CHAPTER TWENTY
When Nat Arno made up the lie about the lynched Jew he’d seen with the swastika carved into his chest, it probably never occurred to him that he was putting ideas into the meaty heads of Newark-area anti-Semites.
On October 11, 1938, nine-year-old Bernard Cohen was minding his own business, walking to school, when he was attacked in a park down the street from his Irvington home, dragged into the bushes by a pair of thick-necked cretins, a fourteen-year-old German and a seventeen-year-old Italian.
They used a jackknife to cut a swastika into the yeshiva bocher’s forearm. They were going to do the same to his other arm, but the boy’s cries of pain attracted attention, so they ran. Little Bernard ran home, his wounds were treated, and he returned to the park to point out the two boys who’d attacked him. They were arrested.
Bizarrely, Judge Thomas J. Holleran let them off with a mild scolding. Did the boys learn their lesson? Two weeks later, a burning swastika hanging from a tree was discovered in that same park.
At the end of October, the Bund, now convinced that police protection would shield them from the Jewish hoodlums, scheduled a meeting in Newark, their first in a long time. They were returning to the Schwabbenhalle, the scene of the earlier riot. It was a ballsy move, but again they underestimated the resistance. The news of the attack on Bernard Cohen in Irvington had infuriated and radicalized otherwise peaceful Jewish groups.
It was no longer just the Minutemen the Nazis would have to contend with but also every Jewish organization in the northeast. Showing up at the Schwabbenhalle would be labor groups, students, even a group of unemployed gentiles.
There were thousands of them, and they’d packed the area around the hall. A motorcycle cop on the sidewalk made an abrupt U-turn and knocked a woman ass over teakettle into some shrubbery. She didn’t get up, and an ambulance was called. The emergency vehicle took forever to get to the woman, as the crowd had to be parted like the Red Sea.
The small group of Minutemen, Arno and an estimated fifty others, had arrived early and had a prime spot, standing in formation on either side of the hall’s front doors. A cop asked them to move farther away from the entrance. Arno said no.
“Just make sure you don’t block the entrance,” the cop said, and Arno agreed. Wooden horses were brought in to form a flimsy barricade between the Minutemen and the Nazis.
When the Nazis arrived at the hall and saw the gridlock of protesters, they must have felt an urge to flee. The promised police protection was there—two hundred officers, some on horseback, some in plainclothes—but the men in blue were all but lost in the seething masses. There was a lot of chanting and sign waving.
The Nazis walked by on shaky knees. To get inside, they had to survive the gauntlet of Minutemen. Some Nazis still bore the scars of previous fights.
But no one attacked. Arno and his men stood with hands clenched and ready, but the Nazis entered the building without violence. A few hours later, when the meeting broke up and it was time for the Nazis to leave, it was a different story.
Following a silent signal, the Minutemen moved as one, knocked over the police barricade, and attacked. Seeing this, the cops pressed forward, and there was intense action clustered tightly in front of the hall’s entrance, looking like the flesh-eating frenzy of piranhas in otherwise still waters. Fists, billy clubs, and blackjacks could be seen rising above the fray.
The top cop on the scene, one John Brady, called for the mounted police to move to the front of the hall and separate the warring groups. The result was a savage trampling as horses moved in fearlessly.
The action was so intense that it subsided quickly, and the mounted police were able to form two rows, between which the Nazis could exit the hall. But the farther they got from the hall, the fresher were their opponents, and objects were lobbed over the mounted police down onto Nazi heads. As had taken place at other gangsters versus Nazis riots, the Nazis’ cars were smashed—headlights and windshields shattered and tires slashed.
According to a police report, one Nazi took his abused car to a garage for repairs, only to be beaten up by the Jewish proprietor. There was no sanctuary for a Nazi in Newark.
The Minutemen who were still standing got into their cars and drove away from the hall, seeking opportunities to attack smaller groups of Nazis. About a half dozen Nazis were beaten up at the corner of Bergen Street and West Market Street, a full mile and a half west of the Schwabbenhalle.
