anything?”
“No, no no no. You will report to your contact at the Edmille Health Club pool hall. Do you know the place? On Kedzie Avenue.”
Ah, Kedzie, his stomping grounds, home of family-operated newsstands, movie theaters with great posters out front, penny-candy stores, traveling crap games, hardcase hoodlums, and the notorious Forty-two Gang, who were juvenile hardcase hoodlums in training. During the Depression, there was also hunger and desperation, blurring the morality of cutting corners to make a buck.
“My dad has a plumbing supplies store down the street. I wasted a portion of my youth there,” Brin said with a grin.