PART FOUR
Back then there was only one place in America tougher than Brooklyn: Newark, New Jersey.
—Al Nit
Jewish boxers were brave and tough, but they did fear one personage above all others—their mothers.
—Mike Silver
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back in chapter 9, we learned that New York’s Mayor LaGuardia put a damper on Meyer Lansky’s war on Nazis by forbidding the goose-stepping Germans from wearing uniforms, displaying swastikas, singing songs, or marching to drums.
In essence, LaGuardia was kicking the can down the road, in this case, across the river. The Nazis executed an end run around LaGuardia’s rules and refocused their efforts on the other side of the Hudson in New Jersey, primarily at first in the city of Newark.
The Depression had been particularly harsh on Newark. More than one hundred banks in the city were padlocked and abandoned. Misery filled the air with its sour scent. Not only were there many Germans living there, but they also were unhappy and convinced that some outside force was responsible. The Bund was glad to tell them at whom they should direct their blame: the Jews of Newark’s Third Ward.
The Third Ward of Newark in the 1930s was much like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, rows of houses on narrow, crowded streets. When a baby was born, the family doctor came to the mother’s house and the newborn would be placed on the kitchen table. When you got sick, you went to the doctor’s office. Cost three bucks. A lady in a nurse’s uniform—who might or might not have been a nurse—would come around and collect the money before the doctor—who might or might not have been a doctor—would see you.
Everybody was poor. Possessions were few but precious. Everybody’s grandma lived with them, but she spoke no English and kept her ways closest to the Old Country. On Prince Street, every corner had a newsie—“Extry! Extry!”—but here they called out the day’s headlines in Yiddish.
No matter your ethnicity, Jewish peddlers came to your door (or stayed out on the street and rang a bell), with a wide variety of wares. Sometimes, it would be the same guy as last week, but now he was selling something different—pots and pans, curtains, bedspreads, whatever he had. By the time he got to your door, you knew what he was selling because he sang about it. If you couldn’t pay all at once, he’d make a deal and come around weekly to collect. There weren’t supermarkets like today, where you could get everything in one place. Oftentimes, when you needed something, you didn’t go anywhere at all. You waited for the guy to come around in his horse-drawn cart. There was an iceman, a fish man, a milkman, a seltzer man, and a guy who sharpened knives.
If you were used to watching the dainty fetlocks of a thoroughbred running at Monmouth, the horses that pulled those carts looked strange. Not only were many of them too old and weary to run at all, they also stood on huge ankles and hooves. Their job had nothing to do with speed. It was to pull the cart for twenty years before dropping dead in the street, which was how they usually went.
The only merchant who didn’t go to his clients was the barber. Barbershops have remained largely unchanged since 1938—a place where men congregated, where a man could keep up on the local news as he tightened up for an evening engagement.
Newark’s Third Ward had eighty-one blocks, nine blocks by nine blocks, and has been called the Central Ward since 1954. Some famous people grew up there:
• Dore Schary, who went on to be a bigwig at MGM and earn nine Academy Award nominations.
• Future New York City Mayor Ed Koch. When he was a poor child, his dad worked for tips in the cloakroom of the local dance hall.
• Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, his dad slogging out a living as a door-to-door insurance salesman.
• And another hero of our story: Abner “Longie” Zwillman, the gangster who ran the Newark rackets and who hated Nazis just as much as Meyer Lansky did.
Abner Zwillman was a bootlegger, born and raised on Newark’s Charlton Street, the son of Russian immigrants who came over on the boat around 1900. Dad Abraham sold live chickens on Prince Street. Abner was the third of seven children, grew up hungry, in poverty so painful that as an adult he thought about nothing but his determination to never be poor again.
He attended Charlton Street School and earned his nickname without irony, growing to be six-two by the time he was fourteen, the year his dad died. With dad gone, Longie quit school, got a job, and helped support his mom and six siblings.
The job was grueling, peddling fruits and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. He quickly learned a distaste for work. He looked around him, saw who the rich guys were, and noticed that they didn’t work very hard at all. They were grifters of all stripes—politicians, gamblers, and gangsters.
Zwillman was charismatic, with eyes that twinkled when he spoke to women but turned hard and cold when he was conducting business. His wiry black hair was combed straight back and trained into waves worthy of the Jersey Shore. He was the neighborhood tough and quickly learned that he could make a profit off of his physical superiority and penchant for intimidation.
When Zwillman was just a kid, there would be anti-Semites on the block, ugly-faced Caucasians with boils—Germans, Polish, Irish, whatever. All goyim looked alike to him. They would harass the Jewish street peddlers. Motive? Unclear. They seemed offended by the peddlers’ Jewishness. Hating Jews was a thing to do.
Being the huge kid he was, Zwillman often was taken for being older, and once when he happened upon such harassment, he grabbed the anti-Semite by the collar, told him what would happen if he came back, and gave the guy a series of kicks in the ass until he was off the block. Women in babushkas applauded.
After that, whenever someone would make the mistake of jerking around the man who sharpened knives or whoever, a Yiddish-speaking neighbor would yell, “Get der Langer!” That meant, “Call the Long One!” Someone would hotfoot it to the Zwillman house. Minutes later, Longie would show up, rolling up his sleeves, and serve up a deli-style knuckle sandwich.
By the time he was a legal adult, he was waist deep in the rackets—policy bank, extortion, backroom gambling—and, like every other hood when Prohibition came, bootlegging.
Zwillman broke into the booze biz by hijacking other hoods’ liquor shipments, a very dangerous business, so he made sure he had backup. He located every still in Newark’s Third Ward and extorted a percentage.
