CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sidney Nathaniel Abramowitz was born on April 1, 1910, and grew up only a block away from the Third Ward’s main drag, Prince Street. When he was fourteen and already at his adult height of five-five, he walked into a Young Men’s Hebrew Club in Newark and approached an old guy with a towel around his neck.
“Teach me to fight?”
“Sure,” the old-timer said and handed Sidney a pair of training gloves. “Put these on.”
Sidney had the right look—wide set eyes, sturdy jaw, and hands like the business end of a sledgehammer. Once gloved up, he worked out on the heavy bag. His punches made that solid thump sound that said the kid had it. His footwork was great right off the bat. His fearsome hands were quick as well. He made the speed bag dance.
Sidney would have been perfect in every way if he’d shown the same aptitude for defense. The second he began sparring, it was clear he couldn’t feint or duck. He was a bull of a fighter, always moving forward in the ring despite the incoming. That would make him a crowd pleaser if he proved to have beard—that is, the ability to take a punch—but might not bode well for his marbles. He got up before dawn each morning and got in his roadwork running around nearby Weequahic Lake. He quit school because it was cutting into his sparring time.
Two days after his sixteenth birthday, he made his pro debut, winning his first six bouts easily. Sidney changed his name to Nat Arno so his parents wouldn’t know how he made his money. Posters proclaimed him “Nat Arno, Newark’s Fighting Hebrew.” Unfortunately for him, the poster also showed his face, which his father recognized right away.
Harry Abramowitz forbade his son to fight. That delayed the boy’s career some, but not much. He packed a bag and hitchhiked to Florida, an adventure in itself, where he continued his career, fighting one or more times a week. According to legend, he once fought twice in the same night, one knockout victory and one ten-round draw.
Arno fought thirty times in 1926, at least. Records from back then are often incomplete and based on newspaper articles written by lazy journalists. But of the thirty we know about, he won twenty-one, lost two, and fought to seven draws.
He waited for more than a year before he wrote home and explained where he was and what he was doing. His folks were greatly relieved. They’d thought their Sidney was dead. When he returned to Newark in February 1927, he worked out at a boxing gym in the basement of a bakery.
Arno ended up fighting professionally well over a hundred times, and that is just counting the sanctioned fights. He fought in “smokers” as well, nonsanctioned bouts outside the law, for which he was paid ten bucks each. As a pugilist, he was reliable but not spectacular, and his boxing career never took off. Even late in his career, he was fighting jobber opponents during the preliminaries, usually at one of a variety of New Jersey city armories. He took a friend’s advice and retired before he grew punchy. In 1938, Arno was still shy of thirty but long retired and working for Longie Zwillman.
If he’d hit it big in the fight game, he might never have become a gangster. But he was badly in need of scratch, and when Zwillman offered him a job enforcing for the Newark mob, he leaped at the opportunity.
Arno found the work easy and exciting. He believed in looking sharp and wore a three-piece suit. It had been years since anyone had seen him without a Robusto cigar, five inches long with a fifty-gauge ring size, clamped in his teeth. He rode shotgun—with an actual shotgun—during various black market runs.
Sometimes, there were shootouts and someone’s dead ass was left by the side of the road. He got to beat people up, and unlike a Jersey City armory fight, the guy he was beating usually didn’t have the gumption to punch back.
Now Arno, along with chronic ringing in his ears, had his own boxing gym in Newark and was the one wearing the towel around his neck, handing training gloves to tough kids off the street, shouting out combos by the number while filling the air with cigar smoke.
He was considered a good-natured man. If you pissed him off, look out, and, of course, if you paid him to punch someone, he would—but he wasn’t the sort to look for trouble. He enjoyed popularity and eagerly sought out opportunities to do good deeds. Just like Longie, Arno couldn’t abide a bully, and when a Jewish kid was being picked on, Arno might walk him all the way to school in the morning to make sure he arrived in one piece.
Zwillman walked into Arno’s boxing gym with a big toothy grin.
“Hey, Boss,” Arno said, and then to two kids sparring in the ring, “Knock off the dancing. Throw!” Then to Zwillman, “What can I do you for?”
“Nat, I want you should assemble an anti-Nazi army,” Zwillman said.
Arno’s eyes sparked. He knew every tough guy, Jewish and otherwise, in the city. A lot of them just plain loved to fight, and busting up those Nazi creeps sounded like fun.
Zwillman explained that he would pay the bills, of course. And that meant he would handle bribing the police, paying fines, putting up bail, and paying for any medical costs that might crop up.
“I want you to do more than lead the boys into battle,” Zwillman said. “I want you to be point man, let the shop owners know what we are doing and why. Talk to the press if they come around with questions. Don’t mention my name. This is the Third Ward’s war, not mine.”
“I got you, Longie,” Arno said, puffing hard at his Robusto. “Those guys drive me nuts. I can’t believe that, right here in Newark, there are Nazis who want to kill Jews. We take care of them, right?”
“Right. But you can’t kill them. You just fuck them up. We’re working for judges and rabbis.”
“You don’t need to tell me that,” Arno said, although he did. Need to tell him that.
A crisply edited montage: Arno building his army, whispering into hoods’ ears on the street. Then in the gym, teaching them to fight. Gathering a stockpile of baseball bats and sawed-off pool cues in the back room of Arno’s gym. Longie showing up to get a progress report, burdened with an armful of deli sandwiches. Arno is having a fit because some of his boys are trying to make weight. The boys are hungrily digging in to the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. Arno slapping himself in the forehead—but then can’t help but laugh. “It’s good food!” Longie says. “To fight good, you got to fuel the engine! Here, I brought mustard and sour pickles.”