The rally, which had gone off without incident, would be remembered as a complete disaster because of the melee that followed it. One Nazi spokesman gave the papers the old rap about their freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly, rights that “meant nothing to that unruly mob.”
Two weeks after this riot came Kristallnacht and the stories of synagogues burning as German firemen stood by doing nothing. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were rounded up and taken away. With that news, the last dribble of sympathy for the Nazis in Newark dried up.
That was the last gasp for the Nazis in Newark. Soon thereafter, the Minutemen’s services would seldom be needed. The leaders of the Bund returned to New York City for one last major rally (see chapter 27), but it was over in New Jersey. The feds raided Camp Nordland and found evidence of “espionage and weapons violations.” And, as we’ll see, the Bund leaders began to have legal woes of their own.
Even in Irvington, long considered a Nazi stronghold, praising Hitler became taboo. Of course, feelings hadn’t really changed, but right-wing kooks learned to keep their opinions to themselves.
The Bund no longer functioned in New Jersey, but anti-Semitism, minus the Hitler-esque regalia, still existed in Newark. Just as Judge Perlman had wished, they’d learned that being a Nazi could be dangerous.
The Jewish war funded by Longie Zwillman and run by Nat Arno had one more moment in the sun. It was the autumn of 1940, and there was trouble outside a tiny synagogue on Clinton Place in the Weequahic section. Sacred scrolls were being solemnly transported to a new space, in a slow parade that attracted anti-Semitic hecklers. The rabbi paid no attention, which encouraged the ruffians to goosestep alongside him.
True or not, rumors had spread that the harassing crew was part of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front and that its members were running a printing press and distributing hateful leaflets out of a building just around the corner from the synagogue.
And that synagogue was where Longie Zwillman’s mom attended services.
“Abner, those nasty anti-Semites are back. They are bothering the rabbi,” she said to Longie.
“Mama, don’t worry about it. They will be taken care of.”
Zwillman called Arno. “Put an end to it,” Zwillman said.
“My pleasure, Boss,” Arno replied with a big smile. It felt good to be back in action.
And so the Minutemen came out of semiretirement. A bit of pre-attack surveillance revealed that the anti-Semites hung out in the same garage where the printing press was reportedly stored.
There were about a dozen anti-Semites hanging out when the Minutemen burst through the door with Louisville Sluggers ready to smash. Marty Cohen had customized his bat so that there was a rusty nail sticking out of the business end.
“Bust their heads and give ’em lockjaw at the same time,” Cohen had said with a laugh.
The anti-Semites took the worst of it—about half of them would require hospitalization, most with head injuries, one with a shattered elbow—and all but one of the Minutemen escaped before the police arrived.
Unfortunately, when they regrouped, the Minutemen realized that Mohawk Skuratovsky had gone into the garage but hadn’t made it out. He’d been laid out by friendly fire, judging from the nature of the wound, most likely by Cohen’s customized baseball bat, and he was one of the unconscious taken away by ambulance. Mohawk was handcuffed even though unconscious, so he wouldn’t be able to start swinging if he woke up in the ambulance. He didn’t wake up, however. He was rushed to an operating room, and the initial attempt to fix him was botched—he was patched up with a piece of gauze still inside his skull.
When Longie Zwillman learned of Mohawk’s injury and the poor treatment he’d received in the hospital, he visited him and made a couple of strained turban jokes because of the huge bandage on Mohawk’s head. Mohawk’s wife was there. The doctors had told her he probably wasn’t going to make it. Longie saw to it that Mohawk was transferred to another hospital and called in a head-injury specialist from Chicago to take charge of Mohawk’s care. The expert opened Mohawk’s noggin back up, removed the gauze, inserted a steel plate, and although he was in bed for many months, Mohawk Skuratovsky returned to bookmaking.