His gang, the “Longie Mob,” enforced his efforts. Eventually, he worked his way up in power and came up with a lucrative plan to ship contraband Canadian whiskey from Montreal, into New York Bay, around the north end of Staten Island, to a pier on the west side of Newark Bay. On land, he transported his hooch in armored trucks, security that would have impressed Perry Brink.
By the end of Prohibition and the start of the Great Depression, Longie was a very rich man. He bought his mom a big house in Weequahic, the movin’-on-up section of Newark. She was so proud of her son who was a successful businessman.
Truth was, he could have bought the whole block: by the end of Prohibition he had a piece of about 40 percent of the illegal liquor coming into the entire country.
Then happy days were here again, and he had to find a different way to make a living. If Hollywood could retool for sound, he could retool for different rackets: sports book, numbers, and coin-operated machines. He never loosened his grip on power.
When Longie got up in the morning, he went to his office, just like any other businessman. That office was in the Public Service Tobacco Company building in Hillside, New Jersey. There, he’d receive visitors, usually Jersey business owners asking forgiveness for loans or explaining why they couldn’t come up with the tribute money.
Longie’s reputation in Newark was heroic. Not only did he supply the population with alcohol—manna from heaven during Prohibition—but he was also legendarily generous, giving food to poor Jews and donating food to Christian charities on Thanksgiving and toys on Christmas. He was the Jewish Santa Claus. He personally financed a soup kitchen for the down-and-out, of which there were many. Everyone wished him well.
Catholic church ladies briefly squawked about the church receiving gangster dough. “Evil!” they said. But the archbishop of the Newark diocese was a practical man. He said he personally blessed that money. The hungry did not care where the money came from; they were just concerned with being fed each noontime in the basement of one of the diocese’s largest churches.
Of the other Jewish gangsters in America, Longie was closest to Bugsy Siegel, and he was a pampered guest at Siegel’s luxurious home whenever he was in Los Angeles. Longie once told a colleague that he’d do anything for Siegel, anything, and all he had to do was ask.
For years, you couldn’t get elected to a political office in Newark without Longie’s seal of approval. One time, he did get busted and went to jail—three months for beating the shit out of a pimp who’d been short with the tribute money and harsh with the talent. But jail turned out to be a piece of cake. Longie had a remarkably pleasant experience. He was allowed to have his meals delivered, and there was a phone in his cell, where it was understood he was conducting business. On his way out the door, he gave one of his jailers a new car.
Longie had three brothers and sisters, and he made it plain to them that he was the outlaw in the family and they were not to get involved in the rackets. So, as he controlled Local 244 of the Motion Picture Machine Operators Union, he used that position to get his siblings jobs as projectionists in Newark movie houses.
But he never heard from a tax form—which would be his undoing. He was called the “Al Capone of Newark,” and Scarface didn’t pay his taxes either. After Prohibition, Zwillman and Willie Moretti shared Newark gambling in all of northern New Jersey.
Longie had a way with women, and in 1930 met a nineteen-year-old platinum blonde named Jean Harlow who wanted ever so desperately to make it in show business. She was Hollywood-hot, under contract with Howard Hughes to make a series of pictures distributed by United Artists, and while on a publicity tour, she came to Newark and met Longie. The pair locked eyes and soon thereafter were scorching mattresses across the Third Ward.
According to legend, Longie “pygmalioned” Harlow to “act with class.” He took her to nightclubs he owned—the Blue Mirror and the Casablanca Club—so she’d get to see him treated like the boss. Their affair was torrid but brief. Hughes sold her contract.
At Penn Station in New York, Harlow gave Longie a locket containing a snip of her platinum pubes, waved a sad goodbye, boarded the Twentieth Century Limited heading westward, switched to the Southwest Chief in Chicago, and five days later reported to the MGM lot in Culver City ready for her close-up. In Hollywood she was a super nova, her career brilliant, notorious, scandal ridden; her life short, dead at twenty-six from kidney failure. (Her mother was a Christian Scientist, didn’t believe in doctors, and allowed Jean to die reeking of urine.)
And so Longie settled down. He married the granddaughter of the founder of the American Stock Exchange and became a boss whose turf went right up to the west bank of the Hudson River, but not an inch further. The other side of the river was the domain of the Five Families. Longie knew exactly where his turf ended, and he ran a casino in Fort Lee on the Jersey side of the new George Washington Bridge, a quick drive or cab ride from Manhattan.
In 1938, Judge Perlman contacted Zwillman and explained what he wanted. Zwillman remembered those thick men jerking around the Jewish peddlers when he was a kid. He knew these Nazis were those same assholes. In the middle of the night, the German bastards would drive around the Third Ward and post threatening flyers on light poles, trees, and walls. The flyers were horrible. They said German destiny wouldn’t be truly fulfilled until Jewish blood ran through the streets of Newark. The flyers were pulled down at dawn by the waking Jews, of course, but they were worrisome, to say the least. Newark Jews received letters from relatives in Europe. They knew what was happening there and feared the same might happen in Newark. Everyone knew these German oafs were marching and drilling in city parks, wearing uniforms, and looking troublingly like an army.
Perlman told Zwillman that Newark was home to an estimated sixty-five thousand German immigrants and their families. For that reason, and the fact that it was next door to New York City, Newark was a priority target for the Bund.
“They are organized,” Perlman said to Zwillman. “I want you to be organized, too.”
“I’ll take care of it. I have a crew that is well-suited to the task,” Longie replied. He promised not to kill the Nazis, just make them regret.
Zwillman told the judge about his tough guys. They headquartered out of a boxing gym run by his friend, Jewish ex-boxer Nat Arno, whose birth name was Sidney Nathaniel Abramowitz.